Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

****

I just sent off my review of this collection of essays, edited by Lucy Delap of King’s College London and Sue Morgan of the University of Chichester. When that review appears in Gender and History, readers will see that I thought it a uniformly strong collection, and left me

‘with the strong impression that masculinity is one of the most neglected analytic lenses through which the history of British religion in the twentieth century should be viewed. Religious historians have long tended to concentrate on other fault lines: between denominations within individual faiths, particularly the Christian churches; and between each of the Christian churches and the secular, however it may be defined. In more recent years, a reckoning has been made with the effects of the post-war growth of the other world faiths; but this in itself has tended to focus on the interaction of the faith of these new arrivals from the Commonwealth and the Christianity of the receiving population, and with the secular state. […] even in the very recent debates about integration and ‘community relations’, the Muslim Other has been viewed as monolithic, rather than as a collection of communities of different ethnicities, geographic origins, genders and sexualities.

‘There has of course been significant work on the ‘muscular Christianity’ of the nineteenth century, such as that by Dominic Erdozain on sport, but this analysis has rarely been carried forward into the twentieth century. And where secularisation in the twentieth century has been analysed in gender terms, such as in the seminal work of Callum Brown, it has been about women, as home-makers, educators of children, carriers of culture.

Of the eleven essays, five examine Christian themes. They are:

• Alana Harris on the Catenian Association, a lay-led group for Roman Catholic men
• Lucy Delap on the Church of England, and the Church of England Men’s Society in particular;
• Sue Morgan on the Scottish writer and minister of the inter-war years, Herbert Gray;
• Timothy W. Jones on the Church of England and homosexuality
• Sean Brady on Protestant and Catholic masculinities in Northern Ireland

It also contains essays on Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu themes, as well as an essay from Callum G. Brown on non-religion, which is yet to properly become a unit of analysis in its own right and not simply a residual category, of absence rather than presence.

My main criticism of the volume was that some of the essays seem to document the activities of groups of religious men without fully getting to grips with those activities as intrinsically gendered in and of themselves. There was also more than one essay that lacked a clear distinction between ‘evangelical’, ‘fundamentalist’ and merely ‘Protestant’; overlapping but distinct categories often unhelpfully elided.

Despite this, the volume is a good example of the best kind of edited collection, that amounts to more than the sum of its parts.