Sam Brewitt-Taylor. Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970

Sam Brewitt-Taylor’s first book, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970: The Hope of a World Transformed, makes an important contribution to debates about secularization in Britain and to broader questions about cultural change in the 1960s. Brewitt-Taylor aims to explain the social revolution of 1960s Britain by examining “cultural paradigm-shifts” (7) instigated by the country’s leaders, which he argues were a more important cause of this phenomenon than grassroots changes were. More particularly, he contends that radical British clergy used their influence to put forward secular metanarratives that proved vital for the development of new sexual mores and other aspects of the Sixties Revolution. Brewitt-Taylor thus challenges the view that secularization is an inevitable result of modernization. He also disagrees with Callum Brown, who argues that changes in the way that the British people thought about and embodied gender were responsible for changes in social, sexual, and religious behavior during this period. Like Brown, Brewitt-Taylor is interested in culture, but for him it is the intellectual culture of the elites that matters. Highly educated insiders needed to validate new ways of thinking about religion and morality before most of the population were willing to change the way they acted.

Grassroots · Human sexuality · Modernization theory · Morality · Mores · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Secularization · Sexual revolution · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies