Cosmo Lang. Archbishop in war and crisis – a review

I recently reviewed Robert Beaken’s study of Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, published by I.B. Tauris in 2012. The full review in Reviews in History shows that I think it an ‘important reassessment’ which ‘goes a long way towards superseding [the work of J.G.] Lockhart and presenting Lang afresh’. Robert very effectively rescues Lang from his reputation as ‘a figure caught in the headlights, reactive rather than in the lead, a puritan and a snob.’

The book has three primary concerns: with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy; with the disputed process of liturgical reform within the Church of England; and with the Second World War. Chapter 7 deals with the war; Chapter 6 with the stalemate in relation to liturgical revision that Lang inherited after the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927-8. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with Lang’s relationship with the monarchy in general, and the abdication crisis in particular, and are very clearly the centrepiece of the book.

The review did make some substantive criticisms, which I reproduce at length here. The first is of one of interpretation:

Beaken rightly emphasises that in the period between the wars the office of archbishop still mattered in English public life. The opinion of Canterbury was sought and listened to on matters of moment; and the archbishop’s correspondence clearly shows that many of the general public expected something of ‘their archbishop’, even if those expectations were inchoately expressed and neither compatible nor realistic. All this is right, and worth emphasising; but it is difficult to recognise the ‘simple narrative of secularisation’ against which Beaken sets himself as one now held by very many historians. The work variously of Callum Brown, Grace Davie, Hugh McLeod and many others have all deepened and complicated our understandings of what secularisation is and how it occurs; and so Beaken is pushing at, if not an open door, one which has been unlocked and left ajar.

Also on matters of interpretation:

For Beaken, Lang’s radio broadcast of December 1936 […] was ‘an unusually unwise and unreflective action’, in that Lang allowed himself to reflect unfavourably on the mores of the social circle around the former king. However, the receipt of many letters and a ‘torrent of abuse’ in the popular press does not necessarily prove that an archbishop is not doing his job, but only that he has expressed an unpopular but arguably necessary view. Despite Lang’s evident enjoyment of the quiet entwining of archbishop and establishment, he was able to see where lines should be drawn.

The other criticisms were about the shape of the book, and its style:

At the broadest scale, the book is strangely shaped, such that it appears not as a rounded study of an archbishop at a time of crisis, but as three substantial studies of particular issues, hedged around with some rather desultory supporting materials. The three themes of the royal connection, the war and the Prayer Book crisis between them occupy two-thirds of the book, with the royal material alone forming nearly a third. This leads Beaken to neglect other issues that merited greater treatment. Lang’s path from bishop of Stepney (1901) to his arrival at Canterbury in 1928 are dealt with in five breathless pages; a time that included the controversy over Lang’s public comments on the First World War, which cried out for a fuller treatment. Similarly, Beaken’s account of a pivotal time in ecumenical relations at home and abroad is perfunctory. Lang’s time in office saw acute economic hardship and the Jarrow March, as well as the rise of home-grown Fascism and pitched violence on the streets to counter it. None of these receive the slightest treatment, in a study entitled ‘Archbishop in War and Crisis.’ […]

By contrast, significant space is instead given over to a discussion of Lang’s sexuality. Beaken is largely successful in showing that Lang was probably not a repressed homosexual, but a lonely figure who found it difficult to form close personal relationships of any kind. To this reviewer, however, it is not clear that those making the case for Lang’s homosexuality ever established why the matter should be all that important, and neither is Beaken convincing as to why it is important that Lang was not.

Robert’s response is at the foot of the review.

Mrs Thatcher’s religion

As Mrs Thatcher passed away last week, I wonder how long it will be before we can reach a sensible assessment of her career. When teaching students born in John Major’s Britain, I used to struggle to bring alive to them quite how divisive a figure she was, and how much visceral emotion about her person has lived on in our political subconscious as a nation. The loathing that some felt for all that she stood for was brought home to me by the spontaneous laughter, tinged with relief and the cathartic release of repressed bitterness, that I overheard the day the news broke. And so for historians of my generation, who came to political consciousness when she was Prime Minister, there is considerable work to be done in shedding that baggage, in order to be able to look at her legacy in the cold, hard light.

This also applies to the work needed to assess her Christianity. And work we must, if only because much of the comment from Christian voices has threatened to obscure the very real debate we need to have about whether Thatcherism ought to be retrospectively glossed as more or less ‘Christian’ at all.

Colin Bloom of the Conservative Christian Fellowship thought that ‘history will show that she, more than any other British prime minister of the past 60 years, changed our nation for the better.’ (1) George Carey, who was archbishop during the later part of her time, admitted that whilst there were divisions in opinion over specific policies, overall ‘as I look back now I think her instincts were absolutely right.’ The new Pope referred to the ‘Christian values which underpinned her commitment to public service and to the promotion of freedom among the family of nations.’(3)

Perhaps the wiser course would have been to have remained as agnostic as Vincent Nicholls, who simply expressed a humane concern for a grieving family, since there are surely an equally significant number of Christians whose immediate feeling is that her instincts were in many respects wrong, and perhaps actively inimical to the cause of the gospel. Bishop John Packer, who had been working in Doncaster during her time in office, sounded a much more equivocal note on Radio 4′s Sunday programme, as did Giles Fraser in the Guardian. Although no Christian herself, Glenda Jackson made a revealing choice of terms when telling Parliament  (Hansard, cols 1649-50) about ‘the most heinous social, economic and spiritual damage …. We were told that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice—and I still regard them as vices—was, in fact, under Thatcherism, a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees..’

Some elements of the question are clear. That she personally professed a strong and consistent faith is hard to dispute. That she was theologically literate is evident from the famous ‘Sermon on the Mound‘ given to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1988. There is interesting scholarly work that re-emphasises the importance of her understanding of theology as formative to her work, such as that by Liza Filby and Antonio Weiss. John Milbank‘s recent intervention should also be required reading.

After that, we lack agreed points of reference to begin to have a sensible conversation about her. Values central to her rhetoric, such as thrift, self-discipline, industry and self-reliance are all traditionally associated with Conservatism, but have also  been at times claimed by Christian socialism. Or what of the ‘socialist’ values of communal aid, concern for the poor and the sending of the rich empty away; all of which have equally well been seen by Christians not as the duty of the state, but of the individual, or the ‘Big Society’ at local level ? The longer-range history of British politics shows that no political party ever managed to command the loyalty of a majority of  Christians, as does the failure of avowedly Christian parties. Those principles often seen as Christian have continued to evade political capture of this sort.

I have no answers; and I suspect it is too early to make sense of the religious elements of Thatcherism as history. At the very least we need access to key sources, such as the majority of her official papers which are still closed, as well as those of Robert Runcie and Carey at Lambeth Palace. In the meantime, commentators on both left and right should probably stop trying to assess a political program in terms of its Christian content or lack of it. The debate is stale, and gets us nowhere.

Is it time to disestablish the Church of England ?

For much of the last century, every adjustment in the relationship between the state and the established Church of England has been resisted on the basis that it ‘raises the question of disestablishment’. There have of course been tinkerings and modifications: on the process of Crown appointments; attempts at removing the bishops from the House of Lords; and the Worship and Doctrine Measure of 1974 which gave the Church the power to settle most of the most important things about its own life and worship.

Bishop John Fisher in Parliament [Image CC: BY-NC, from Lawrence OP (Flickr)]

Perhaps the establishment of the CofE is one of its intrinsic mysteries; the genius of Anglicanism which remains opaque even to its initiates, and which (like that other fabled beast the British Constitution), seems to work well even if no-one quite knows how. But recent events show more clearly than ever before just how precarious establishment is, and how contingent on other things which seem less solid.

There was always an implicit bargain involved in the survival of establishment. On the Church’s side, it offered some advantages. In the parishes, hatching, matching and despatching kept open occasions for pastoral contact with parishioners who never otherwise entered the building, even if opinions differ on how real or important much of this was. The royal set-piece occasions remained symbolic demonstrations of the historic reality of the place of Christianity in national life. And the place of the bishops in the Lords was taken very seriously by those bishops, even if their consciousness of their role shifted, first towards being representatives of the other Christian churches, and then of all faiths.

After the mid-sixties, and particularly after 1974, the burdens of establishment in practical terms were light, once Parliament had denied itself the right in practice to interfere in the internal running of the Church, even if sometimes it still had to wave necessary legislation through. And so an equilibrium has held since then: the Church didn’t much bother the state in practical terms; the Church bore some mild inconvenience in return for some advantages; and the sheer effort and parliamentary time involved in disestablishment deterred any serious consideration of it.

More recent events have upset this delicate balance. Rural clergy of my acquaintance still place considerable value on the Church’s role as registrar-delegate on behalf of the state in the matter of the rites of passage; but that advantage in urban areas is surely now almost null. As for the role of the bishops in the House of Lords, some still set some store by it, but as a burden rather than a privilege. If any government were actually to set to the task of removing them, I doubt it would be resisted too hard. And so, although hard data for analysis is in short supply, the cost-benefit calculus of establishment for the Church looks less and less favourable, and is increasingly seen to be so.

Both of these changes would be a loss, but a minor one, and easily accommodated. Two recent developments take things closer to home.

Firstly there is the issue of gay marriage. Several faith groups hold that marriage is necessarily, indeed ontologically only possible between man and woman. However, for all but one of these groups (those that are not established) the redefining of civil marriage by the state need not cause any internal difficulty, other than the loss of the right for their own religious solemnisation of marriage to contain the civil component. For the Church of England, I see no possible way that its own religious definition of marriage as exclusively heterosexual could survive an enforcement by the state of such a redefinition of marriage in civil terms. The role of registrar-delegate would have to be relinquished, leaving marriage in the Church of England the same (in law) as by the rites of the Methodists or in synagogue or mosque. This may (or may not) be possible without upsetting some other part of the delicate ecology of establishment. I don’t see the exemption of the Church of England from the current legislation as durable for any length of time.

Similarly, if the General Synod votes again against the consecration of women as bishops, then the sort of attempt (suggested by some) by Parliament to force the issue in relation to the bishops in the Lords would provoke a similar crisis. This is not to mention any attempt to apply the existing employment equality legislation to the issue, if the Church (as discharger of some functions on behalf of the state) discriminates on the grounds of gender.

Had either issue come to the surface twenty years ago, things would have been quite different. But in the last few years, I think that the climate of opinion has changed, on both sides. There has been a considerable upsurge in secularist sentiment, whether as applied to the House of Lords, or faith schools, or the law on blasphemy, or the visit of the Pope to the UK in 2010. And so the public mood would seem to the most supportive it has been for decades for an attempt at a renegotiation.

And at the same time, there may be more appetite within the Church for such an attempt as well. The point is often made that the Church of England is a church, not a sect. But a church can only be church in this comprehensive national sense if the nation on whose behalf it is supposed to exist recognises it. Not everyone, or even the majority, need ever make direct use of it, but it needs to be regarded as something other than a private religious society (that is, a sect), and that has some set of obligations to the whole nation. Becoming a sect need not jeopardise the Church’s mission; but it would need to recognise that that mission is no longer shaped as it was when establishment made sense. And more and more Anglicans are I think coming to recognise that it no longer does. There have for decades been voices who have thought that establishment meant being part of The Establishment, of being too close to secular power and all its moral difficulties; and that the prophetic edge of the Church’s mission, to speak truth to power, was thereby compromised. I think these voices are now coming to represent a more and more mainstream view.

(Let me be clear about one thing, however. Some within the churches have seen the gay marriage issue as the thin end of a wedge, by which the freedom of churches (as voluntary religious societies) to order their worship and doctrine would be eroded by militant secularists – that conservative churches would eventually be forced to accept gay clergy, or women bishops, or whichever norm of wider society conflicted with their own belief. This rhetoric is surely overblown, and hinders hard thinking on the real issues about the dual nature of the Church of England.)

It would be brave to predict the actual disestablishment of the Church of England, and I’m not about to. However, I do think that the state of opinion, both within and outside the Church, are more favourable than they have been for decades. If a government had the appetite for the job of disestablishment, now would be the time to attempt it.

On Popes, archbishops and their predecessors

Those who follow such obscure things will be conscious that we have at the moment simultaneous periods of transition in the highest offices of both the Roman Catholic church and the Church of England (and thus the Anglican Communion.) As Pope Emeritus Benedict disappeared from view into the palace at Castel Gandolfo, speculation began as to what sort of neighbour he would be to his successor, since Popes have not often needed to reckon with the presence of a living predecessor. Would Benedict be a critic, or at the least a silent focus for the discontent of others ? Or a source of counsel and encouragement? I am not enough of a Vatican-watcher to speculate; but there are some interesting parallels in the relationships of some modern archbishops of Canterbury with their predecessors; and not always happy ones.

Outgoing archbishops have often been asked for their mind as to their successor. In 1961 Geoffrey Fisher advised Harold Macmillan against appointing Michael Ramsey to Canterbury. In 1974 Ramsey himself thought that Donald Coggan was not the best man to succeed him; not for any particular fault of Coggan’s, but because Ramsey thought that a figure from the worldwide Anglican Communion would be better.

So far, so predictable; indeed, one might hope that any such process would seek the views of the outgoing man, even if they were not decisive, as neither Fisher nor Ramsey were. But there have been two recent instances where an outgoing archbishop has not retired to monastic seclusion, never to be seen in public affairs again; and neither of them reflect well on the men concerned.

The most recent was the intervention of George Carey in 2008 in the media firestorm following Rowan Williams’ comments on the possibility of finding some limited spaces for sharia law within (and subject to) UK family law. Carey, in his regular column in the News of the World, argued that such change would be ‘disastrous for the nation [and] a direct challenge to the values of the Christian/Jewish ethic on which our laws have been constructed.’ Although much of the rest of the column was more supportive, the episode was one of the most difficult in Williams’ time, and it is hard to imagine that Carey’s intervention was experienced as anything other than unhelpful.

The other case, sustained over a longer period and probably more damaging, was Geoffrey Fisher’s campaign from retirement in rural Dorset against the Scheme to reunite the Anglican and Methodist churches; a scheme in which Ramsey had invested much. That the two men were poles apart temperamentally was noted at the time; Harold Macmillan’s quip about his appointment of Ramsey, that there had been ‘enough of Martha and it was time for some Mary’ caught something of the contrast. Fisher’s reputation has suffered unduly, but the picture of the brisk, efficient headmaster figure has persisted, and indeed Fisher had been head of Repton School when Ramsey was a pupil. Ramsey told Macmillan that ‘Fisher was my headmaster and he has known all my deficiencies for a long time.’ Macmillan replied ‘Well, he is not going to be my headmaster.’

Fisher yielded to no-one in his commitment to reunion between the two churches, being widely credited with the inception of the whole process in his so-called ‘Cambridge sermon’ of 1946. However, he came to reject the Scheme, thinking it a basic error to suppose that the ministries of the two churches could be reconciled before full communion was achieved. For Fisher the ambiguity necessary in the special Service of Reconciliation, created to circumvent the issue, was intolerable: ‘a pious subterfuge, pious and sincere but still a subterfuge and a tortuous one.’

Ramsey’s predecessor was loudly and consistently against the Scheme, in print, in letters to the Press, and in a constant private correspondence with Ramsey and other bishops. Ramsey came to dread the arrival of Fisher’s letters which eventually went unanswered, causing Fisher to lodge a formal complaint with the Church Assembly about his treatment at the hands of his successor. Ramsey certainly thought Fisher had been crucial in sinking the Scheme, many having been persuaded ‘that as Lord Fisher dislikes the proposals there must be something fishy about them.’

There was no hint of the episode in the address that Ramsey gave at Fisher’s funeral; but Fisher’s brooding presence had been nothing but a hindrance. None of the more recent (and sympathetic) students of Fisher have quite been able to excuse him on this count. I would doubt that either of the outgoing Pope or archbishop would wish to follow his example.

Religion, politics and law in contemporary Britain: a web archive

[This is an expanded version of a post first published in the UK Web Archive blog.]

It has been over two years in the making, but I am delighted to be able to say that my own special collection in the UK Web Archive is now online.

UKWA (for which I am engagement and liaison lead, based at the British Library) collects and preserves websites of scholarly and cultural importance for the UK web domain. Already UKWA collect some 11,000 sites, and has more than 50,000 instances in total, with series of snapshots of some sites going back the best part of a decade. That’s a lot of data, and so one of the ways into the archive is by means of the special collection, of sites on a particular theme.

A couple of years ago, long before coming to the BL, I joined a project at the Library which brought together a group of scholars to guest-curate special collections on our research interests. I had become interested in the sharpening of the terms of debate about the place of religion in British public life, particularly since 9/11 and the London bombings in 2005. I’ve long been interested in public debate about church and state; but until relatively recently this happened by means of the print press, public oratory, ephemeral publication and the broadcast media. It struck me that a good deal of this debate had already moved online, and so new ways of capturing and preserving it were going to be needed. And so, the ‘politics of religion collection’ (as it was then known) was born. (See these posts on my progress.)

I fairly soon realised why I’m not an archivist, since all sorts of unfamiliar questions hove into view. When archiving the web, what is the base unit ? A whole domain, such as www.bbc.co.uk ? Or a single URL ? Several sites, like that of the National Secular Society or the Christian Institute were central to my concerns, and so could be included whole. But what does one do with a single post on a PR blog about the handling of the sharia law row by Rowan Williams and his staff ? In fact, the collection is a mixture of whole domains and individual directories or pages from larger sites; an uneasy compromise, but a necessary one.

Also (and I may as well come straight out with it), the collection is selective, and thus in a real sense subjective. As a watcher of contemporary religious politics, against the backdrop of recent history, my impression is that the place of religious ideas, symbols and organisations in public life is at its most contested for decades. Historians are traditionally wary of assessing the significance of present trends, since it leaves hostages to fortune and later events. Yet, all archival choices from a pool of material not defined in advance by provenance involve some judgements as to significance; and historians are as well suited as any to make those judgements. And so I have put the collection together now to enable future historians to begin to answer the questions which I anticipate will be significant. (See an older post on why I think historians should engage with this way of working.)

There were other issues. Were I the archivist for a particular organisation, I’d have no problem with getting permission to add material to my archive: everything produced in-house would be in view. The problem for web archiving is that we’re dealing with other people’s copyright work, and so an individual permission is needed for each site. I have a long list of sites which I would dearly love to add to the collection, but for which (for various reasons) we’ve had no response. So, if you are the owner of Protest the Pope, or Holy Redundant, or Christians in Politics, please get in touch. For now, even if the collection cannot be anything like comprehensive, I do hope that it is at least coherent.

There are particular strengths, and some gaps. It includes many campaigning organisations, both secularist and religious, and is heavy on the conservative Christian groups about which I myself know most. It is very light on non-Christian faiths, since I know the field much less well.  It is still very much open, however, and so suggestions of sites that ought to be included are very welcome, via this blog or at the UKWA Nominate a Site page.

What can you do with it ?  For now, there is a simple browse function; and the collection can be searched on its own.  And over time, all sorts of uses will present themselves, which we can’t currently imagine. But the data is there: a growing longitudinal series of timed instances of websites, identified as thematically related; that is to say, an archive.

Not quite about women bishops

Picture the scene. The central decision-making body of the Church of England met to decide, finally, on a matter that had occupied hearts and minds for years before. Few on either side of the debate had ever quite asserted that the proposed change went to the essence of the faith; that it was a matter of doctrine, a salvation issue. But if adopted the change would have profound implications for the structure of the Church of England and for the way it presented itself to the nation at large.

On one side were ranged those who might have been called liberals, or progressives. For them, the present situation, an accident of history, should have been borne no longer. It impaired the mission of the church, since it embodied a division that seemed incomprehensible to the nation at large, and only added to the widespread perception that the Church was out of touch with contemporary thought and feeling. The young of today, it was thought, cared little for the theological niceties; the issue was clear, to them at least. Moreover, it discredited the Church’s witness to be seen to be unable to deal with the matter in a way that was timely and without rancour.

On the other side was ranged what one commentator called an ‘unholy alliance’ of conservatives, not usually to be found in agreement. For some Anglican Catholics, the change went far beyond a mere matter of the housekeeping of the Church; rather, it went to the heart of historic catholic order, exemplified by Christ and the apostles. To relinquish a fundamental element of that catholicity was gravely to endanger the prospects of eventual union with Rome. For some conservative evangelicals, the matter was one of the interpretation of Scripture. To vote for the change was to adopt a way of ordering the church’s life which could not easily be directly justified from the example of the early church, and against which there was Scriptural testimony that needed to have been weighed more heavily than had been the case.

And so, after several years of reports, commissions, and successive drafts of the legislation, the day of decision came. The archbishop of Canterbury, often identified with the progressives but acutely conscious, as with other issues, of the need to keep both the bulk of the Church of England and the wider Anglican communion moving together in roughly the same direction, had invested considerable personal capital in the scheme, and argued passionately in favour. And so, the vote came. Overall the voting resulted in a majority supporting the change, but a simple majority was not enough. Measured against the necessarily arbitrary hurdle set beforehand, the voting fell agonisingly short; and so the proposals were rejected.

Naturally in the short term there was great disappointment , not so to say anger and hurt, both within and outside the Church. And more significantly in the longer term, the archbishop thought that the Church’s failure to agree to its own proposals meant a permanent surrender of initiative; never again would the Church of England have the moral right to claim leadership and to speak to those outside from a position of authority, as it once had. In this matter at least, it would from then on be not a leader, but a follower.

The date: not 2012, but 1969. The issue: the scheme to reunite the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Nothing new under the sun indeed.

Conference paper: Michael Ramsey and the Troubles in Ulster, 1968-74

With a sigh of relief, I’m now putting the finishing touches to my paper for this week’s conference on Protestant-Catholic conflict, at Stranmillis College in Belfast. (More details in a previous post.)

Here’s my conclusion:

“The complexities of the archbishop of Canterbury’s position in relation to Ulster are a microcosm of his wider predicament. Amongst moderate elements, he was seen as an honest broker at the centre of power, able to create a neutral space in which political schemes to end the Troubles might be able to grow. His own public interventions in relation of issues of human rights abroad caused others to see him as a friend of victims of perceived injustice. However, the bulk of the calls upon him to intervene to end the violence were based on either naivety, a lack of information about what was already being done, or a misunderstanding of the powers of Canterbury over the independent Church of Ireland.

“In Protestant eyes, however, there was an inescapable contradiction between Ramsey’s constitutional role as head of a Protestant state church born at the Reformation, and his own fervent commitment to the ecumenical movement and to closer relations with Rome in particular. In this Ramsey was caught between genuine ecumenical enthusiasm within his own church and within the Irish churches on the one hand, and residual anti-Catholic sentiment in the nation at large on the other. The 1960s were a period in which the relationship between the Church of England and the nation was being renegotiated, in relation to the moral law and to conceptions of national identity. Those negotiations, never easy, were intractable to the point of impossibility in an Irish context.

Archiving the Jubilee: Part Two

I’ve been looking at some of the coverage of and reaction to the jubilee weekend, in order to suggest that the British Library archives them for safe keeping in the UK Web Archive. (See Part One.) My earlier post looked at some of the preparatory statements from official church sources, and some very early oppositional voices. Here are some examples of reportage and comment after the event.

Rowan Williams’ sermon at St Paul’s

Perhaps predictably, the archbishop did not allow the pieties of the situation to restrict his thinking on the subject, making some robust comments about aspects of current economic life. See the full text, and the reactions of the Daily Mail (negative) and the Guardian and Nelson Jones in the New Statesman (rather more positive).

Local events

The Church Times gave a useful digest of local events, including a street party in the nave of Ripon Cathedral and various sermons, including that of the Dean of Belfast.  Events in local communities includes an inter-faith Family Fun Day in Tooting, south London.

The ‘real meaning’ of Jubilee

A good few campaigning sites sought to draw a distinction between the biblical concept of jubilee and the pattern of the celebrations, often making a more or less explicit connection with the current climate of austerity. See Christianity Uncut, Ekklesia and Symon Hill. The work of the Jubilee Debt Campaign predates this year’s events, although their site did draw attention to the connection.

The Church of England and theatre censorship

I was delighted yesterday to find on my doormat Studies in Church History 48 (2012), in which there is my own article on the archbishops of Canterbury and theatre censorship between 1909-49. It is available direct from Boydell and Brewer or from the Ecclesiastical History Society, or at an academic library near you. It will not be available on Open Access for a while yet, but for now, here is an edited extract which gives a flavour of the whole.

[from the Introduction]

“The position of the archbishop of Canterbury at the heart of the Establishment engendered requests to be patron, advocate or opponent of almost every conceivable development in national life. One such entanglement was his role as unofficial advisor to the Lord Chamberlain in the matter of the licensing of stage plays.  According to the report of the 1909 Joint Select Committee on the system, the Lord Chamberlain was able to refuse to a licence to any play that was likely ‘to do violence to the sentiment of religious reverence’, to be indecent, or ‘to be calculated to conduce to crime or vice’. It was on matters such as these that from time to time the Lord Chamberlain’s office would consult the archbishop.

“Despite the apparent oddity of a senior churchman being asked to adjudicate on artistic matters such as this, the matter has hitherto received little attention from religious historians to match that given to the censorship of the cinema and to the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960. It receives scant attention also from successive archiepiscopal biographers, due perhaps to its apparently epiphenomenal nature. The role of the archbishops is treated in passing in general accounts of the censorship, but by its very nature this scholarship has not treated the theme directly.

“Taking as its period the forty years from the Joint Select Committee report in 1909 to the unsuccessful attempt in Parliament to reform the system in 1949, this article details the curious unofficial position of the archbishops within the system of censorship. The various grounds on which Archbishops Randall Davidson (1903–28) and Cosmo Gordon Lang (1928–42) in particular offered their advice to the Lord Chamberlain are then examined. The article thus provides a case study of the singular and often anomalous position of the archbishop at the heart of the Establishment in Britain, and the extent to which the secular and ecclesiastical powers combined in the regulation of the life of the nation, both moral and aesthetic. In addition, it examines a unique nodal point in the interaction between the Church and the arts.

[from the Conclusion]

“In 1940 Colin Gordon of the Lord Chamberlain’s office solicited Lang’s opinion on the play Family Portrait by the American playwrights Lenore and William Joyce Cowen. A.C. Don, Lang’s chaplain, accepted the ‘obvious reverence and restraint’ of the script but raised some fundamental concerns. The first issue was the portrayal of the brothers and sisters of Christ, the very non-existence of whom was a matter of some importance to Roman Catholics and to some within the Church of England. The second was the downplaying of the incarnation to the extent that Christ appeared as solely an ethical teacher, although a great one. Don concluded that the play ought not to be licensed in the usual way.

“Here was the archbishop’s representative advising in accustomed fashion. When called upon, Davidson and Lang had advised on the licensing of plays on a number of different grounds: the likelihood of incitement to vice; of gratuitous offence to religious people; and, more controversially, of theological or artistic defect. They helped shape the formulation of guiding principles, and advised in cases where there was doubt.

“It is, however, an indication of the degree to which the situation had changed by 1940 that Family Portrait had in fact already been licensed the previous year, without reference to Lambeth at all; and the exchange was one of the last of its kind. After a peak in the 1920s and early 1930s, there had been a marked decline in the number of plays referred to Lambeth. Lang’s successors William Temple (1942–44) and Geoffrey Fisher were seldom consulted, although Fisher was kept informed of major changes in policy, such as the relaxation of restrictions on the portrayal of homosexuality in 1958. One of Fisher’s few interventions was to reinforce the longstanding ban on the representation of God in The Green Pastures in 1951, a decision reinforced by Michael Ramsey ten years later. So it was that the single stipulation relating to the impersonation of the persons of the Trinity was by 1949 the only remaining matter on which the archbishops advised the Lord Chamberlain.

“I hope elsewhere to continue the story beyond 1949, and to treat of the attitude of Anglicans to the final abolition of theatre censorship in 1968. Anglican support for abolition was in part fostered by the manifest anachronism of the remaining rule and its stultifying effect on religious drama within the Church. That aside, the operation of the system to 1949 is demonstrative of some governing assumptions concerning the joint operation of church and state in the regulation of morals; of understandings of the appropriate modes of representing the national faith; and of some of the tensions in the relationship between the church and the arts.

Reforming the House of Lords: a review

I’ve been very pleased to see my review of a recent history of the movement to reform the House of Lords appear over at Reviews in History. If you were to read the whole thing, you would see that I thought the book, by Peter Dorey and Alexandra Kelso, at once interesting, useful and convincing.

There was one major omission: of any consideration of the position of the bishops in the Lords, save for a single paragraph. In the review, I wrote:

One surprising omission (for this reviewer) is any extended consideration of the position of the Lords Spiritual: that subset of the bishops of the Church of England who sat in the House as of right. Had this book appeared in 1981 or 1991, the neglect of the issue would have been of a piece with a general sense of the irrelevance of religious history more generally. However, the last few years have seen an upsurge in debate about the place of the religious in public life, including the House of Lords, which featured in debates preceding the 2010 election; and as such the issue probably merited more than the single paragraph that it receives here. It is perhaps an opportunity missed, as the development of the various arguments either in favour of or opposed to the presence of the Lords Spiritual mirror wider issues regarding the Lords in general. In the earlier part of the century, the bishops were viewed in much the same way as the hereditary peers: representatives of the immutable order of society; the establishment of the Church just as inevitable and right as the class system. Over time, and particularly in the 1960s, as the moral law was reformed in such a way as to emphasise the widening gap between state and church, the bishops’ own view of their position shifted, as did that of those observing them. Mirroring the advent of the life peers, the bishops became, as it were, Life Peers Spiritual: in the House not simply, or even mostly, by virtue of their historic office but also now on grounds of religious expertise. The bishops came to view themselves as representing a religious mode of viewing public affairs; and it is striking that there has been no consistent pressure from either the other Christian denominations or from other faith groups for parallel representation. Whilst a number of non-Anglican Christian leaders did become life peers, Donald Soper (Methodist, 1965) and George Macleod (Church of Scotland, 1967) among them (both Wilson nominees, and both reputed to be on the left), the bishops came to be seen in their standing role as defenders of all faiths, rather than simply of the Church of England alone.

Since reading the book, and writing the review, it has become yet more clear to me that the influence of the bishops in Parliament, and public perceptions of their role, have been rather neglected by scholars so far; both ecclesiastical historians and scholars of parliament and politics. One can glean a certain amount from the many and various biographies of the bishops, but little on the wider issues involved.

I’ve just begun to gather some material together on the bishops in the Lords in the mid-to-late 1960s, and on the involvement of the Church in shaping the abortive 1969 Parliament (No. 2) Bill. Some of this material is likely to feature in my forthcoming book on Michael Ramsey; but I have a hunch that there is a separate article to be written as well.