7 - Anglicans, reconstruction and democracy: the Cripps circle, 1939–52

Summary

At the start of the Second World War, the invocation of Christianity against dictatorships, already present in British public rhetoric and propaganda since the mid-1930s, became more intense. Particularly during the crisis of 1940, ‘Christian civilization’ was contrasted with the ‘paganism’ or ‘barbarism’ of Nazism and Communism, and divine providence was enlisted in support of the British cause. It was also asserted that religious values were essential to the nation's survival. A Times editorial in February 1940 noted that since the start of the war ‘it has become clear that the healthy life of a nation must depend on spiritual principles’. The role that religion would play in post-war society informed the discussions on post-war reconstruction which began in the first months of the war. Many of these ideas were associated with the archbishop of York – and later, Canterbury – William Temple, who convened the 1941 Malvern conference on Christian reconstruction and, with the Conservative president of the board of education R. A. Butler, secured an advantageous settlement for the Church in the 1944 Education Act. Temple's 1942 Penguin Special, Christianity and social order, which set out a blueprint for a post-war welfare state (a term which Temple had been the first person to use in English as early as 1928), was a best-seller, with 139,000 copies sold in a short period.

Temple was not the only prominent wartime advocate of reconstruction based on Christian values. Another was Sir Stafford Cripps, wartime ambassador to Russia and a non-party minister in Churchill's coalition government, and later president of the board of trade and chancellor of the exchequer in the post-war Labour government. Cripps and Temple collaborated before the latter's sudden death in 1944, and afterwards some regarded Cripps as the only person who could carry on Temple's work towards reconstruction. Although Cripps’ political career is well documented, his religious activities are less so. Historians of Christian socialism have tended to overlook him because he was not ordained, while biographers and political historians have been more comfortable discussing the more ‘secular’ aspects of his career.

The year of the Education Act and Temple's death, 1944, has often been portrayed as the high-water mark of Anglican influence on social reconstruction for post-war Britain. But a study of Cripps’ career in the 1940s suggests that it continued through the period of the 1945–51 Labour governments.