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Race, Religion and National Identity in Sixties Britain: Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his Encounter with other Faiths*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Peter Webster
Peter Webster*
Affiliation:
Chichester
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Extract

The twentieth century saw the opening of wider spaces in which the settled historic Christianity of the UK could encounter other faiths. By the time Michael Ramsey became archbishop of Canterbury in 1961, developments both in England and in the international Anglican Communion made the task more present and more urgent. Ramsey was enabled by the expansion of air travel to visit more of the countries of the former empire in which Anglicans still worshipped, as Geoffrey Fisher before him had begun to do. Added to this was his willingness to intervene in international affairs, whether the war in Vietnam or the apartheid regime in South Africa. As such, there were new opportunities for Ramsey to come into contact with leaders of the other world faiths, and with local conflicts in other nations that had religious elements to them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 51: Christianity and Religious Plurality , 2015 , pp. 385 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to the editors and peer reviewer of Studies in Church History, and to Clare Brown, Graham Macklin, John Maiden and Stephen Parker for their comments on this essay.

References

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18 I am indebted to Clyde Binfield for discussions on this point; see also Peter Webster,‘Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Evangelicals in the Church of England’, in Atherstone, Andrew and Maiden, John, eds, Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century: Reform, Resistance and Renewal (Woodbridge, 2014), 162–82Google Scholar, at 170-2.

19 On Ramsey's involvement in efforts to reform the various elements of the moral law, see Webster, Ramsey; Owen Chadwick, Ramsey, 145–7, 150.

20 Ramsey Papers, vol. 90, fol. 40, William Theobald Frary von Blomberg to Ramsey, 5 October 1965; ibid., fol. 45,John Satterthwaite to Robert Beloe (Ramsey's lay secretary), 11 October 1965. The Council for Foreign Relations was the depart ment at Lambeth charged with handling relationships with overseas Churches, and with religious affairs in other countries more generally.

21 Alan Webster, obituary of Carpenter, Independent, 28 August 1998.

22 Ramsey to Carpenter, late 1969, quoted by Chadwick, Owen, Ramsey, 407.Google Scholar

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30 Ramsey Papers, vol. 4, fol. 244, press release from the Church Information Office about the visit, 2 August 1961; ibid., fols 241–3, typescript memorandum of meeting with Lansdowne.

31 Feldman, David,‘Why the English like Turbans: Multicultural Politics in British History’, in Structures and Transformations in Modem British History: Essays for Gareth Stedman Jones, ed. Feldman, David and Lawrence, Jon (Cambridge, 2011), 281–302 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 302; see also, in this volume, John Maiden,‘“What could be more Christian than to allow the Sikhs to use it?” Church Redundancy and Minority Religion in Bedford, 1977-8’, 399-411.

32 Ramsey Papers., vol. 145, fol. 213,Joginder Singh Sadhu (president) to Ramsey, 27 July 1968.

33 Ibid., fol. 214, Ramsey to Sadhu, 30 July 1968.

34 Ibid., vol. 169, fol. 241, David Blunt to Geoffrey Tiarks, 6 October 1969.

35 Ibid., fol. 242, Hugh Whitworth to Blunt, 10 October 1969.

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38 Ibid., vol. 59, fol. 269, Brodie to Ramsey, 23 September 1964.

39 The proposed change was from ‘Church Missions to Jews’ to ‘Church Ministry to the Jews’: ibid., vol.18, fols 104-5, W.A. Curtis (secretary) to Ramsey, 23 May 1962, and Ramsey's reply.

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50 Ramsey Papers, vol. 277, fol. 215, memorandum from Hugh Whitworth, 23 April 1974.

51 Ibid., vol. 169, fols 238-9, Michael Dummett to Ramsey, 9 April 1969. On the affair, see Feldman,‘Why the English like Turbans’, 281–2.

52 Ramsey Papers, vol.121, fol. 260, Beloe to Sant Fateh Singh, 17 April 1967.

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57 Ramsey Papers, vol. 210, fol. 47, Ramsey to Kenneth Ryle, 14 October 1971.

58 Feldman, ‘Why the English like Turbans’, 302; see also idem, ‘Conservative Pluralism and the Politics of Multiculturalism’, in Yuval-Davis and Marfleet, eds, Secularism, 10-12.