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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.

Slow scholarship and fast blogging

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Recently there has been some debate on whether academic blogging is good for you; part of a wider debate about the speed and pressure of contemporary academic life. (You can get a sense of the debate in the articles here and here.) Some of this is prompted by the widely-circulated Manifesto for Slow Scholarship, which points to the supposedly inevitable superficiality of academic interaction in social media channels. It calls for a return to a more leisurely, measured, considered mode of thinking and writing, that produces writing that is fully baked. (There are some sage comments on the manifesto at large on CelebYouth.org.)

This month marks the second birthday of this blog (at least in its current form and location). And so it seemed a good time to look back and see whether there is any evidence here of ‘fast scholarship’ which has been too fast. After an elapse of two years, are there posts here that in retrospect I might wish not to have published ? If so, there would be some justice in the charge.

In that two year period, I counted up some 74 individual posts. Some of these were reports of work that was appearing in print, or in other outlets, including extracts. Some were explicitly partial and forward looking, such as this post inviting comment on an abstract for a forthcoming conference. These have a natural shelf life.

Along with these, there are perhaps 45-50 posts which have the character of an essay: thinking that had not previously been published, and which were an expression of a reasonably settled view. How have these fared ?

Some which contained comment on live issues at a point in time have been overtaken by events and changing circumstances, such that they speak to issues that have either been settled, or have transmuted into something different. An example is this post on the Church of England and women bishops, and this, on disestablishment. Also in this category are various posts on the policy environment for Open Access in the humanities, in which policy statements from government and funders have come thick and fast. Others are in the character of reviews of fast-developing web services, such as Google Scholar Updates. That said, I think these remain reasonable and cogent points to have made at that time, and so I don’t intend to remove them.

But what of the others ? There are areas in which my thinking has deepened since the first time I posted about them. But (crucially) that growth in thought has not been away from the initial post, but deeper and wider in the same soil. This is indeed what  one would hope would happen – the act of first essaying something here is the stimulus to further thought.  And so, I don’t think there are any posts here which I now wish were not here, and not in the archived version in the UK Web Archive. From the evidence of this blog, at least, there is no contradiction between slow scholarship and fast blogging.

 

 

Rescripting religion in the city

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Jane Garnett and Alana Harris (eds)
Rescripting Religion in the City. Migration and Religious Identity in the Modern Metropolis
Farnham, Ashgate, 9781409437741, 2013

I have just submitted a review of this very useful volume of essays, for the Journal of Belief and Values. It begins:

‘The city, and in particular the metropolis, has always been key to local, national and international networks: of trade, of communication, of governance. And the briefest acquaintance with the history of London, for instance, shows that the same applies to networks of religious exchange. ….. London has acted as a node in the networks around which money, information, material objects and people have flowed. As this new collection of essays shows, these interactions have only become faster and more complex as empires were dismantled and the former colonial powers gave room to significant immigrant populations who might or might not share the inherited faith of their hosts.’9781409437741 Rescripting Religion in the City

The volume includes contributions from ‘historians, theologians and sociologists, and from scholars of music, social and cultural geography and anthropology… organised in thematic sections, on languages, place and space, gender and generation, and public policy, with editorial introductions to each… In this diversity lies the volume’s strength. There are rich connections to be made between essays that deal with native and migrant Christian experience across several denominations, and those on Jewish, Hindu and Muslim cases. London figures heavily, alongside studies of Paris, Warsaw, and of Australian and North American cases…’

The essays that stand out are those that engage most with historical context: in particular, those by Matthew Grimley, Gil Toffell, Nazneen Ahmed, Michael Keith and Abigail Wood. Thomas Hodgson wins my prize for best article title of the year with ‘”Do what the Qu’ran says and stay away from crack”: Mirpuri Muslims, rap music and the city.’

Other were less successful, not so much for the content as for the style, being:

‘poorly structured and lacking a clear analytical thrust. … Others are heavily larded with some rather rebarbative jargon, and plain bad writing; the sentence that must be read three times to be understood is a bad sentence.’

It is a shame that in a policy environment focussed on ‘impact’ outside the academy, some authors make their readers, even the initiated ones, work so hard.

See the list of contents.

In defence of pseudonymity

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Pseudonymity has had a bad press recently. A moral consensus seems to have formed that there is a problem not merely with behaving badly online while not under your real name, but with adopting a pseudonym at all. Pseudonymous authors “hide” behind their noms de plume; they lack the courage of their convictions; they are in some sense cowardly.

I don’t want here to get into the powerful imperatives of self-preservation that make pseudonymous writing a necessity when resisting a tyrannical government. I’d like to explore the particular reason why I myself blog elsewhere, and tweet, under a pseudonym (which I am clearly not about to disclose here).

I write for a living, more or less. I publish academic works, and blog here and elsewhere on the areas in which I am either directly professionally concerned, or on those subjects in which I am expert enough to make some observations. As more and more historians start “doing history in public”, this hybrid model of communicating what we as scholars do will become more and more important. And, as more and more of the web is routinely archived by the Internet Archive or the UK Web Archive, all of that communication which might previously have happened in person or in conferences, will now persist in the digital record. And since all these various utterances are linked together in various ways, such as Google Authorship, it will become easier for readers to trawl back through them all, and to put them together.

Given this, it is increasingly difficult to keep open a space in which to express an opinion just as a citizen without it becoming part of a professional profile. There are many issues in contemporary life on which I have views, but without any particular expertise. I’ve written elsewhere on the reasons I just write, and some of those thoughts are clarified in my own mind by the discipline of putting them online. And so my “other blog” gives the space to work out those off-piste ideas without them becoming mixed with my more “professional” writing.

And (incidentally) this is why I am not a “public intellectual”. The concept, at least in the UK, seems to involve the bringing to bear of a general intelligence, honed in one field, to matters of more general interest. Stefan Collini and others have already pointed out the tensions in the role. I have no view on whether or not the specific professional reputation of (say) David Starkey in relation to Tudor England is compromised by taking part in The Moral Maze. My point is simply that maintaining a separation between professional and pseudonymous selves in public means the question does not arise.

On being haunted by Owen Chadwick

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Most contemporary historians, I suppose, have had the experience of meeting the dramatis personae about whom one is writing. In a recent conference paper, I discussed a 1965 encounter between Michael Ramsey and a leading Anglican evangelical, now retired to Oxford, and in the audience. With perfect courtesy he disagreed with my analysis, but did unwittingly point me in the direction of an additional source, now worked into the paper, which is much the better for it.

What, however, do you do when the author of the main secondary work in your field was also a participant in the events which he describes? Even worse: what if that author is the (now retired) Dixie professor of ecclesiastical history, and then regius professor of modern history at Cambridge, and president of the British Academy? Such is my vexed relationship with Owen Chadwick, holder of all these offices, and author of the standard Life of Michael Ramsey.

One would need to read the book carefully to notice (such is his self-effacement), but Chadwick was involved at the very centre of the events he describes. Chadwick was a member of the Church of England’s commission on synodical government, and chairman of the influential commission on church and state which reported in 1970. While Ramsey was archbishop of York, the two men were part of the same delegation to Moscow to meet leaders of the Russian Orthodox church in 1956.

Even less well known was their contact over scholarly matters. Ramsey read and appreciated Chadwick’s The Victorian Church. He also sought Chadwick’s counsel on the draft pamphlet Image Old and New, Ramsey’s reply to John Robinson’s Honest to God, which Chadwick gave in in a state of ‘doubt and difficulty’.

It would help, of course, if one could say that Chadwick’s book was a bad one; or even that it was now unsatisfactory by dint of age and the changing state of the field. Of course (as I am bound to say) there is more to say on Ramsey. Chadwick doesn’t deal directly with the debates about secularisation and the Sixties that have been prompted by Callum Brown in recent years. He also tends to underplay the force and significance of conservative opinion, and particularly conservative evangelicalism. More prosaically, having been completed before the Ramsey Papers at Lambeth Palace Library were catalogued, the book has no references to the papers which a scholar could follow.

Despite all this, it isn’t a bad book or even an inadequate one. More than one person suggested to me that I would have my work cut out to supersede it, since it is a fine piece of work; and that is my problem. If, as A. N. Whitehead put it, all western philosophy has been but footnotes to Plato, then at times writing about Ramsey has felt like so many minor adjustments and refinements to Chadwick’s overall picture. Many times have I seized with glee upon a chink of new light, only for a check to reveal that Chadwick had it covered, even if obscured by an inadequate thematic index.

Even the style is a problem. There is a mandarin quality to Chadwick’s writing; of the wise doings of a great and sensible man among other sensible men of a similar age and class. Matters are just so; courses of action are obvious once the right minds had been brought to bear on an issue. This style tends to flatten out some of the turmoil of the period, the very present sense of crisis in British religion. This much can be refined, finessed, disrupted. But the prose style is seductive too, somehow making matters so plain that it disarms criticism. In fact, I found myself having to examine my own prose for traces of Chadwick; more than once have I unwittingly reproduced one of his sentences, so aptly had it summed up the matter in hand.

Perhaps all this is merely a symptom that I have lived with the book for too long; nothing that a change of focus or a stiff dose of more bracing reading wouldn’t sort out. It helped that I eventually realised that I didn’t need to replace Chadwick’s book at all; better simply to receive it gratefully as a foundation on which to build. But I would be intrigued to hear of other historians’ relations with similar monumental works in their fields, if they were prepared to share their thoughts.