Sam Brewitt-Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 698861 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sam Brewitt-Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sam |
| FAMILY NAME | Brewitt-Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | BREWITT-TAYLOR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lincoln College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6156-186X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Inspiration and Institution in 1960s Anglican Radicalism: The Cases of Nick Stacey and John Robinson
This article explores how Nick Stacey and John Robinson, two central figures in Anglican radicalism, navigated the tensions between their institutional embeddedness and their radical theological inspiration during the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s. These tensions operated on the level of strategy, as radicals calculated the opportunities and costs of leaving Anglican institutions, but also on the level of emotion, as radicals weighed institutio…
Notes toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization
This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's othering category, and secularization as…
The Battle for Christian Britain: Sex, Humanists and Secularisation, 1945–1980, by Callum G. Brown
This is the fourth instalment in Callum Brown’s ongoing series on the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Recent research has portrayed Britain’s Sixties as a multidimensional and multi-stage affair, but Brown boldly cuts through this complexity: as he explains in the introductory Part I, the 1960s witnessed a binary ‘battle’ between the friends and enemies of moral progress, with the decisive ‘watershed’ occurring at a single moment in the mid-19…
Christian civilisation’, ‘modern secularisation’, and the revolutionary re-imagination of British modernity, 1954-1965
This essay argues that essentialist models of modernity are always ideological, and that Britain’s dominant ideology of modernity was transformed from the mid-1950s, with revolutionary consequences for British Christianity and secularisation. Before the mid-1950s Britain's predominant 'civilisation' ideology portrayed Christianity as more advanced than secularity. The mid-1950s global crisis, however, created widespread belief in a radical break …
David Martin's The Religious and the Secular (1969): An Underestimated Masterwork in the Study of Western Secularization
This article considers the content and reception of David Martin's The Religious and the Secular (1969), a brilliant text whose revolutionary implications were overlooked by most of the next two generations of secularization scholarship because it was so far ahead of its time. The young Martin was able to unmask the ideological nature of the secular project partly due to his knowledge of theology, partly due to his eclectic reading, and partly be…
Conclusion
This chapter concludes that the early stages of Britain’s Sixties moral revolution were importantly influenced by metanarratives derived from Christian eschatology. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Cold War’s ‘years of maximum danger’, radical clergymen used their clerical cultural privileges to reimagine Britain as a ‘secular’ society, and to contribute to the wider envisioning of modern secularity as globalist, anti-authoritarian, …
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Christian Unity
This chapter explores the sudden outbreak of ecumenical enthusiasm that swept over the early-1960s Church of England against the backdrop of superpower confrontation. Radical readings of Christian eschatology suggested that global church reunion would provide the key to world peace. These Christian longings for world unity formed part of a wider Sixties assault on British moral exceptionalism, whose problematization at the dawn of the 1960s paved…
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Revolutionary Social Justice
This chapter explores the radical Anglican contribution to the sudden upsurge of political radicalism which Britain experienced in the late 1960s. As the Sixties progressed, increasing numbers of Anglican radicals were drawn to revolutionary politics by their readings of Christian eschatology, a phenomenon which split the movement between revolutionaries and moderates. Since the secularization metanarrative was becoming increasingly normalized, a…
World Crisis and the Making of Christian Radicalism, c.1938–1957
This chapter locates the immediate origins of British Christian radicalism in the early 1940s. The Second World War was frequently interpreted by Christian commentators as evidence of a profound spiritual crisis in Western civilization. The resulting quest for a new Christianity was pursued, amongst others, by J.H. Oldham, Kathleen Bliss, Ronald Gregor Smith, Alec Vidler, and John Robinson. Many of these figures went on to become leading figures …
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Transcending ‘Religion’
This chapter outlines the radical Anglican contribution to the ‘secularization’ metanarrative, which suddenly achieved cultural dominance in British discussion in the early 1960s. During the early Cold War, it had been widely assumed that ‘religious decline’ was a regressive phenomenon, fatally detrimental to human freedom, as apparently exemplified by the Soviet Union. From the late 1950s, however, Anglican radicals drew on Christian eschatology…
Christian Radicalism and the Enactment of Secular Theology
This chapter outlines three examples of how secular theology was put into practice in the 1960s: Nick Stacey’s innovations in the parish of Woolwich; the radicalization of the ‘Parish and People’ organization; and the radicalization of Britain’s Student Christian Movement, which during the 1950s was the largest student religious organization in the country. The chapter argues that secular theology contained an inherent dynamic of ever-increasing …
Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970: The Hope of a World Transformed
Like all transformative revolutions, Britain’s Sixties was an episode of highly influential myth-making. This book delves behind the mythology of inexorable ‘secularization’ to recover, for the first time, the cultural origins of Britain’s moral revolution. In a radical departure from conventional teleologies, it argues that British secularity is a specific cultural invention of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was introduced most influentia…
Christianity and the Invention of the Sexual Revolution in Britain, 1963–1967
This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arg…
Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century . Edited by David Bebbington and David Ceri Jones.
From Religion to Revolution: Theologies of Secularisation in the British Student Christian Movement, 1963–1973
The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of ‘secularisation’, which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian es…
Archbishop Fisher, 1945-1961: Church, State and World
Perhaps inevitably, Archbishop Geoffrey Francis Fisher's primacy has been overshadowed by a development that took place largely after his retirement: the religious crisis of the 1960s. In 1961 the mainstream press reported Fisher's resignation with enthusiastic praise for his achievements, but during the 1960s it became conventional to argue that Fisher incarnated a traditional form of ecclesiasticism that was intrinsically unsuited to the new “m…
Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2012: The Invention of a 'Secular Society'? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961-4
This essay examines the sudden re-imagination of Britain as a ‘secular society’ in the highbrow British media between 1961 and 1964. It is often assumed that contemporary discourses of secularization were relatively unproblematic, simply reflecting reality, but closer investigation reveals that they invented a general crisis of supernaturalism, and exaggerated the extent of religious decline. Between 1961 and 1963 such discourses were promulgated…
Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2012: The Invention of a 'Secular Society'? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961-4
This essay examines the sudden re-imagination of Britain as a ‘secular society’ in the highbrow British media between 1961 and 1964. It is often assumed that contemporary discourses of secularization were relatively unproblematic, simply reflecting reality, but closer investigation reveals that they invented a general crisis of supernaturalism, and exaggerated the extent of religious decline. Between 1961 and 1963 such discourses were promulgated…
Christianity and the Invention of the Sexual Revolution in Britain, 1963–1967
This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arg…
Notes toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization
This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's othering category, and secularization as…
Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2012: The Invention of a 'Secular Society'? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961-4
This essay examines the sudden re-imagination of Britain as a ‘secular society’ in the highbrow British media between 1961 and 1964. It is often assumed that contemporary discourses of secularization were relatively unproblematic, simply reflecting reality, but closer investigation reveals that they invented a general crisis of supernaturalism, and exaggerated the extent of religious decline. Between 1961 and 1963 such discourses were promulgated…
Archbishop Fisher, 1945-1961: Church, State and World
Perhaps inevitably, Archbishop Geoffrey Francis Fisher's primacy has been overshadowed by a development that took place largely after his retirement: the religious crisis of the 1960s. In 1961 the mainstream press reported Fisher's resignation with enthusiastic praise for his achievements, but during the 1960s it became conventional to argue that Fisher incarnated a traditional form of ecclesiasticism that was intrinsically unsuited to the new “m…
Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism in the United Kingdom during the Twentieth Century . Edited by David Bebbington and David Ceri Jones.
From Religion to Revolution: Theologies of Secularisation in the British Student Christian Movement, 1963–1973
The collapse of the British Student Christian Movement in the long 1960s is conventionally ascribed to its mimicking of student radicalism at a time of increasing secularisation. Yet analysis of the SCM's rhetoric demonstrates that in the early 1960s the movement imagined a religious crisis when student Christianity was still strong. By embracing a theological vision of ‘secularisation’, which demanded the deliberate transposition of Christian es…
Christianity and the Invention of the Sexual Revolution in Britain, 1963–1967
This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arg…
Conclusion
This chapter concludes that the early stages of Britain’s Sixties moral revolution were importantly influenced by metanarratives derived from Christian eschatology. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Cold War’s ‘years of maximum danger’, radical clergymen used their clerical cultural privileges to reimagine Britain as a ‘secular’ society, and to contribute to the wider envisioning of modern secularity as globalist, anti-authoritarian, …
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Christian Unity
This chapter explores the sudden outbreak of ecumenical enthusiasm that swept over the early-1960s Church of England against the backdrop of superpower confrontation. Radical readings of Christian eschatology suggested that global church reunion would provide the key to world peace. These Christian longings for world unity formed part of a wider Sixties assault on British moral exceptionalism, whose problematization at the dawn of the 1960s paved…
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Revolutionary Social Justice
This chapter explores the radical Anglican contribution to the sudden upsurge of political radicalism which Britain experienced in the late 1960s. As the Sixties progressed, increasing numbers of Anglican radicals were drawn to revolutionary politics by their readings of Christian eschatology, a phenomenon which split the movement between revolutionaries and moderates. Since the secularization metanarrative was becoming increasingly normalized, a…
World Crisis and the Making of Christian Radicalism, c.1938–1957
This chapter locates the immediate origins of British Christian radicalism in the early 1940s. The Second World War was frequently interpreted by Christian commentators as evidence of a profound spiritual crisis in Western civilization. The resulting quest for a new Christianity was pursued, amongst others, by J.H. Oldham, Kathleen Bliss, Ronald Gregor Smith, Alec Vidler, and John Robinson. Many of these figures went on to become leading figures …
Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Transcending ‘Religion’
This chapter outlines the radical Anglican contribution to the ‘secularization’ metanarrative, which suddenly achieved cultural dominance in British discussion in the early 1960s. During the early Cold War, it had been widely assumed that ‘religious decline’ was a regressive phenomenon, fatally detrimental to human freedom, as apparently exemplified by the Soviet Union. From the late 1950s, however, Anglican radicals drew on Christian eschatology…
Christian Radicalism and the Enactment of Secular Theology
This chapter outlines three examples of how secular theology was put into practice in the 1960s: Nick Stacey’s innovations in the parish of Woolwich; the radicalization of the ‘Parish and People’ organization; and the radicalization of Britain’s Student Christian Movement, which during the 1950s was the largest student religious organization in the country. The chapter argues that secular theology contained an inherent dynamic of ever-increasing …
Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970: The Hope of a World Transformed
Like all transformative revolutions, Britain’s Sixties was an episode of highly influential myth-making. This book delves behind the mythology of inexorable ‘secularization’ to recover, for the first time, the cultural origins of Britain’s moral revolution. In a radical departure from conventional teleologies, it argues that British secularity is a specific cultural invention of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which was introduced most influentia…
Christian civilisation’, ‘modern secularisation’, and the revolutionary re-imagination of British modernity, 1954-1965
This essay argues that essentialist models of modernity are always ideological, and that Britain’s dominant ideology of modernity was transformed from the mid-1950s, with revolutionary consequences for British Christianity and secularisation. Before the mid-1950s Britain's predominant 'civilisation' ideology portrayed Christianity as more advanced than secularity. The mid-1950s global crisis, however, created widespread belief in a radical break …
David Martin's The Religious and the Secular (1969): An Underestimated Masterwork in the Study of Western Secularization
This article considers the content and reception of David Martin's The Religious and the Secular (1969), a brilliant text whose revolutionary implications were overlooked by most of the next two generations of secularization scholarship because it was so far ahead of its time. The young Martin was able to unmask the ideological nature of the secular project partly due to his knowledge of theology, partly due to his eclectic reading, and partly be…
Inspiration and Institution in 1960s Anglican Radicalism: The Cases of Nick Stacey and John Robinson
This article explores how Nick Stacey and John Robinson, two central figures in Anglican radicalism, navigated the tensions between their institutional embeddedness and their radical theological inspiration during the ‘religious crisis’ of the 1960s. These tensions operated on the level of strategy, as radicals calculated the opportunities and costs of leaving Anglican institutions, but also on the level of emotion, as radicals weighed institutio…
Notes toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization
This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's othering category, and secularization as…
The Battle for Christian Britain: Sex, Humanists and Secularisation, 1945–1980, by Callum G. Brown
This is the fourth instalment in Callum Brown’s ongoing series on the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Recent research has portrayed Britain’s Sixties as a multidimensional and multi-stage affair, but Brown boldly cuts through this complexity: as he explains in the introductory Part I, the 1960s witnessed a binary ‘battle’ between the friends and enemies of moral progress, with the decisive ‘watershed’ occurring at a single moment in the mid-19…
Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Religious studies (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (12 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (12 works) · Theology (10 works) · Political radicalism (8 works)