The Battle for Christian Britain: Callum Brown

Chapter 1: 

Overview and of note. The regulation of public morality was taken very seriously by civic and religious bodies. Notable was the amount of local community agencies and groups who met to help regulate the morality of the arts but also the amount of clergy involved in the licensing and regulating. 

Key names: George Tomlinson a full time secretary of the Public Morality Council (PMC). He was a Methodist preacher but he was also a man 'with a strong command of the law, both in statute and in precedent'. He wrote weekly in newspapers answering questions and explaining the reasoning behind his thinking on censorship.

Of note: it's also interesting to note the early discussions of infertility treatment. there was a widespread condemnation of Artificial Human Insemination owing to the fact that for the man it required masturbation (which was a sin) and for the woman it constituted adultery. What I find of note is the theological invocation of the medical professionals. "Even an expert on male infertility condemned the 'unsavoury subject of masturbation'" this reminds me of Tom Holland's comment that 'science is a mirror that lets you see whatever you want.' In this case and at this time in Britain's history (1948) science was informed much more by the morals of traditional Christian teaching. 

The PMC  had a large budget and concerned itself with the morality of the nation. Quote:

"In the 1930s, driven by its moralistically conservative membership, it investigated the sale of contraceptives, carrying out surveillance on shops, garages and barbers selling them"

This is fascinating to me, knowing only the licentious libertarianism of my age.

Interestingly:

There seems little doubt that the sexualisation of the entertainment industry was intense and widespread in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Sex was everywhere the topic of conversation and despair amongst conservative Christians. But there is an important paradox to be confronted. The sexualisation rarely delivered. A culture of titillation, innuendo and enticement by capitalist enterprise did not, in the main, deliver what clients might anticipate. It was based on what became the hallmark of British fifties' culture: casual and illicit sex was in the air, but few people got it. Indeed, os few go the sex tat this was a period of high sexual fidelity, low illegitimacy and a repressive culture. It was all a fraud. 

The shows and films had risqué titles but almost no nudity or sex.

Chapter 2:

Reviews the different cultures and moral vigilance in London and Blackpool. Whilst London grew increasingly animated about protecting Christian Britain's morality, with an alliance of (3 things) boards such as the Public Morality Council backed up by the church leaderships of the Anglicans, Catholics and Free Church Board, agencies of public moral censorship such as the  the London County Council, the Lord Chamberlin's department and the BBFC, but also with the support of the political will of leading politicians who were often driven by personal religious commitment to moral rectitude and the censorship of popular culture. Blackpool on the other hand was a town of approx. 170k people and a summer time tourist culture that attracted between 5-7 million people each year. This meant that a) there weren't the large governing bodies like there was in London and b) everyone in the town relied on the swelling tourist trade for their income and economy. This led to a greater level of permissiveness and a much reduced ability and appetite to police things.

A lot of attention was given in London to the display of sex or nudity on stage or screen, occupying a lot of time and reports and resulting in the banning of many shows and films. By contrast Blackpool was a largely unregulated (or enforced) town with postcards of women in bikinis, 'freak shows' and stripteases along the Golden Mile. 

Information on churchgoing:

In 1851 church attendance amounted for 21.4% of the population of England. In 1902-03 London;s Sunday attendances at church was reckoned to be 18.6% of the population. In 1979 in London it stood at 9.1%. In the 1950s was the first time that Greater Londoners reported to being 'never attenders' at church: 26% in 1960 but ballooning to 62% in 1981. London's church attendance was lower than that of Blackpool's. 

Interestingly: From 1905 there developed in England and Wales a policy of reducing the numbers of pubs and improving them -making them 'civilised' by connecting them to other leisure pursuits, and by the encouragement of women and also children under 14yrs to form a health atmosphere. This 'civilising' strategy sought to reduce the adverse impact of drink upon the rest of public culture and health raning from sexualised entertainment to drink-fuelled indecency... The English pub fostered community togetherness, with the piano, singing and a degree of cross-class shared space making it the quintessence of beneficent English culture - as seen in film representations of the pub during the Second World War."

This wasn't true in Scotland, who until the 1970s, employed an opposite strategy of keeping the pubs 'cut off' from the rest of leisure.

Also of note:

• Cinemas and entertainment venues had to obtain licenses to open on Sundays and needed to give a percentage of their takings to charity. 
• Young people congregated in coffee bars where there emerged a problem with 'coin-activated gramophone players' (jukeboxes) owing to the young peopel dancing together. This resulted in the banning of dancing in coffee bars which led to the invention of the jukebox jive of hand movement on table tops whilst seated.
• Local authorities were charged with regulating STIs and monitored the sale of condoms.
• 'Banned in Blackpool' became a title of commercial value referring to postcards deemed too raunchy even for Blackpool.
• It seems that morality boards were much more animated over the censorship of sex than they were about the other abuses and displays of immorality common in art and Blackpool's tourism. 
• It was believed/taught that 'atheism led to communism' or was an expression of it.
• Sexual censorship was considered extremely important since it was believed to lead to 'irreligion'.

By 1963 the 'swinging sixties' was starting to surface, quickly its headquarters in London. But what historians have not really engaged with was that, immediately, those same swinging sixties were rooted in Blackpool.

Chapter 3:

A further case study of three different towns: Sheffield, Glasgow and Isle of Lewis.

Of note is the stats of church attendance in each place:

Sheffield: the figure for total adult church going in the wider South Yorkshire 7% in 1979, the second lowest county figure after Humberside (6.6%) and considerably lower than the English average at the time: 10.5% Meanwhile, Anglican church attenders in Sheffield diocese fell to 2.4% of population in 1956, 2.1% in 1961 and 1.7% in 1985.  "Sheffield is likely to have been a city in the 1945-80 period with amongst the lowest church attendance in all of the UK and with a CofE in a parlous state.

A man of note for Sheffield: Ted Wickham was the CofE industrial chaplain to Sheffield who was sent on a mission to bring more workers within the orbit of the church. He concluded in the 1950s that churches had not lost the working classes because they had never had them in the first place. 

Glasgow: 44.8% of the population attended church in 1851, 19.3% in 1876, 17.7% in 1959 and 19% in 1984. Estimates for the 1950s range between 14-20%.

Isle of Lewis: in 1984 the Isle of Lewis weekly adult church attendance stood at 54%; this dropped to 39% in 1994 but stayed the same in 2002. For comparison the next highest churchgoing area in the UK was in the adjacent Highland region with, in 1984, a 'mere' 18% weekly churchgoing. Accompanying the high religious practise in Lewis has been an official public culture of extreme conservatism in doctrine, moral attitudes and, in the Protestant areas, strict Sabbath-keeping. this has been the only part of Britain in which Calvinist dissenting Presbyterians were in the majority during most of the twentieth century.

Sheffield. Ted Wickham's comments on the state of church engagement among the workers is helpful. He puts their irreligiosity down to a long term alienation of the workers by the middle classes and says: "The  churches condemnation of the workers for their 'personal morality' produced an over-zealous mission against vicd, drink, and lack of Sunday observance, generating... moral crusades on which the social aspect of the questions was lost in the passionate warfare with sins and with sinners."

Sheffield by the 40s ad 50s was dominated by a churchless popular culture harassed by teetotalism and Sabbatarianism in which evangelism was failing convert. 

Sheffield was one of the earliest local authorities to accept powers granted in 1934 to give out contraceptive advice and, from 1937, contraceptives to mothers for whom a further pregnancy might be dangerous.

In 1946British cinema in the UK was at its peak popularity with 1.6b cinema admissions.

In 1947 the battle fo Sunday observance was dealt a significant blow by the vote in Sheffield  by 64% of electors to open cinemas which reinforced Ted Wickham's view that the city's working classes were ecclesiastically alienated. 

Nevertheless Ted Wickham remained optimistic when in 1961 he said "England, os largely unchurched, refuses to go anti-Christian.' nevertheless in debates with prominent British Humanist Margaret Knight Oxford Union famously voted in favour of her statement that 'this house does not believe in the Christian God.'

On the threshold of 1965 fundamental challenges to Christian culture were multiplying in Sheffield.

Glasgow. Simialr in many ways to Sheffield Glasgow was more religiously conservative and yet seemed to fight its battles not around sex but around alcohol. the pubs, as mentioned in a previous chapter, were not places for families (women being banned from most of them, and barmaids too) but were out of view with darkened windows structly regulated. 

Billy Graham met a good reception in Glasgow: In 1955 1.5 million people cae over a six week period to hear Billy Graham at nightly gatherings of 10,000 people in the Kelvin Hall, as well as others via the first use of 'relay' broadcasts nationwide and at special meetings in the football stadia... where on Easter Sunday he addressed an estimated 120,000 people.

Whether his popularity is viewed as the final outing for Protestant evangelisation before the secular surge, the result of his clever repackaging of popular fears about nuclear war and family breakdown or, as one academic put it, because he 'looks like a film-star , speaks with the accents of a film-star, [and] has a wife as pretty as a film-star', this Christian preacher from the states was able to turn Glasgow upside down for six weeks.

Lewis: is tantalising for the historian and anthropologist of morality, custom and community.

On the revival: In the atmosphere at war's end, a short period ensued of intense 'religious revival' amongst teenagers and young people, marked by some earlier indicative trends with accounts in lowland newspapers in 1938 of 'swooning' by women in much-disputed symptoms of religious experience. But it was in the post-war revival of 1949-53 based on the west coast of Lewis at the township of Barvas that young people at a dance were shocked into a sense of seriousness and conversion One young man recalled later being the MC that night, and being converted after a young girl sand a psalm. Under the inspiration of a charismatic preacher, Duncan Campbell, young people were drawn in such large numbers from neighbouring communities that impromptu services in the large church became packed to overflowing.

Chapter 5: Battle at the Beeb part 1

A fascinating chapter on the origins of the BBC it's alliance with British and Christian values as well as its concerted effort to make and keep the BBC as a channel for promoting exclusively Christianity among religions and religious viewpoints.

Underneath this alliance was the understandable fear over the nation's stability and the rising concern that communism presented. Communism was understood to be the social face of atheism and was perhaps another major part of the BBC's defence of preference for Christianity over Humanism and atheism. An officer for the MI5 even held an office at the BBC concerned as they were to watch out for any communist ideas.

The church held a lot of power still in the defining and shaping of British morality and values. Churches were therefore united in the common purpose of ensuring that Christianity was the only faith to be preached on the airwaves. This was to be a policy that remained vigorously defended in the 1950s.

The BBC had a committee the Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC) which operated in the same way that the PMC did and held power to determine what shows should and shouldn't be shown. The CRAC set up a board of approved churches allowed to broadcast their worship services, these churches were thus deemed to be 'mainstream christianity'

This enforcement of Christianity on air reached new heights during the 1940s when the BBC grew into the British establishment acting as an arm of the state. As the war progressed, religion was even as vital to the national and military morale at the a very difficult time, notably in 1940-42, and on air this led to an increase in the volume of religious worship per week and a proportionate reduction in discussion or debate programmes on religious themes. Religious doubt was being quelled. 

Despite battles to keep humanists promoting humanism and atheism off the air, nevertheless interest in religious shows dropped from attracting 56% of audience in 1946 to 8% in 1970. There was also concern from Christians that the shows weren't helping them engage with actual doubt and scepticism since they were so one sided. The BBC showed the Billy Graham crusades but were critics by CRAC members and the council of Free Churches since it was thought that Billy Graham undermined the efforts of local churches to evangelise and there was even concern that his crusades affected Sunday service attendance. This seems to be a moment where the BBC began losing its sympathy for the church's cause. 

Interestingly, as a reflection of public morality. In 1962 a series of Reith Lectures were shown on sex education, in them (and despite being carefully groomed) the presenter G. M. Carstairs saying: surely charity is more important than chastity' and also that pre-marital sex was a good thing. Of note was that the public reaction was enormous, both at home and abroad, with two thirds being hostile.

Whenever non-christians were allowed to discuss religion with Christians the rules were quite clearly stipulated: A humanist could only speak about religion when a Christian interlocutor was present and the Christian was always given the responsibility to summarise at the end of the broadcast for the Christian case.

In 1946 Francis Hodge was appointed as the new director of religious broadcasting. He proposed three rules of broadcasting: 1. God is 2. God rules. 3. God cares. No one was allowed to suggest anything that didn't fit within these rules he laid down. 

In the late 1940s and 50s there was concern among the Humanists of a deeply Christian 'revival' led by intellectuals - T.S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy Sayers and Malcolm Muggeridge the later becoming the most common face of Christianity on British TV during the 60s and much of the 70s. 

In the mid 60s there were 30hr a week of religious programming and yet 'not one hour, not even ten minutes, is assigned in an average week to the presentation of the views of serious thinkers who explicitly reject Christian theology.'

But things were shifting. By the late 1940s atheists constituted the backbone of intellectual programming on the BBC talks shows, radio and television. On both media they made up more than half of the brains on the Brains Trust show and were in growing demand into the 1960s. But also the media was changing as talk shows were dying fast as audiences didn't want them.

Chapter 6: The Privatisation of Moral Vigilance

As the established institutions began to close or adapt individuals took it upon themselves to try and keep the tight regulating and censorship going. This was owing in part to changes of leadership at the institutions but also the sheer weight of material being produced that required regulation. The organisations simply couldn't keep up.

The level of anti-religious satire rose a notch with the Beyong the Fringe revue which contained, amongst other things, Alan Bennett's parody of an Anglican sermon, presaging a plethora of similar material from television comics in various sixties shows.

By 1963 the PMC's lack of agility was to have major consequences as religion itself became a target for ridicule. In late 1961 one of the most popular TV shows on the BBC pilloried clergy, ridiculed scripture reading and parodied the hymn To Be A Pilgrim. 

A month later, a discussion programme on BBC television had two speakers, both in favour of premarital sex and thus silencing the conservative voice, with the brunt of argument being the promotion of contraceptive teaching in schools - something the PMC announced was 'crazy'.

Despite the challenges the PMC was not slow in trying to keep its work going. George Tomlinson appeared on television and radio programmes explaining the work of the Council, and he was interviewed at the Home Office over proposals to regulate proliferating theatre clubs. The campaign bore some fruit as at least one club (The Geisha Club) was found to contain complete nudity in its show and was consequently reported, raided by the police, prosecuted and fined.

As a result if this and other raids theatre owners supposedly appointed a full-time inspector whose duty it was to see that the clubs kept on the right side of the law - the industry policing itself. In addition, the association had appointed the Revd Vernon Mitchell, the vicar of St Phillip's Church Norbury, as chaplain 'to prevent any unethical conduct in the clubs'.

Mitchell, however, was not a Christian conservative, but rather the reverse - being cited in 1965 as bringing a 'shapely' model in tights and sweater beneath his pulpit where she 'wiggled provocatively' during worship.

In 1965 te PMC's monitoring of moral issues ended.

The liberalising of society was gathering pace resulting in the 'liberal hour' in British politics. This was heralded by the passing of the Suicide Act in 1961 (which, as well as overturning the 1,100 year old felony of suicide and imprisonable offence of attempted suicide, also finally undermined the lingering Anglican Church's withholding of Christian burial and other shaming of suicides and their families).

Michale Ramsey came to lead the PMC in 1961 and brought with him a fresh approach, addressing the Congress meeting in subdued tones: 'In matters of morality the only way of being protective is to be creative, and morality needs to be presented not as a fragile thing to be defended, but as a creative thing powerful to demolish evils and to use for its good and glorious ends things which might have evil uses.'

One key issue he reflected on was the rise of television as a power in the public life of the people:

The coming into existence of television has brought with it a whole new set of data for the moralist. They now see far more things than it used to see; most citizens live in a visual world bigger, more complex and more rapid. We need at this stage not dogmatism about the effects of this, but scientific enquiry. there is an immense field here for the scientific sociologists to investigate, and this Congress can point the way to some of the matters to be investigated.

He said that he: 'considered that too much was said about the facts of life and too little about the divine purpose of life.' This led the Daily Express to contrast Godfrey's straight talking against sex education with a picture of Ramsey captioned 'He was bland'.

Ramsey's 'blandness' was based on the theological development of a distinction between private and public morality. 

Until 1966, moral vigilance had been part of the British establishment, led by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury ad Bishop of London with, at their side the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the leader of the Free Churches Council and the chief rabbi... The vigilantes were the epitome of respectability, led by titled aristocracy, and with contacts deep in central and local government, in the entertainment industry, and had been attended by huge success over decades. The end of the PMB was a milestone, signalling the end of organised moral vigilante work by the British religious establishment to combat the liberalisation of sexual representation in the arts, cinema, television and public life. 

Between 1964 and 1965 there was a changing of the guard of British moral vigilance. the new guard were outsiders to the establishment, disconnected from the main churches, with little insider knowledge or care for working the licensing system. They were bold, brash and populist, given to impatience and openly righteous indignation. They harassed the powers that be with letters, phone calls, petitions and marches, and became accustomed to placing lurid stories of sexual panic in the popular press.

The rise of Mary Whitehouse, the Clean Up TV campaign in 1964 and the foundation of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, is normally attributed merely to the growing liberalisation of values in broadcasting organisations and notably at the BBC on television to which Whitehouse directed the bulk of her ire during the 60s and 70s... the key reason for Whitehouse's intervention was her identification - correctly - of the crumpling of ecclesiastical moral vigilance in the form of the collapse of the PMC. The work of the PMC was passing to private moral campaigning organisations.

One particularly militant privatised group was the MRA - the Moral Rearmament Association. formed in 1921 it held to an emphasis on a scheme to transform the world by re-moralisation, led by the Holy Spirit. Its teachings centred on four absolutes: Absolute Unselfishness, Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty and Absolute Love. Hotly contested by church hierarchy, it was nonetheless a hugely influential group whose members and sympathisers consisted of many public figures. Another group was the National Festival of Light. Four individuals came to represent the face of the NFL: Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Frank Pakenham and Cliff Richard. 

Muggeridge argued in 1968 that levels of divorce and mental sickness were higher in areas where contraception was readily available, adding that the idea that sex is needed for a valid marriage is almost 'blasphemy'. some Christian bishops accused prominent atheists of being occasioned by 'sexual lust'. Evidently, some conservative Christians strongly associated premarital sex and contraception with atheism and immorality. But unlike the the old ecclesiastical vigilante campaigners who enjoyed charmed protection from much public ridicule in the 1950s, by the end of the 1960s there was less hesitation about criticising people like Muggeridge, with newspaper letters in 1968 mocking his 'obsessive remarks on sex' and for being 'marginally more arrogant than God'. Outright atheism was still rare in discourse but the new morality signalled a declining influence of normative conservative church morality. (p175).

Chapter 7: The Sixties Liberalisation of Licensing

Change in the Air.

The lax and liberal regime of moral regulation Britain inhabits in the 2010s was, in ites essentials, formed in the 1960s and 1970s.

The mid 60s witnessed the confluence of 5 key changes in British culture. 

1) after almost 20yrs of Christian austerity's relative strength, stability and cultural dominance, steep secularisation commenced: rates of church membership, churchgoing, proportion of marriages religiously solemnised, confirmations in CofE, youth recruitment through Sunday schools and a number of other metrics of religious behaviour and belief sharply declined from 1962-63.

2) a sexual revolution developed comprising a comprehensive liberalisation - of views and practices towards premarital heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations, the nature of sexual practises, sexual knowledge and fertility control, accompanied by declining guilt, shame and fear of social ostracism over sex.

3) Fuelled by consumer prosperity, youth culture took a huge stride in development, composed of an expressive revolution in generational independence through an admixture of music, dress, comportment, political protest in both old and new causes and access to higher education, and was marked by recreational drug use.

4) A singular and very enduring element of the decade's change was reinvigoration of feminism and the rise in demand for women's autonomy, marked by the declining salience of domestic ideology - te notion that a woman's ideal should be early marriage and motherhood. In its place quickly came demands for gender equality in total personhood - in pay and opportunity in work, education, leisure, sport and power. 

5) and much overlooked by the religious historian, there was demographic revolution fuelled by women, taking form in: the advent of ultra-low fertility (at below population replacement); diminishing and later marriage; and strong connection between declining religiosity and increased female participation in the labour market.

These five overarching trends each pronounced and persistent...

The churches - as well as the state, the press and older generations - stumbled in the face of the sixties. 

The liberal hour (between 1961-68) saw:

- the full decriminalisation of: off-course betting, suicide, medical abortion, male homosexual acts in private, 1967 saw the state approval of contraceptive advice and contraception to unmarried women and in 1968 the abolition of theatre censorship.

Surveys of notable pop culture shifts in various cities: Blackpool, London, Glasgow follows. By 1974 comment was made in the press after Billy Connelly's show 'Crucifixion':

It's such a permissive age that people are Godless and Christless, and they prefer to listen to toilet talk like Connolly's who we call manure mouth.

Brown concludes the chapter:

In Britain as a whole, the will to personal autonomy, widespread loss of personal faith and increased migration drove a vibrant nexus of popular music, drink, drugs and sexual revolution.

Chapter 8: The Humanist Challenge

 A thought provoking chapter that focuses on the deliberate efforts of Humanist and Atheist organisations and individuals to change public policy and attitudes on issues of moral and sexual importance. The chapter focuses on three issues: abortion, sexual conversation and moral reform before concluding with comments about the divided church on the issues that led to further watering down of their authority and lessening of their voice and reach in society.

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In 1958 the Lambeth Conference finally gave its blessing - rather begrudgingly, one Humanist thought - to the idea of birth control.

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Humanists were at the heart of the sixties' reform, leading progressive pressure groups and lobbying in parliament and elsewhere for the causes they espoused. 

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The so called liberal hour largely started on the election of the second Labour government of 1966.

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The work of progressive reform was constituted of a network or individuals characterised by Humanist, atheist or avowed agnostic positions. they congregated in a series of four types of organisation:

1) the small but influential intellectual organisation promoting social reform across a broad agenda - the Progressive League which had a tremendous influence amongst an elite intellectual group consisting of lawyers, scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals. 

2) non-belief sector bodies, principally the ethical societies that became the British Humanist Association in 1963. 

3) Professional bodies within which members of the network struggled to gain influence for reform ideas; such organisations included the British Medical Association, teachers' organisations and representative schools' associations. 

4) Pressure groups dedicated generally to one cause lobbying in parliament and elsewhere for legislation and favourable government policies on that cause.