The front cover of John Carter Wood’s edited collection Christian Modernities in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century is adorned with a line-drawing sketch of a cityscape. Urban landscapes have served as an enduring source of inspiration for modern artists - from the impressionistic views of Paris depicted by nineteenth century giants Monet and Pissarro to the abstract depictions of New York created by Mondrian in the mid-twentieth century. Historians and artists alike have explored the intersections of urban and religious life, with modernist artists like Marc Chagall fusing traditional religious imagery with city life (‘Paris Through the Window’, 1913; ‘White Crucifixion’, 1938; ‘The Soul of the City’, 1945). Meanwhile, the expansion of European cities in the nineteenth century, and the associated long-term processes of industrialisation, urbanisation, and mass migration, are familiar concepts to historians seeking to understand religious decline, revival, and reinvention in modern Britain. It is thus fitting that the first impression of this edited collection, which seeks to shine light on the role Christians have played in imagining and co-creating a new, ‘modern’ world, would be of a sprawling metropolis.
This relatively slim book is comprised of an introduction and six chapters, which initially formed part of a Special Issue published in 2020 by the journal Contemporary British History (Volume 34, Issue 4). Collectively, these chapters cover an impressive array of themes: mass democracy, gender and sexuality, communication and the media, British intellectual life, and secularity. Each of these chapters are linked by the contention that ‘religion - and religious believers – have themselves been active participants in the creation of modernity’ (p. 2). By emphasising the agency of Christian protagonists, this collection challenges depictions of Christians as a ‘beleaguered group’ responding with ‘anxiety’ or ‘hostility’ to the dramatic political, technological, and social changes associated with the twentieth century (p. 2). Instead, a vision emerges in which Christians, conditioned by local contexts and operating within groups and institutions, sought to adapt their faith to the changing landscape of twentieth century Britain. In this way, the collection seeks to continue an ongoing conversation which challenges the still prevalent notion that the rise of modernity was inevitably ‘detrimental to religion’ (p. 6).
In challenging this assumption, the book’s intended audience reaches beyond historians of religion (although there is much rich content encompassed within this collection for specialists in the field) and seeks to attract students and scholars broadly interested in twentieth century British history. As Carter Wood notes, the tensions and ambiguities between the categories ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ make this collection vital reading for academics interested in the complexities of twentieth century cultural, gender, and intellectual history. In seeking to address a wide audience, Carter Wood begins this collection with an introduction which provides a helpful overview of ‘modernity and its discontents’. The scholarly terrain surrounding the concepts of modernity, modernisation, and secularisation are skilfully outlined, as are the various academic turns (‘from the objective to the subjective, from the real to the discursive and from the Western to the global’) which have shaped our understandings of these contested concepts (pp. 3-7).
From here, Chapter One explores the rise of mass democracy in the early twentieth century and the churches’ responses to it. Within, Pippa Catterall centres the voices of leading figures in the British churches, particularly those operating within the nonconformist tradition. She critically examines the religious roots of democracy and the role played by Christian protagonists and institutions in ‘preserving Britain from the slide to totalitarianism’ evident in parts of Europe during this period (p.16). This chapter (particularly when read in conjunction with Tom Rodger, Philip Williamson, and Matthew Grimley’s edited collection The Church of England and British Politics since 1900) provides an immersive insight into the ‘intertwined’ nature of religion and politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and challenges historians to acknowledge the active role the churches have played in modern political life.
Chapters Two and Three, written by Alana Harris and Laura Monica Ramsay respectively, reflect on the different ways in which Christians engaged with changing societal attitudes towards gender and sexuality during the inter-war period. Harris predominantly focuses on two lay Catholic doctors, Halliday Sutherland and Letitia Fairfield, to argue that a distinctive form of Catholic sexology evolved during this period. In doing so, she questions ‘accounts of modernisation that focus exclusively on the advance of “secular” sexual knowledge and contraceptive technologies’ by examining licit forms of family planning which meshed ‘natural law’ theory with modern medicine (p. 9). Within the chapter, the writings of familiar figures like Marie Stopes are interwoven with intriguing insights into the lives and work of these lesser-known lay Christian figures, whose contributions to the evolution of British sexology (and indeed their wider life stories) are in desperate need of further academic attention. Lengthy quotations from publications, correspondences, and extracts from the religious press punctuate Harris’ analysis to provide an immersive insight into Catholic engagement with ‘sexual modernity’. Complementing Harris’ analysis, Ramsey explores the 1924 interdenominational Conference on Christian Politics, Economics, and Citizenship (C.O.P.E.C). Ramsey concentrates on one of twelve reports produced by the Conference (‘The Relation of the Sexes’) to demonstrate the longer historical genesis of Christian efforts to rethink approaches towards issues such as pre-marital sex, monogamy, birth control, prostitution, and homosexuality. Read together, Chapters Two and Three will be valuable to students seeking to complexify their understandings of the emergence of a ‘permissive society’ in the 1960s and the long-term processes which underscored this seemingly sudden shift in British social and cultural attitudes.
Chapters Four and Five explore the intertwining of secularity and modernity. In Chapter Four, Carter Wood analyses a well-connected circle of British Christian intellectuals united by the ecumenist and missionary Joseph H. Oldham. The ‘Oldham Group’, active during the 1930s and 1940s, sought to keep ‘religious values and practices alive’ in ‘secularised’ British societies dominated by ‘materialism’ and the loss of ‘community’ (p. 10; p.). Crucially, the ‘Oldham Group’ sought to emphasise Christianity’s relevance to contemporary social realities, rather than idealising the past. In doing so, members of the ‘Oldham Group’ developed a complex relationship with ideas of ‘the secular’ —viewing it, simultaneously in positive, negative, and neutral terms. Following chronologically from Chapter Four, Sam Brewitt-Taylor identifies a ‘a dramatic shift in British intellectual history’ in which a long-extant ‘civilisation’ ideology (which proposed that ‘western civilisation’ was rooted in a Greco-Roman philosophical heritage and Christian faith) was replaced in the mid 1950s by the assumption that society had ‘undergone a dramatic historical discontinuity and entered “the modern world”’(p. 10). Throughout, Brewitt-Taylor questions the scholarly reliance on teleological and ethnocentric approaches used to understand continuity and change, urging that the historiography surrounding secularisation in late twentieth-century Britain must be re-interpreted.
In Chapter Six, Gladys Ganiel argues that ‘one of the ways that churches in Britain and Ireland responded to modernity was by engaging with modern forms of mass communication’ (p. 135). Whilst the other contributors to this collection have sought to unravel the conversations and activities which predated the social and cultural changes that took place in the 1960s, Ganiel’s research demonstrates how productive explorations of the lives of Christians active in the last decades of the twentieth century can be. Her analysis centres on the journalistic outputs of the Irish clerical moderniser Gerry Reynold between 1962 and 1989 to highlight the challenges and new opportunities that the shifting media landscape posed to Christians. One of the most intriguing sections of the entire collection is found in Chapter Six under the subheading ‘In Praise of Women’. Here, Ganiel outlines a Special Issue produced by Reynold which included reflections from seven priests on their relationships with women, and an article on the ‘Language of Love’ which highlighted the ways in which ‘celibate love is a gift for the church’ (pp. 148-149). Brief as this section is, it serves to humanise those who occupy the priesthood and simultaneously draws much needed scholarly attention to the contributions of women and lay people to the maintenance of modern church life.
It is noteworthy that the collection ends somewhat abruptly after the final chapter. There was, perhaps, a missed opportunity to include a new conclusion during the process of translating this valuable special issue into a book. However, this is a small complaint. Collectively these six chapters adeptly demonstrate the multiplicity of ‘experiences of’ and ‘responses to’ modernity. Most strikingly, these chapters draw attention to the web of formal and informal networks populated by Christians active throughout the twentieth century. Whilst the collection has emphasised the importance of examining specific contexts and local conditioning, fruitful lines of enquiry also emerge in relation to understanding the cross-fertilisation of ideas between individuals, institutions, and groups across regional, national, and interdenominational boundaries. Further attention to these exchanges will facilitate a more holistic understanding of the diverse array of causes championed by many of the historical actors examined in this collection. This is a stimulating and rigorously researched collection which is highly recommended to experts and students alike.
