Dr%20Matthew%20Grimley: List of publications

An important contribution to the understanding of twentieth-century Anglicanism and evangelicalism

In trying to trace the development of church-state relations in Britain since 1961, one encounters the difficulty that conceptions of both ‘church’ and ‘state’ have changed radically in the half-century since then. This is most obviously true of the state. The British state in 1961 was (outside Stormont-governed Northern Ireland) a unitary state governed from London. It still had colonies, and substantial overseas military commitments. One of its Houses of Parliament had until three years before been (a few bishops and law-lords apart) completely hereditary. The Prime Minister controlled all senior appointments in the established Church of England, and Parliament had the final say on its worship and doctrine. The criminal law still embodied Christian teaching on issues of personal morality.

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.

"Redefining Christian Britain" brings together distinguished writers from a number of fields - history, sociology, theology - to reassess the role of Christianity in Britain. This is an area that has been of increasing public debate and interest in recent years, but the debate has followed rather predictable grooves. This book seeks to do something different, by looking at the impact of Christianity over a wide range of areas of national life - religion and the media, religious art, religion in literature, religion in schools, religion and economics and so on. The book has been born out of a frustration at existing writing on religious change in Britain, which has tended to over-concentrate on church attendance figures, rather than look at the more diffuse and dynamic influence of religion on public and private life. "Redefining Christian Britain" will open up new areas of inquiry including religious architecture, church music, debates on sexuality and women's ordination, public rituals like royal weddings, the 'sacred' memory of World War II, multicultural education, and the role of Christian narrative in children's literature. Many of these topics are areas of current debate in the media. Some have been the subject of specific academic studies. But no book, until now, has attempted to bring them all together. The book is organised around three themes: authenticity, generation and virtue. These themes offer a distinct and original conceptual framework within which to address the study of modern Christianity.