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Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 19, Number 1 (March 2013)

Catholicism, Dictatorship and the World at War: The Significance of Cardinal Hinsley, 1935-1943

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

This month brings the seventieth anniversary of the death of Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster. Hinsley’s time at the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England coincided with the appeasement of continental dictators, the final tumbling of all of Europe into war, the crisis of those critical months of 1940 when France fell and Britain faced catastrophe, the relentless expansion of the conflict across the face the world and then the turning of the tide against the Axis powers and the growing confidence of victory. It was the intensity with which Hinsley identified with the colossal dramas of his times that made him a national – and international – figure.

To any scholar of the relationship of religion and politics Hinsley presents an obvious interest. Yet this man who became archbishop of Westminster for eight tumultuous years has not attracted as much attention as he might have. Within a year of his death there was something like an ‘official’ biography by John Heenan, one of his students in Rome who would one day follow his master to that high office. This is very much a work of a particular kind and its judgments show the author to be working within the various confinements of his day and interest. There is a good drenching of piety, an emphasis on laudable qualities, and some firm avoidances. But Heenan knew the force of what his subject had established. In beginning with the weighty funeral which Church and State accorded to Hinsley in March 1943, he shows a Roman Catholic Church that had truly arrived as a dimension of national life. For this was a great occasion and a vast congregation. The Government, he exults, was not merely represented. It actually came, altogether. Even so, the wait for a second biography would be a long one. James Hagerty’s admirable 2008 study, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot, provided a more dispassionate analysis, and often a more extensive one.

Hinsley has attracted only sporadic attention from scholars. Adrian Hastings paid a warm tribute in his lively History of English Christianity, 1920-1985 (London, 1986) while Thomas Moloney placed Hinsley firmly in the framework of solid diplomacy, in Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican: The Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1935-1943 (in 1985). Moloney’s often elegant book leaves the historian of international politics much in his debt, for he clearly did a good deal of honest toil in the archives and, in so doing, widened and developed our picture. There is now a valuable overview by Michael Gaine in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. To extend the range of this will not be quite straightforward because, as Heenan found in 1944, there is not very much to go on. Hinsley was not a man who thought of filing papers and meeting the requirements of future historians. He did not bother to preserve his correspondence once a matter was settled. Heenan suspected that he would not even have expected a biography. He was private, modest and utterly given to the present moment. But he was observed sympathetically by a few who were prepared to commit something of the man to paper. The Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, recorded a significant tribute in the pages of Blackfriars in May 1943. This friendship of a Cardinal and an Anglican bishop is suggestive. Later that great insider, David Mathew, wrote wisely and sensitively of Hinsley in the later editions of his striking study, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: its Culture and Tradition (third edition, 1955).

The verdict that the great weight of Hinsley’s long life came to rest in those late, crucial years, between 1935 and 1943, is irresistible, although in his biography of 2008 James Hagerty does well to retrieve the earlier years and readjust at least some of our perspectives. In fact, this was really rather an odd career, much of it committed to one modest institution, the Venerabile in Rome and then to a long, roving brief as Apostolic Delegate in Africa. There was not a great deal in all this to make any historian of great affairs sit up sharply and take note. But, crucially, Hinsley was enough of an insider in Rome to be in the way of something splendid if it happened to occur. In 1935, when he was 69 years old, it certainly did.

The leadership of the English Roman Catholic community had for over thirty years rested in the hands of capable Cardinal Bourne. But the impression left by those decades is something dour, brittle, dry and introverted. This was a Catholic community still not quite at home in national society; one often defined by a deeply regional character, a particular sociology (Irish, working class, aristocratic and rather little in between), a rather petulant striving for legitimation and a bristling grievance that the Establishment still refused to acknowledge its existence at State occasions. Nor was it was not a community always at peace with itself. The English bishops were notoriously querulous – and Rome knew about it. In 1935 many English Catholics may have been baffled by the appointment as Archbishop of Westminster of a man so little known in his home country. But Pius XI knew his man and would have no other. When Hinsley himself had recovered from the shock he quite simply took on a new lease of life. This sudden emergence from the background at such a doom-laden hour had something of the Churchillian epic about it. Hinsley must have wondered if the whole of his life had been merely a preparation for this moment.

Hinsley looked like a safe pair of hands. He was devoted to the Papacy. He had done nothing disconcerting. He was amiable and had friends in high places. Moreover, he was theologically a conservative who had no time for Modernism. None of this indicated any bracing, liberalising attitudes or obvious liabilities. Yet there were quiet hints of something bolder. His sympathies were too deeply rooted in the conditions of the poor to accept too readily the blandishments of the Right. When a politician had visited the Venerabile and amiably told the ordinands that on their return to England it would be their duty to vote Conservative Hinsley brusquely ended the occasion. The Church was not his whole world: he was perfectly capable at ecclesiastical affairs but they did not excite him. He was stirred by the spectacle of oppression and he hated to see righteousness persecuted. Wherever the Church was threatened his ears pricked up and he was all attention and involvement. Yet we still know too little of what he made of Italian Fascism when he lived in Rome itself. Mathew thought he did not really understand Italians altogether. Heenan simply observed that when the Mussolini regime sought to redesign the centre of Rome and gobble up at least part of the Venerabile Hinsley did his best to thwart the plan. He would, not doubt, have done the same if a comparable civic engineering project had been dreamed up by any other power.

The personal traits of an archbishop are bound to be eulogized, but Hinsley’s characteristics were suggestive. Mathew thought that he simply lacked pride or vanity. He lived as simply as he could; he needed, and relished, the company of all sorts and conditions of people; as a friend he was found to be kindly, loyal, paternal. He listened well. It seems that Hinsley was quite at home with Chapel as well as Church people. Mathew thought Hinsley ‘never thought in denominational terms’. He did not much care for great churches – and Westminster Cathedral is something strenuous in these terms – but grumbled about mere ‘bricks and mortar’ and sought active apostolic work. Instead he was happiest in settings that were modest or quietly domestic. He sought never to waste time; some found him always in a hurry to use well what was left to him. He worked like a Trojan and prayed constantly. When George Bell stayed with him in his home in Hare Street he found ‘the next morning I felt a richer man, richer spiritually as well as richer in wisdom’. He could be stern but was more often found to be compassionate. He was uninterested in splendour and pageantry. When he left a note for his executors it was found to request no pomp at his funeral but only a low Mass, ‘no profusion of candles’, ‘the least expense possible’, a burial ‘wherever most convenient’. None of this, of course, he got.

Hinsley was devoted to the Papacy and this must have been at least one reason why Pius XI put him in Westminster. But he was not over-fascinated by church affairs and the perspectives that he brought to the job were generous ones. Hinsley disavowed purely clerical company and his view of the Roman Catholic Church was by conviction a laicizing one. He looked for things of substance, in whatever form they arose, not the mere presentation of clerical appearances. Hastings observed, ‘No archiepiscopate was effectively less ultramontane or clericalist.’ Hinsley was ardent in his support for Catholic Action. The Tablet had long ago been incarcerated by a defensive clerical caste; now he promptly turned it over to the laity and watched it prosper under Douglas Woodruff. He enjoyed G.K. Chesterton, looked up to Christopher Dawson and Arnold Toynbee and fostered the work of the young Barbara Ward. He would have liked Ronald Knox to be a bishop.

Above all, Hinsley brought something of the world to Westminster – but the world was just about to shout its demands at the politicians in Parliament and the diplomats in Whitehall anyway. He lost no time in pinning his colours to the shaky mast of the League of Nations but this brought no strong reassurance. His arrival had coincided with the hour of its most severe test. When Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in October 1935 Hinsley faced a fundamental challenge. What should he now say? If British opinion was indignant should he join the chorus and show the loyalty of the Church? If he stood firmly by the Pope he must know that the neutrality of the Vatican was incomprehensible to the critics of dictators and aggressors. The Archbishop of Canterbury was powerful against the invasion; a senior Anglican bishop like Henson of Durham was positively incandescent. To make matters worse for Hinsley he was caught up in a clumsy, botched attempt at intervention in Britain by the Vatican itself. For his part he had no illusions about Abyssinia, whatever his calculations. This was an act of aggression and, as Hagerty shows, he was ready to say so publicly. There was a letter to the Times. And then there was a sermon in Golders Green.

‘Indignation’, Hinsley declared at Golders Green, ‘knows no bounds when we see that Africa, that ill-used continent of practically unarmed people, is made the focus and playground of scientific slaughter.’ But what could the Pope actually do?

He is a helpless old man with a small police force to guard himself, to guard the priceless art and archaeological treasures of the Vatican, and to protect his diminutive state which ensures his due independence in the exercise of his universal right and duty to teach and guide his followers of all races. Can he denounce or coerce a neighbouring power – a power armed with absolute control of everything and with every modern instrument of force? He could excommunicate and place under interdict! Yes! And thus make war with his neighbour inevitable, besides upsetting the peace and consciences of the great mass of Italians with the result of a fierce anti-clerical outbreak. Spiritual penalties are for the correction of those who are knowingly guilty. And spiritual penalties for a world daily more godless are of little avail.

The Pope was not an arbitrator. He was explicitly excluded from any such role by the secret London pact of 1915. Only if both sides of a dispute invited him to judge them could he do so.

Parts of the British press made much of this characterisation of the Pope. Pius XI himself was not flattered. But what really caused the ecclesiastics in Rome to fidget nervously was Hinsley’s condemnation of the ideology which launched this invasion. Fascism, he had pronounced, deified Caesar, showed tyranny, made ‘the individual a pawn on the chessboard of absolutism’. This also alienated a significant number of English Catholics, bishops among them, who openly favoured the Duce. There was talk of bringing the Archbishop of Westminster to heel – and Hinsley did indeed fall silent, for a time. When he turned to Heenan for advice in writing speeches he was seen to be shaken by the controversy. But in retrospect the sermon at Golders Green sounds like the stray, opening shot in a far longer war.

Abyssinia was a cause of much heart-searching amongst British Catholics and Protestants alike. The Spanish Civil War presented dilemmas no less painful. Heenan the careful biographer buried this quietly; Moloney and Hagerty offer sustained reflections. Hinsley, they find, had to find a credible place between that position held by many English Catholics, who trembled at the growth of communism and cheered for Franco, and a vigorous left-leaning public opinion which deplored fascism and the forces of reaction. Above all, he was horrified by the onslaught against the Church in Spain and knew a good deal about it. He let it be known that he thought the Nationalist cause a crusade. But beyond this he was decidedly circumspect, maintaining a purposeful neutrality, refusing to indulge those who lauded Franco or accept the criticisms of those who deplored the Right and raged at any evidence of complicity. Meanwhile, he turned his attentions to the plight of refugee children. When Franco was victorious Hinsley received a signed photograph, a gift arranged by an English admirer. ‘I look upon you as the great defender of true Spain, the country of Catholic principles where social justice and charity will be applied for the common good under a firm peace-loving government.’ For all this, Moloney insists that Hinsley was ‘no third order Falangist’. In 1942 he would take up the cause of persecuted Spanish protestants too. It was often heard that to condemn Communists involved a support for Fascists. Although he had favoured Franco, Hinsley was determined not to accept that anti-communism revealed any shade of Fascism. He viewed both as enemies. His task now was to show that Catholicism voiced the cause of liberty and the maintenance of the common good.

At home Hinsley the Archbishop appeared rudely caught between the campaigns of conflicting parties. Some parts of the Catholic press was likely to shout any embarrassment when it came to foreign affairs. Abroad, the troubled consistencies of Vatican policy had made life no easier for him. But when he looked at Germany Hinsley was far more the critic. He was ready to follow the lead given by Mit brennender Sorge in March 1937. That September he published a protesting letter in the Times. Hinsley himself had been present when on Christmas Eve in 1937 Pope Pius XI said to a gathering of cardinals. ‘We know that there is in Germany a grievous persecution, and more, that there has rarely been a persecution more serious, so painful, and so disastrous in its widespread effects. This is a persecution in which neither the exercise of force, not the pressure of threats, not the subterfuges of cunning and artifice have been spared.’ By December 1938 he was taking to the platform at the Albert Hall to protest against the persecution of the Jews where he deplored that Nero was ‘a model of justice compared to the Führer of the German Reich’. He approved thoroughly of Chamberlain and applauded him as a peace-maker. But he did not want Hitler accommodated at the price of justice. In a private meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang (with whom he had much in common and in whom he found a growing friendship) he agreed that no colonies could be returned to a government which persecuted other races. But unlike Lang he could have nothing to do with the idea that to rein Hitler in a new diplomatic understanding with the Soviet Union might be deemed necessary. There were other public speeches, no less vigorous and confrontational. National opinion was thickening against appeasement and now the archbishop of Westminster was positively stirring the pot.

After the painful ambiguities and compromises of the age of appeasement, the coming of war brought some vital clarifications. Hinsley set to work with a will, making public speeches and BBC broadcasts which were unequivocal in their denunciations of the enemy and rich in their confidence in British justice. And Hinsley certainly was patriotic. He had grown up with patriotism; he must have taken on something of the patriotic yearning of the long-term ex-patriate; he had admired British colonial administration in Africa; he viewed national institutions with great loyalty. Now a robust patriotism in high office in the circumstance of 1935-43 was a high virtue, indeed a basic necessity. Hinsley was realistic enough to know that it was patriotism which in no small measure stood between Hitler and Whitehall. ‘I’m glad we’re alone’, he remarked to Churchill after the fall of France. When Churchill asked ‘Why?’ Hinsley replied, ‘Englishmen fight best when they have got their backs to the wall.’ There is more than a sense of rejoicing at the coming of superbly heroic moment in all this. But if Hinsley’s patriotism is firmly acknowledged there is at least a danger that it confines him to a national landscape and merely exposes him to suspicions of another kind; that he was a prelate too close to the governing powers (even if they happened, on that occasion, to be right and just). But Hinsley does present a bigger argument than this and he does belong to a wider picture.

Heenan observed that Hinsley was a convinced democrat who preferred to live among the poor. The age of the dictators stirred deeply his affinity with the heroic and the just cause. Mathew found that Hinsley positively thirsted after justice and was ‘a great hater of oppression’. There remains something visceral in this palpable hatred of tyranny, a restless determination to stand against it, an abiding compassion for its victims. When an English edition was prepared of the reports documenting the German occupation of Poland sent by Cardinal Hlond to Rome it was Hinsley who contributed the foreword. In his last years Mathew thought that the new book which affected him most deeply was Professor Binchy’s Church and State in Fascist Italy. Mathew recognized that ‘the quality that most appealed to the Cardinal was reckless and self-sacrificing moral goodness, and it was this that led to his always deepening affection for the Bishop of Chichester’. Bell was convinced that the churches must sink their differences over doctrines and questions of order and unite urgently against against the new foe of totalitarianism. Hinsley promptly agreed. For a while, at least, there was the ecumenical excitement of the ‘Sword of the Spirit’ movement and a glimmer of authentic ecumenical progress in wartime. When, at a meeting of the movement in May 1941, Bell whispered to Hinsley that perhaps Protestants and Catholics might say together the Lord’s Prayer, Hinsley was ready to lead it – a quiet revolution, no doubt, but an authentic one, even so. His bishops disagreed with most of this and yet they never squabbled with him. It was enough, after 1943, to pretend that it had never happened. Without Hinsley the Sword of the Spirit had nowhere to go and it was soon only the pious memory of a few stranded progressives.

Hinsley in wartime took his place in a national consensus against Nazism and Fascism. In no way did he see himself as an individualist or a prophet. He was equally adamant that his views found their place within the body of Catholic thought, as history and international life revealed it, not on the margin. In a broadcast of 10 December 1939 Hinsley justified his own conviction that Britain’s cause was just by asserting, ‘I have before my mind the lessons of history and also the great traditional body of doctrine which sets forth for the moral guidance of mankind principles which are above both national and racial interests. These principles are clearly stated in the great pastoral letters of the Popes from Leo XIII to the present pontiff ….’ It was Benedict XV who had issued the ‘peace note’ of 1917, affirming the ‘supremacy of right over might, and also for a real and agreed peace between combatants whether victors or vanquished.’

Bell found Hinsley eager for the regeneration of Europe. What had made Europe great in civilization? It was Christianity. And it was Christianity which had formed a reverence for the individual, a belief in the family and, out of this, the very nation which had created Europe. In March 1940 he found much of significance in the anniversary of St Gregory the Great, a Pope who inherited a civilization in chaos and ruins and yet claimed a vision of Christendom. Now in the Soviet Union ‘the individual and his conscience, and therefore God and His supreme rights, are to be “liquidated,”’ not even with a nod to any theory at all, whereas in Nazi Germany the same effect was sought in the name of Race, ‘of the physical blood which courses pure, according to the Myth, in the veins of Aryans alone, and, among Aryans, of Germans only.’ If a society rejected God this was the kind of thing that might be expected. ‘Rome only has been the source of full civilization, that is, the perfect harmonious relating of individual to Society, of State with Church, of time with eternity.’

This was what Moscow and Berlin sought to destroy, in Poland and in Finland. With such powers as these there could be no compromise. He viewed the ‘martyrdom’ of Poland with ‘deep indignation’: it was his duty to ‘protest aloud’ against such persecution of Catholic and Orthodox Christians as he had against such persecution in Germany itself. ‘Liberty must be our goal, liberty which is not now possible in Russia and in Germany. The thirty-seven million Catholics living under the Government of the Reich are constantly in my thoughts. They, and the members of the Evangelical Confessional Church, have been among the principal victims of the Nazi regime.’

Hinsley insisted that in all of this he stood by the Popes, not against them. First there was Mit brennender Sorge in 1937, then the encyclical Divini Redemptoris. Both of these were the work of Pius XI. To them Pius XII had added Summi Pontificatus and the Five Peace Points of Christmas 1939. When it was asserted that other Catholics spoken in contradiction of his views he simply denied it. He could turn to Mit brennender Sorge again. He could look at the letter issued by the German bishops at Fulda in August 1938. ‘I am’, he maintained, ‘in good company when I denounce the principles and methods of Nazism in its tramp through Europe.’ What Hinsley took from Summi Pontificatus was the defence of the ‘sacred rights’ of the family against ‘the aggression of the State and against the doctrines of immoral propaganda’. He was clear that it was the place of the Catholic Church to stand firmly against this fundamental enemy and he knew that he occupied a significant place within an international argument, one that concerned the credibility of the whole Church. When he heard that Nazi propaganda in Germany and in the Netherlands had complained that he had merely converted the words of two popes to the service of the cause of Britain he was more than ready to confute them.

Hinsley had been as much a denouncer of the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany. As James Hagerty acknowledges, the new alignment of powers after Barbarossa ‘seriously compromised’ him and he made no easy accommodation. Indeed, he would not conform to the new official line if he could possibly help it. He sought to distinguish between the Russian people and their state, insisting that all expressions of support were for the former and not the latter. On this he came to rely rather heavily. How he would have managed if he had lived to see the end of the war is difficult to judge. Heenan found that Hinsley ‘loved the Jewish race’. When he heard that he was scored by Nazi propaganda as a ‘friend of the Jewish people’ he was evidently proud of the title. He was ready to join the new Council of Christians and Jews with Archbishop Temple and the Chief Rabbi, J.H. Hertz. His final public statement was produced when he was dying, on 1 March 1943, not for a British audience but for the World Jewish Congress in New York: ‘In unison with the voice of indignant protest that cries aloud from all human hearts and in accord with the declarations of the Church, I denounce with utmost vigour the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi oppressors … Words are weak and cold; deeds and speedy deeds are needed to put a stop to this brutal campaign for the extermination of a whole race ….’

The historian may turn again to Hinsley with many questions. What remains clear is that Hinsley played a vivid part in the international encounter between Catholicism and totalitarianism, that he sought to show the two as implacable enemies and that he sought to claim an alignment between the Church and democracy and liberty. Within this he struggled as much as most to find a lasting consistency, not least in juggling his responsibilities to Vatican policy, national diplomacy and domestic opinion. Arguably, he would have wished to be remembered as an archbishop who stood resolutely against tyranny and persecution, for it was in this landscape in which he truly found himself. He did much to deserve this. Those who seek to condemn the Church at large for its acquiescence in the evils of dictatorship during the Second World War still have something in him to reckon with. Insofar as he drew justification from the words and interventions of the Papacy he might, too, shed at least some light on the value of that much disputed record.

Review Article: The Death of Christian Britain Reconsidered

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2010

Review Article: The Death of Christian Britain Reconsidered.

By John S. Conway, University of British Columbia

Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, Understanding secularisation 1800-2000, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2009. IBSN 13: 978-0-415-74134-3.

Jane Garnett et al., eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives. London: SCM Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-334-04092-7.

Keith Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. The Christian Church 1900-2000. Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-826371-5.

Ten years ago, Callum Brown, who is Professor of Religious and Cultural History at Glasgow’s second university, Strathclyde, published his controversial book The Death of Christian Britain. It has now been republished in a second edition, with an additional chapter taking issue with some of Brown’s critics. This is not an ecclesiastical history. It has little to do with the churches as institutions or their theologies. Rather it is an impressionistic exposition about what Brown calls the Christian discourse amongst the British population in the period from 1800 to the present. He seeks to show that for the first 150 years, this discourse, particularly as seen in the writings and preaching of the evangelical sections of the various churches, provided an identity, a mental structure, and a moral code of behaviour for the majority of the population. This generally-held discourse, he believes, is what made Britain a Christian country. But this is no longer the case. “The culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium. Britain is showing the world how religion as it has known it can die.”

The impact of these challenging views was only made more strident by his claim that this ‘death’ could be precisely dated to the 1960s, i.e. had already happened, and by his assertion that the principal cause lay in the decision-making of young women. Their abandonment of the habits and thought-forms of their mothers and grandmothers, who had for so long sustained both the moral forms and the institutional life of the churches, was the key factor. In the remarkably short period of the 1960s all this was to be eroded. It was a sudden and drastic process which Brown described as the de-pietisation of femininity and the de-feminisation of piety.

These provocative assertions were part of his sub-title’s Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000. But secularisation is both a complex as well as an emotive term. There have been at least two rival and opposed assessments. On the one hand, almost all church-goers including the professional clergy and their supporters, have deplored the loss of faith, the decline in church attendance, the erosion of social and personal values, and the abandonment of the so-called Christian identity of the nation. These developments were often associated with the growth or urbanisation and modernisation so that the myth of ‘the unholy city’ with its dark satanic mills could be contrasted with the simple purity of rural life centred around the parish church or chapel on the village green.

On the other side, the champions of secularisation saw this as a revolutionary advance into the modern age, when the individual is liberated from superstition or the shackles of clericalism. Secularisation is a salute to reason, to intellect and to progress. By the mid-twentieth century, virtually all British intellectuals subscribed to this ideology. Yet it took the impetus of a social revolution in the 1960s, which freed British popular culture from what Brown believes was the misery of a restrictive Christian discourse, often backed by the state. For at least a century this discourse had governed all aspects of self-identity and expression, community-regulated leisure and domestic life. Its repressive features, in the name of adherence of Christian morality, had imposed great suffering on minorities and miscreants, such as homosexuals. It had strictly limited the range of opportunities especially for women. It was the rejection of these bulwarks of Christian piety, so Brown believes, which so rapidly led to the death of this kind of Christian culture in Britain.

Brown’s critics were quick to attack him for his reductionism and for his mono-causal explanation for the demise of the Christian discourse. But it is noteworthy that Brown also took issue with much of the methodology employed by many sociologists of religion. Particularly he disputed the widespread teleological theory whereby religious decline was seen as the inevitable and linear obverse of the rise of rationality and science. Brown disputed this time line by pointing to the undeniable revival of religious life in Britain in the immediate post-1945 years. So too he challenged the views taken by many left-wing social scientists who drew their analysis from Marxist theory. According to this paradigm, Christianity’s hold was largely class-based, and would and should disappear once the class struggle was overcome and modernisation ensued. But the subsequent discrediting of Marxism and its theories of modernisation now requires now requires new coherent explanations for the apparent changes in Britain’s religious adherence.

Redefining Christian Britain. Post-1945 Perspectives is the product of an Oxford conference whose contributors sought to escape from the ideologically-based theories or the sociologically-based statistics of the proponents of secularisation. Instead they sought to stress Christianity’s continuing influence on culture through literature, art and architecture. As well, they found Christian moral ideas as forming the background for many economic developments, as well as in protest movements. Above all they seek to claim the continued relevance of Christian values in Britain’s national identity. Christian Britain is not dead, they assert. There is no corpse in the Library. Rather, these essays contain countless examples of how Christianity has continued to infuse public culture, though the authors admit that the cultural strength of religion must be separated from its institutional strength or decline. By rejecting any teleological approach, they argue for a wide variety of positive adjustments in British religious life, pointing particularly to the number of sub-cultures brought in by recent immigrants.

There is considerable mention of “transformations” in the chapters of this book. Many of the contributors rightly point out that the 1960s were indeed years of change and challenge in Britain. The national identity, and with it the many religious associations it held, were transformed in more ways than allowed by Callum Brown. The loss of empire, the spectre of nuclear annihilation, the awareness of world poverty, and the wholly new relationship with Europe, all posed questions which included a religious dimension. Above all, these were years in which religious certainty faded, to be replaced by a far more questioning discourse. It was not surprising that Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God should prove to be the best-selling theological work of the century. The abandonment of the ideal of authority, and the disappearance of a deferential society, both clearly affected the position of the clergy. So too the rise in the general standards of education meant that many more individuals than before claimed an independence of mind which no longer looked for paternalistic guidance from the churches or their ministers. There was in fact a process of spiritual fragmentation when the institutional church, with its rituals and dogmas, no longer received automatic assent. This development proved to be far more corrosive of belief patterns than the alleged impetus of women’s sexual liberation.

There were indeed, as Mark Chapman points out, many churchmen who welcomed a transformation of their spirituality, and who looked for more relevant forms of Christian witness, stripped of the Victorian trappings of religion. Some were to welcome the abandonment of dogmatic theologizing, and were to cultivate a vaguer religion of love and service of fellow men and women. But others still recognized the need to maintain the importance of the transcendent in both personal and public life. They were to argue that the churches should continue to have a prophetic and critical role over against all idealistic political or social proposals. If the churches limited themselves to being agents of social reform, they would have lost a dimension of incomparable worth. Transformation should be achieved without sacrificing the essence of the Judaeo-Christian heritage. And institutional diminution was not necessarily a pointer to social relevance. In the view of these authors, the wishful thinking of doomsayers, predicting religious and moral decline, has to be challenged. Little evidence exists that the national standards of personal morality have declined, even when the churches’ previous emphasis on puritan-style sexual ethics has been overtaken. Instead, newer issues such as nuclear armaments, climate change, or world poverty are clearly able to arouse strong moral reactions, derived certainly from Christian roots. The discursive Christianity of the British nation still continues in a variety of different ways. A transformed view of the sacred, and an ardent desire for genuine spiritual experience, still persists, even if bearing little resemblance to the master-narrative of former years. The authors’ conclusion is that Christianity in Britain has been better able to respond to changed circumstances than grand narratives of decline or death have allowed. The picture they uncover is one of innovation and exploration not of atrophy or paralysis. In short they believe that Christian Britain is not dead but that it will continue to be reshaped and redefined in the years ahead.

How Christianity interacted with broader social and political movements in the twentieth century is the focus of Keith Robbins’ magisterial study of the Christian Church in the four countries which form part of the British Isles. Robbins is a distinguished scholar of church history, and a former university president. He is very much aware that England,Scotland,Wales and Ireland all have a long history of dialogue between Christianity and its surrounding culture. The varieties and the peculiarities of this relationship lie at the heart of his book. Christianity has been embedded in Britain for over sixteen hundred years, during which it has been shaped by numerous, frequently conflicting impulses. The dialectic between past and present has produced radically different situations and seemingly incompatible belief-systems. Yet Robbins seeks to write transnationally and transdenominationally since he believes he can see the unity in this diversity.

This is no ordinary textbook. The reader should be warned not to expect any systematic delivery of names, dates, places or statistics. Instead, it is a large-scale portrait, or rather a series of large-scale portraits in chronological order, bringing in aspects from each of the national church settings. Robbins paints with a variety of multi-coloured brush strokes, each drawn from his immense fund of knowledge and reading. His style is allusive, following in the footsteps of G.M. Young and Owen Chadwick. Readers are therefore expected to have considerable knowledge already in order to appreciate his nicely-pointed comments.

Robbins naturally takes issue with Callum Brown`s over-simplistic assessment. Rather, he believes, the churches have always lived in an ambiguous and often awkward symbiosis with their environment. The issue is how this relationship can be fully described given the complexity of the churches’ institutional life and the variety of ways in which the different sections of the population both contribute to and are drawn from the church communities. A ‘typical’ church, he believes, is elusive, but he seeks to integrate, in a comprehensive and ecumenical whole, the various strands, both from within and outside, as well as from above and below.

His task has been complicated by the fact that most church histories have been written from the perspective of one or other denomination to confirm their legitimacy and authority, and to impugn the claims of others. Robbins seeks to rise above this fray and adopts an even-handed ecumenism. He is ready to understand, though not necessarily to endorse, those viewpoints which he sees as narrowing down the Christian message because of a particular theological or social slant. All have, he believes, to be accommodated as part of Christian Britain, even when discordantly opposed to each other, as for example in twentieth-century Ireland. So his volume is irenic and suitably comprehensive, and his wide-ranging sympathies can open new horizons of insight.

For the first half of the century, the question of how the churches related to concepts of Britain’s national identity and to its military and political fortunes was a constant preoccupation. In England the established church had little debate about where its duty lay, but increasingly more about the ethical values such nationalism propagated. In Ireland, the Catholic faith had no such priority. It saw itself as the church of the victimized population, creating barriers against unwanted and alien onslaughts. But both sides saw their stance as upholding their Christian witness. The bitter divisions in doctrine and practice which had accrued since the Reformation still prevented unity. But increasingly all churches faced parallel challenges confronting what came to be known as the tide of secularisation.

Yet in 1914 all the churches in England,Wales and Scotland, and in some parts of Ireland, especially the north, enthusiastically backed the war effort including its appeal to nationalism, militarism, even jingoism. Only a tiny handful saw pacifism as the true Christian discipleship. But the subsequent mass slaughter on the battlefields thereafter was to cause a major and irreversible crisis in the credibility of the Christian witness and to lead to long-lasting disillusionment with its institutions and personnel – and not only in Britain. To many observers, myself included, this post-war disenchantment marked the onset of the death of Christian Britain.

But Robbins rightly points out that the churches were too closely integrated into their host societies to be able to develop alternative theologies or practices. The clergy particularly could not escape the role of being public cheerleaders for the war effort. But the price was fateful. During the Second World War, most church leaders were more cautious. Bishop George Bell urged the government to ensure that the war was waged in a Christian fashion on behalf of the Universal Christian Church, and not just for the advance of national interests. The Pope, in the impartiality of the Vatican, upheld the cause of peace, despite being under relentless pressure to join one side or the other. No German church leader ever opposed the regime or its wars of racial annihilation. Attempts to justify such events as Auschwitz or Hiroshima merely discredited those who tried. Such horrendous crimes only revealed the Christians’ impotence and their creeds’ irrelevance.

But, as both Brown and Robbins show, in the post-1945 period, the desire to rebuild Britain on the basis of Christian family values brought about a revival in many denominations. The more critical questions were subdued or postponed. The churches existed in a widespread state of cognitive dissonance. Only in the 1960s did these issues become insistent. Many younger people, of both sexes, then found they could no longer support the supposedly hypocritical and compromised churches, which should be left to die out. Secular scepticism was more honest.

There was, however, one part of the British Isles, in the last half of the century, where Christianity and the churches were of crucial significance, though hardly in any laudatory sense. Robbins’ treatment of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland is brief but succinct. Undeniably, the situation in Ulster reinforced his main contentions. The province’s deep-seated religious factions and rivalries were inextricably interwoven in the political and social fabric. The conflicting religious traditions were not just a propagandistic cover for more vital economic or political struggles. Rather the intensely-held folk memories of each side’s religious traditions gave the conflict its enduring and intractable quality. Cromwell mattered.

Even more significantly the conflict continued even though the church leaders on both sides came to deplore the violence and bloodshed. But they were not heard. The clergy’s authority was one of the casualties of this un-Christian fratricidal strife.

All this was part of a wider process. In the latter part of the century authority figures in both church and state were rejected. As prosperity grew, so did the notion of self-help spirituality. Britain became a market-place for competing yet negotiating moralities. Many church leaders recognized that they had been improperly coercive in the past. And while the Pope still called for obedience in matters of personal, especially sexual, morality, he increasingly called in vain and could no longer seen as the voice of Christendom.

The final years of the century were therefore years of institutional and ethical unsettlement. Questions were increasingly posed about the identity and viability of churches, but not severely enough to overthrow the historical divisions embedded since the Reformation. The failure of church unity plans meant that the churches remained rooted, for better or for worse, in their cultural inheritances. And their discordant voices meant that they lost more of their moral authority, along with their disappearing membership. Britons became much more pluralistic in their religious views and spiritual searching.

Thus Robbins finds himself at least in partial agreement with the more guarded of Callum Brown’s assessments. “This was a period which witnessed the increasing marginalisation of religion from British public life, intellectualism and popular culture.” And yet, a wide survey conducted at the turn of the century found that 77% of the population reported themselves as having a religious affiliation, the majority of whom declared they were Christians. This was perhaps based on a diffuse understanding of what Christianity meant and entailed.. But it could indicate that the notion of the death of Christian Britain had been overstated. Christianity could still be regarded as a significant contributor to national life, even if its institutional expressions were fragile. The secular state cannot be regarded, in Robbins’ view, as the desirable terminal conclusion of two thousand years of Christian presence on Britain’s soil. The pluralistic spiritual patterns which currently prevail may yet hold out other possibilities.