evangelicalism

On the history, theology and practice of evangelicals in the Christian churches, in particular in the UK.

Michael Ramsey and Anglican evangelicals: new article

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[Now available as a free PDF download.]

The pleasure of picking a new book up off the doormat never seems to diminish, and so it is with this new book on Anglican evangelicalism in the twentieth century, in which I have a chapter on Michael Ramsey and evangelicals in the Church of England. Here’s a summary of my argument, which runs as follows:Maiden Atherstone - cover

(i) that although Ramsey was no evangelical, his time as archbishop was also a crucial period of transition in evangelicals’ view of themselves and of how they should relate to the wider church;

(ii) that Ramsey has too often been assumed to have either indifferent or actively hostile to evangelical concerns, mainly because of a reputation fostered by one episode, the “fundamentalism controversy” of the mid-1950s;

(iii) that this understanding of Ramsey was a product of a wider relationship of tension between evangelicals and the wider church, a story which has since been told in terms of dogged evangelical persistence in the face of calculated marginalisation from the hierarchy;

(iv) that despite all this, Ramsey in fact enjoyed good working relationships and indeed friendships with many within the liberal or centrist parts of the evangelical constituency, including men such as Max Warren;

(v) that early contact with conservative evangelicals was tentative, but that there was a marked change in atmosphere after the safe passage through Parliament of the Vesture of Ministers Measure in 1964 (of which more here);

(vi) that despite evangelical wariness of Ramsey in relation to the more ‘political’ aspects of the church, he was nonetheless viewed as clearly orthodox in his theology; and that there were several points of sympathetic contact between Ramsey and evangelical theology, in relation to the Cross, his concern for evangelism, and his emphasis on personal holiness. Much of this was connected to Ramsey’s own Congregational background;

(vii) that there was a difference of emphasis in relation to method, in that what some evangelicals saw as doctrinal ‘clarity’ and a willingness to contend for the truth was to Ramsey evidence of intellectual rigidity and an unwilingness really to engage openly with anyone holding an opposing view;

(viii) that an examination of the Ramsey Papers shows clearly that, even if there was mutual distrust between wings of the church, there is no evidence of deliberate efforts by the central institutions of the Church to keep evangelicals from positions of influence. This was the case with the appointment of bishops (a favourite bone of contention) and membership of the Church Assembly, as well as with the memberships of the many commissions and working groups set up to consider difficult issues. It was also the case in relation to the failed scheme for Anglican-Methodist unity.

The article concludes that the persistent story in evangelical folklore of exclusion from the corridors of power in this period cannot be grounded in fact. The continued existence of this explanatory myth tells us as much about (some) evangelicals’ view of themselves as it does about the actual workings of the Church of England.

New sources at Lambeth Palace Library, 2014

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Some twentieth century highlights from the latest Report of the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library:

(i) a note on the cataloguing of the papers of John Stott, funded by Stott himself and his executors. There’s more on the LPL site, and on their blog when the cataloguing was finished.

(ii) newly catalogued files from the Council on Foreign Relations, including key dialogues between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. These began before the Second Vatican Council; became the Joint Preparatory Commission (1967), and in turn the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). The papers touch on many of the most difficult issues of the time, including ‘mixed marriages’

(iii) amongst the papers of the archbishops, the series reaches 1983, and Robert Runcie’s view on nuclear weapons and his visit to China as part of a delegation of the British Council of Churches.

(iv) the papers of Joseph McCulloch, rector of St Mary-le-Bow (London) and instigator of the weekly public debates in the 1960 and 1970s known as the Bow Dialogues.

Religion and the household: Studies in Church History, 50

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A recent arrival on the doormat is this year’s volume of Studies in Church History, from the Ecclesiastical History Society. The amount of twentieth century material in Studies tends to vary with the theme of each volume, and this year is relatively small. However, there are two essays of note:

(i) Andrew Atherstone’s piece on Raymond Johnston, leading light of the Nationwide Festival of Light. Johnston is something of a heroic figure amongst some parts of the evangelical community in the UK (see this paper by David Holloway). It is very good to see Johnston, and the NFOL, getting scholarly attention. (See also this on the NFOL by Amy Whipple.

(ii) Callum G. Brown on the oral history of women leaving religion. Brown shows that the terms in which these journeys away from the churches are narrated are heavily gendered. It can be read very much as the companion piece to his essay in Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan’s recent collection on men, masculinities and religion.

Men, masculinities and religious change

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

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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.

Delap Morgan ‘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.

David Lodge and Billy Graham

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Among the ‘Catholic novels’ of David Lodge, his first novel The Picturegoers (1960) is the least well-known, partly due to the neglect into which it fell until it was reissued by Penguin in 1993, with an introduction from the author. Lodge himself thought it, like most first novels, ‘a receptacle for whatever thoughts and phrases the author was nurturing at the time of composition, whether or not they are relevant.’ The novel was substantially complete by the summer of 1957, and one of the many such thoughts that are crammed into its pages is the brief passage about Billy Graham’s visit to the Harringay arena in 1954. It appears towards the end of part two.

Billy Graham at Duisburg, 1954. Bundesarchiv, Bild 194-0798-22 / Lachmann, Hans / CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons

At the Brickley Palladium, the faded south London picture palace around which the novel revolves, there are two cleaning ladies, Dolly and Gertrude. Doll and Gert are salt-of-the-earth working class Cockneys on whom little weight of the plot rests but who provide some relief as the book progresses. And “our Else”, Gert’s married daughter, having gone to Harringay “for a lark”, has “gone and got religious”. There was the organ, the choirs and masses of flowers, and a call to come forward in the meeting and testify that one had been ‘called’. To Gert and Doll, it all sounded “just like the Salvation Army, only posher.” And not only posher. Had Doll seen pictures of this bloke Billy Graham, Gert asks ? “’Andsome ain’t the word. As soon as I saw ‘is picture I knew what ‘ad ‘saved’ Else.” It was “Salvation Army plus sex, if you ask me.” Lodge neatly anticipated later analyses of Graham’s appeal, a glamorous apparition in austerity London.

Lodge also hints at the disruption within families that a conversion at a Graham meeting could provoke. Gert hadn’t taken well to being called a sinner by her own daughter: “If she was younger, I’d ‘ave smacked ‘er arse.” And Else’s husband Sidney has worse to contend with. After reading Graham’s The Secret of Happiness, his wife has decided that his lack of regular bathing is connected to a lack of purity of heart, and refuses to share a bed with him until he washes. That cleanliness was next to godliness was not a message that washed well in Lodge’s Brickley.