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Faculty of History

University of Oxford

Dr Sam Brewitt-Taylor

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Dr Sam Brewitt Taylor
Darby Fellow and Tutor in History
Lincoln College
01865 (2)87371
samuel.brewitt-taylor@history.ox.ac.uk

I’m fascinated by the way that modern cultures are shaped by myth. As a historian of 1960s Britain, I’m interested in how the myths of ‘the Sixties’ were invented, and how they influenced what people did. My current project focuses on the role of Christian commentators in inventing Britain’s ‘Sixties’, arguing that their significance has been overlooked due to the contemporary myth of ‘secularization’.

I completed my DPhil at Mansfield College, Oxford in 2013, and held lectureships at St John’s College, Lincoln College, and Plymouth University. In September 2015 I returned to Oxford to become Darby Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College.

 

See page on Lincoln College website.

Research
  • ‘The Sixties’ in Britain
  • The religious crisis of the 1960s

I am interested in the religious dimensions of Britain’s ‘Sixties’, and how these affected British social and cultural development more broadly. My first article, which won Twentieth Century British History’s Duncan Tanner prize, showed that the sudden reimagination of Britain as a ‘secular society’ in the early 1960s was initially accomplished by Christians. My second, published in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 2015, showed that radical Christian groups made an early and significant contribution to British student radicalism. My third, published in the Historical Journal in 2016, argued that Christians made an early and important contribution to inventing Britain’s ‘sexual revolution’ in the mid-1960s.

My forthcoming monograph reconceptualises Britain’s ‘Sixties’ as an elite cultural invention, challenging the orthodox understanding of Britain’s ‘Sixties’ as a mass revolt. It argues that radical clergymen played an important early role in inventing the moral dimensions of Britain’s ‘Sixties’, but that this role has been overlooked because of the prevalence of the myth of ‘secularization’. The book has been provisionally accepted by OUP’s Oxford Historical Monographs series, and should be out in 2017 or 2018.

Featured Publication

 

cd publications christian radicalism

S. Brewitt-Taylor ‘Christianity and the invention of the sexual revolution in Britain, 1963-67’, Historical Journal, published online 3 June 2016

This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arguments. In 1963 and 1964, the existence of a rapid, widespread, inexorable, secular, and antinomian transformation of sexual mores was prominently proclaimed by Christian commentators, who thought it an inevitable consequence of ‘secularization’, whereas secular commentators usually objected that this narrative was insufficiently evidenced. After its initial discussion in the mainstream media in 1965, the ‘sexual revolution’ narrative was increasingly articulated without explicit reference to Christianity, but it usually retained theologically inspired structural features inherited from earlier religious discussions. In the late 1960s, elite perceptions of inexorable sexual liberalization decisively legitimated rapid decensorship, wider access to the pill, and the reimagination of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, thereby importantly shaping real popular change. In this way, Christian clergymen made a significant, early, unwitting, and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Britain's sexual revolution.

Publications

  • Decolonizing Christianity. Religion and the end of empire in France and Algeria. By Darcie Fontaine. Pp. xvi + 251 incl. 5 ills. Cambridge–New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. £64.99. 978 1 107 11817 1

    2018
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    Journal article
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    The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

  • Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970 The Hope of a World Transformed

    2018
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    Book
    By exploring contemporary prophecies of the inevitable arrival of 'the secular society', Sam Brewitt-Taylor shows that, ironically, British secularity was given decisive initial momentum by theologically radical Christians, who ...
    History

  • CHRISTIANITY AND THE INVENTION OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN, 1963-1967

    2017
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    Journal article
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    HISTORICAL JOURNAL

  • From Religion to Revolution: Theologies of Secularisation in the British Student Christian Movement, 1963-1973

    2015
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    Journal article
    |
    Journal of Ecclesiastical History
    © Cambridge University Press. The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of 'secularisation', which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian eschatologies into secular form, the SCM embarked on an early, original and influential journey into political radicalism. In this way, the SCM made a significant contribution to British student radicalism in the late 1960s.

  • Archbishop Fisher, 1945-1961: Church, State and World

    2014
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    Journal article
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    Journal of Church and State

  • Duncan tanner essay prize winner 2012: The Invention of a 'Secular Society'? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961-4

    2013
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    Journal article
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    Twentieth Century British History
    This essay examines the sudden re-imagination of Britain as a 'secular society' in the highbrow British media between 1961 and 1964. It is often assumed that contemporary discourses of secularization were relatively unproblematic, simply reflecting reality, but closer investigation reveals that they invented a general crisis of supernaturalism, and exaggerated the extent of religious decline. Between 1961 and 1963 such discourses were promulgated in the British media chiefly by Christians, who still enjoyed a privileged position in the reporting of religious affairs. In many cases such discourses drew on a radical theological critique of the churches which had been developing since the 1940s. From 1963, especially in the wake of Honest to God, the idea of the 'secular society' was accepted by a wide range of Christian leaders, and consequently it passed into the received wisdom, allowing secular sociologists to dominate the debate from 1965. This problematic re-imagination of British religiosity had important secularizing consequences, especially in the fields of the media, the law, and within the churches themselves. For these reasons, Christians played the central role in the initial stages of the religious crisis of the 1960s, and in the imaginative deconstruction of 'Christian Britain'. © The Author [2013]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

  • David Martin’s The Religious and the Secular (1969): An Underestimated Masterwork in the Study of Western Secularization

    Journal article
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    Society
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