Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Journals
  3. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History
  4. Volume 60
Journal Home
Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Publication date:

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×
< Back to all issues

Volume 60 - April 2009

Contents

Page 17 of 20

Reviews

Research Article

  • Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967

  • MATTHEW GRIMLEY
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    16 October 2009, pp. 725-741

  • The role of the Church of England in the permissive reforms of the 1960s has been neglected. This article examines the Church's part in the campaign for the legalisation of homosexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. It shows that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council played a key role in setting up the Wolfenden Committee in 1954, and in later campaigns culminating in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. In advocating the separation of crime and sin, senior Anglicans were promoting the secularisation of the criminal law, but many church members opposed this reorientation of Church and State. The importance of the Church of England in homosexual law reform suggests that existing narratives of secularisation and the permissive society need to be revised.

Reviews

Page 17 of 20