Callum G Brown
Biographic Data
| ID | 3766211 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Callum G Brown |
| GIVEN NAMES | Callum G |
| FAMILY NAME | Brown |
| SIGNATURE | BROWN C G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 43 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada . Elliot Hanowski
No abstract available
The agency of women in secularization
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
The Individual, the Community and the Impact of Touring Film: Interviews with Jim Hunter and Others
The impact of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild is here explored through narrators interviewed in the 2010s about their experiences of touring film shows between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Centrally featured is the testimony of Jim Hunter, journalist, historian, erstwhile director of the Scottish Crofters’ Union and chairman of the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, whose testimony is analysed for six major narrative features – cultural an…
The Curse: Film and the Churches in the Western Isles 1945 to 1980
Focusing on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, this article looks at the interaction between religious culture and film between the 1940s and 1980s. Its first main feature is an examination of the causes of the closure of the Playhouse cinema in Stornoway in 1977–79 and the role of the Calvinist churches and the local authorities in this and other film censorship. It identifies a growing vigour on the part of some churchmen, notably of the …
The Media and Modernity: Film and New Media in the Highlands and Islands 1946–1971: Introduction
The Highlands and Islands Film Guild is briefly surveyed in this article that introduces the Special Issue on Media and Modernity. The foundations, principles and manner of operation are outlined, as well as the interdisciplinary research project. The article starts with a review of literature on the nature of society in the Highlands and Islands, and the way that researchers regard it as ‘the other’ in historical and ethnographic research within…
The Necessity of Atheism: Making Sense of Secularisation
Atheists and atheism have a negligible place in the historiography of secularisation. This is because, it is argued here, secularisation is something that is too often measured from religion and, in one influential narrative, has a strongly Christian character to its progress and its outcome. Taking Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) as a foil, this article explores longstanding suppositions about the nature of the religious past. It explores …
Secularisation in the Christian World
Contesting the Moral High Ground: Popular Moralists in Mid-twentieth Century Britain. By Paul T. Phillips
Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
During the twentieth century, Britain turned from one of the most deeply religious nations of the world into one of the most secularised nations. This book provides a comprehensive account of religion in British society and culture between 1900 and 2000. It traces how Christian Puritanism and respectability framed the people amidst world wars, economic depressions, and social protest, and how until the 1950s religious revivals fostered mass enthu…
Unfettering Religion: Women and the Family Chain in the Late Twentieth Century
There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (espec…
Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s
Gendering secularisation: Locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s
The marginalisation of gender Of all the ways in which secularisation has been imagined and studied by scholars, the least explored has been gender. As a category of analysis, it is now pretty standard across the historical and sociological professions, and has transformed areas of study, established entirely new ones, and generally invigorated intellectual thought about past and present societies. But few studies of religious change and seculari…
Religion and the Political Imagination
The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has co…
What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s
The crisis of the 1960s is now central to debates about religious change and secularisation in the twentieth century. However, the nature of the crisis is contested. Using Hugh McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007) as a starting point, this article explores the issues that divide scholars — the origin and length of the crisis (was it revolution or evolution?); was it generated more by developments within the Christian churches or by d…
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation’s dominant religious culture has been destroyed. Callum Brown challenges the generally held view that secularization was a long and gradual process dating from the industrial revolution. Instead, he argues that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. Using the latest techniques of gender analysis, and by listening to people's voices rather than purely …
The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000
This text challenges the generally held view that secularisation has been a long and gradual process beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and instead proposes that it has been a catastrophic short-term phenomenon starting with the 1960s
Secularization, the growth of militancy and the spiritual revolution: Religious change and gender power in Britain, 1901?2001
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and since, have altered perceptions of religious change in Britain in the last century. This article proposes that three key trends encapsulate the most significant developments – secularization, the rise of religious militancy, and the evolution of the New Age. It seeks to refine the periodization and definitions of these, and the interconnections between them, focusing on gender as the major category …
Faith in Diversity: The Flowering of Divergent Agendas in Recent Writing in the Social History of Religion in Late Modern Scotland
The writing of religious history has changed enormously in Scotland in the last fifty years. Early pioneers of a social history approach to the interaction of religion and society, such as L. J. Saunders in Scottish Democracy 1815–1840: the social and intellectual background (London, 1950), and the work of Stewart Mechie in his collection of essays The Church and Scottish Social development 1780–1870 (London, 1960), joined an early flowering of e…
Religion in the city
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Secularisation: A Theory in Danger
'The coming of an urban and industrial class society did not result in a decline of religion, despite the comments of preachers like Thomas Chalmers. All the evidence for Scotland points to the reverse.' So Bob Morris wrote in his introduction to Volume 2 ofPeople andSociety in Scotland.1 His brief remark is ofmajor importance, for it is very probably the first such statement (admission?) by a prominent social historian in a text book on an indus…
Capitalists and Christians: Business Leaders and the Churches in Britain, 1900-1960
Abbreviations Introduction: Business leaders and churches: issues and approaches Part I. Contexts: Business structures, religious structures and business elites 1900-1960 Part II. Formations: Church views of business 1900-1960 Christian influence in the formation of business values, skills, and networks in British business elites 1900-1960 Part III. Advance or retreat? Christians in big business prologue. The numbers involved The industrial secto…
Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865
Did urbanization secularize Britain
There are few issues in British history about which so much unsubstantiated assertion has been written as the adverse impact of industrial urbanization upon popular religiosity. Urban history undergraduates are plied each year with the well-worn secularizing interpretation of urban growth which emanated with the Victorians (mostly churchmen) and which has since been reassembled by modern investigators in forms suitable for digestion in ecclesiast…
The Costs of Pew-renting: Church Management, Church-going and Social Class in Nineteenth-century Glasgow
The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thu…
Short notices
R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (1984), xvi+391 (Cambridge, £32#lb50). Doreen M. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (1984), 262 (Croom Helm, £14.95). Roger Morriss, The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1983), ix+262 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £28#lb50). Robert Bud and Gerrylynn Roberts, Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victor…
What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s
The crisis of the 1960s is now central to debates about religious change and secularisation in the twentieth century. However, the nature of the crisis is contested. Using Hugh McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007) as a starting point, this article explores the issues that divide scholars — the origin and length of the crisis (was it revolution or evolution?); was it generated more by developments within the Christian churches or by d…
Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
During the twentieth century, Britain turned from one of the most deeply religious nations of the world into one of the most secularised nations. This book provides a comprehensive account of religion in British society and culture between 1900 and 2000. It traces how Christian Puritanism and respectability framed the people amidst world wars, economic depressions, and social protest, and how until the 1950s religious revivals fostered mass enthu…
Did urbanization secularize Britain
There are few issues in British history about which so much unsubstantiated assertion has been written as the adverse impact of industrial urbanization upon popular religiosity. Urban history undergraduates are plied each year with the well-worn secularizing interpretation of urban growth which emanated with the Victorians (mostly churchmen) and which has since been reassembled by modern investigators in forms suitable for digestion in ecclesiast…
The Costs of Pew-renting: Church Management, Church-going and Social Class in Nineteenth-century Glasgow
The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thu…
The Necessity of Atheism: Making Sense of Secularisation
Atheists and atheism have a negligible place in the historiography of secularisation. This is because, it is argued here, secularisation is something that is too often measured from religion and, in one influential narrative, has a strongly Christian character to its progress and its outcome. Taking Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) as a foil, this article explores longstanding suppositions about the nature of the religious past. It explores …
Religion in the city
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture, 1780-1850
Short notices
R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (1984), xvi+391 (Cambridge, £32#lb50). Doreen M. Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (1984), 262 (Croom Helm, £14.95). Roger Morriss, The Royal Dockyards during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1983), ix+262 (Leicester University Press, Leicester, £28#lb50). Robert Bud and Gerrylynn Roberts, Science versus Practice: Chemistry in Victor…
The Costs of Pew-renting: Church Management, Church-going and Social Class in Nineteenth-century Glasgow
The letting of pews was virtually a universal practice in the churches of nineteenth-century Britain. Although letting and private ownership of seats were well known before the 1700s and have continued in the present century, the renting of fixed seats for use during divine service reached its height in the Victorian period. Worshippers paid anything from one shilling to thirty shillings or more to reserve a seat for one person for a year. It thu…
Did urbanization secularize Britain
There are few issues in British history about which so much unsubstantiated assertion has been written as the adverse impact of industrial urbanization upon popular religiosity. Urban history undergraduates are plied each year with the well-worn secularizing interpretation of urban growth which emanated with the Victorians (mostly churchmen) and which has since been reassembled by modern investigators in forms suitable for digestion in ecclesiast…
Secularisation: A Theory in Danger
'The coming of an urban and industrial class society did not result in a decline of religion, despite the comments of preachers like Thomas Chalmers. All the evidence for Scotland points to the reverse.' So Bob Morris wrote in his introduction to Volume 2 ofPeople andSociety in Scotland.1 His brief remark is ofmajor importance, for it is very probably the first such statement (admission?) by a prominent social historian in a text book on an indus…
Capitalists and Christians: Business Leaders and the Churches in Britain, 1900-1960
Abbreviations Introduction: Business leaders and churches: issues and approaches Part I. Contexts: Business structures, religious structures and business elites 1900-1960 Part II. Formations: Church views of business 1900-1960 Christian influence in the formation of business values, skills, and networks in British business elites 1900-1960 Part III. Advance or retreat? Christians in big business prologue. The numbers involved The industrial secto…
Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865
Religion in the city
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Faith in Diversity: The Flowering of Divergent Agendas in Recent Writing in the Social History of Religion in Late Modern Scotland
The writing of religious history has changed enormously in Scotland in the last fifty years. Early pioneers of a social history approach to the interaction of religion and society, such as L. J. Saunders in Scottish Democracy 1815–1840: the social and intellectual background (London, 1950), and the work of Stewart Mechie in his collection of essays The Church and Scottish Social development 1780–1870 (London, 1960), joined an early flowering of e…
Secularization, the growth of militancy and the spiritual revolution: Religious change and gender power in Britain, 1901?2001
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and since, have altered perceptions of religious change in Britain in the last century. This article proposes that three key trends encapsulate the most significant developments – secularization, the rise of religious militancy, and the evolution of the New Age. It seeks to refine the periodization and definitions of these, and the interconnections between them, focusing on gender as the major category …
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain examines how the nation’s dominant religious culture has been destroyed. Callum Brown challenges the generally held view that secularization was a long and gradual process dating from the industrial revolution. Instead, he argues that it has been a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s. Using the latest techniques of gender analysis, and by listening to people's voices rather than purely …
The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000
This text challenges the generally held view that secularisation has been a long and gradual process beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and instead proposes that it has been a catastrophic short-term phenomenon starting with the 1960s
Gendering secularisation: Locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s
The marginalisation of gender Of all the ways in which secularisation has been imagined and studied by scholars, the least explored has been gender. As a category of analysis, it is now pretty standard across the historical and sociological professions, and has transformed areas of study, established entirely new ones, and generally invigorated intellectual thought about past and present societies. But few studies of religious change and seculari…
Religion and the Political Imagination
The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has co…
What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s
The crisis of the 1960s is now central to debates about religious change and secularisation in the twentieth century. However, the nature of the crisis is contested. Using Hugh McLeod's The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007) as a starting point, this article explores the issues that divide scholars — the origin and length of the crisis (was it revolution or evolution?); was it generated more by developments within the Christian churches or by d…
Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s
Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain
During the twentieth century, Britain turned from one of the most deeply religious nations of the world into one of the most secularised nations. This book provides a comprehensive account of religion in British society and culture between 1900 and 2000. It traces how Christian Puritanism and respectability framed the people amidst world wars, economic depressions, and social protest, and how until the 1950s religious revivals fostered mass enthu…
Unfettering Religion: Women and the Family Chain in the Late Twentieth Century
There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (espec…
Contesting the Moral High Ground: Popular Moralists in Mid-twentieth Century Britain. By Paul T. Phillips
Secularisation in the Christian World
The Necessity of Atheism: Making Sense of Secularisation
Atheists and atheism have a negligible place in the historiography of secularisation. This is because, it is argued here, secularisation is something that is too often measured from religion and, in one influential narrative, has a strongly Christian character to its progress and its outcome. Taking Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) as a foil, this article explores longstanding suppositions about the nature of the religious past. It explores …
The Individual, the Community and the Impact of Touring Film: Interviews with Jim Hunter and Others
The impact of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild is here explored through narrators interviewed in the 2010s about their experiences of touring film shows between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Centrally featured is the testimony of Jim Hunter, journalist, historian, erstwhile director of the Scottish Crofters’ Union and chairman of the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, whose testimony is analysed for six major narrative features – cultural an…
The Curse: Film and the Churches in the Western Isles 1945 to 1980
Focusing on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, this article looks at the interaction between religious culture and film between the 1940s and 1980s. Its first main feature is an examination of the causes of the closure of the Playhouse cinema in Stornoway in 1977–79 and the role of the Calvinist churches and the local authorities in this and other film censorship. It identifies a growing vigour on the part of some churchmen, notably of the …
The Media and Modernity: Film and New Media in the Highlands and Islands 1946–1971: Introduction
The Highlands and Islands Film Guild is briefly surveyed in this article that introduces the Special Issue on Media and Modernity. The foundations, principles and manner of operation are outlined, as well as the interdisciplinary research project. The article starts with a review of literature on the nature of society in the Highlands and Islands, and the way that researchers regard it as ‘the other’ in historical and ethnographic research within…
The agency of women in secularization
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
History (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Religious studies (12 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (11 works) · Secularization (10 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (8 works) · History (7 works)