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Inspiration and Institution in 1960s Anglican Radicalism: The Cases of Nick Stacey and John Robinson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
Abstract
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 institutional loyalties that went deep inside themselves. In the mid-1960s, Anglican radicals attempted to resolve these tensions by campaigning to transform the Church of England. By the early 1970s, however, the failure of these attempts had led to the movement's disintegration, leaving individuals to address the emotional tensions between inspiration and institution in their own particular ways. Thus Anglican radicals failed to evade the central paradox of their movement, namely that their brief moment of prominence in the early 1960s owed much to the prestige of the institution they were critiquing so influentially.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 57: INSPIRATION AND INSTITUTION IN CHRISTIAN HISTORY , June 2021 , pp. 318 - 340
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society
References
1 The most common contemporary term was ‘Christian radicals’: this article uses ‘Anglican radicals’ to denote Christian radicals in the Church of England. For more on definition, see Brewitt-Taylor, Sam, Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970: The Hope of a World Transformed (Oxford, 2018), 32–6Google Scholar. For other recent treatments, see McLeod, Hugh, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), 83–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robbins, Keith, ‘Contextualizing a “New Reformation”: John A. T. Robinson and the Church of England in the Early Sixties’, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 23 (2010), 428–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Kirby, Dianne, ‘Ecclesiastical McCarthyism: Cold War Repression in the Church of England’, Contemporary British History 19 (2005), 187–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grimley, Matthew, ‘Law, Morality and Secularization: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, JEH 60 (2009), 725–41Google Scholar, at 726; Brown, Callum G., The Battle for Christian Britain: Sex, Humanists, and Secularization, 1945–1980 (Cambridge, 2019), 116–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 129–223.
4 Brewitt-Taylor, Sam, ‘The Invention of a “Secular Society”? Christianity and the Sudden Appearance of Secularization Discourses in the British National Media, 1961–4’, Twentieth Century British History 24 (2013), 327–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For humanists, see Brown, Battle for Christian Britain, 216–55.
5 This article consistently uses ‘Anglican’ as a shorthand for ‘of the Church of England’. A central contention of Anglican radicalism was that people could be Christian and secular at the same time: see Robinson, John, Honest to God (London, 1963), 8Google Scholar. For these two rival visions of modernity, see further Brewitt-Taylor, Sam, ‘“Christian Civilization”, “Modern Secularization”, and the Revolutionary Re-Imagination of British Modernity, 1954–1965’, Contemporary British History 34 (2020), 603–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 224–9.
7 Brewitt-Taylor, ‘Invention of a “Secular Society”?’, 340–6. The term ‘secular revolution’ was coined in Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, 2012), 252. Simon Green is incorrect to argue that the bond between faith and people ‘finally broke … sometime in the 1950s’; 93% of Britons still defined themselves as Christians in 1963, and the Cold War strengthened the association between Christianity and British national identity throughout the 1950s: Field, Clive, Britain's Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s (Basingstoke, 2015), 19Google Scholar, table 2.2; pace Simon Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularization and Social Change, c.1920–1960 (Cambridge, 2011), 87.
8 Nicolas Stacey, Who Cares (London, 1971), 81. See, for example, ‘Anglicans: South Bank Religion’, Time, 26 July 1963, 42.
9 Don Brand, Nick Stacey and Kent Social Services: A Study in Leadership (Faversham, 2008), 12, 14.
10 London, LPL, MS 4370, Robinson correspondence and papers, fol. 32, Nicolas Stacey to Eric James, 1 November 1985.
11 For this context, see McLeod, Religious Crisis.
12 Notable exceptions include E. R. Wickham, Sheffield Diocesan Missioner to Industry 1944–59, and Eric James, Director of Parish and People 1964–9.
13 Eric James, A Life of Bishop John A. T. Robinson: Scholar, Pastor, Prophet (London, 1987), 7.
14 Ibid. 3.
15 Ibid. 11.
16 Ibid. 4.
17 Eric James, ‘Robinson, John Arthur Thomas (1919–1983)’, ODNB, online edn (2011), at: <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31619>, accessed 21 December 2020.
18 James, Life of Robinson, 17–18, 30–1.
19 Ibid. 58.
20 Ibid. 59–67.
21 Stacey, Who Cares, 7–8.
22 Ibid. 19.
23 Ibid. 37.
24 Ibid. 47.
25 Ibid. 60.
26 Ibid. 35; James, Life of Robinson, 36–7.
27 Ibid. 14.
28 Stacey, Who Cares, 17.
29 Ibid. 23–4, 156; personal recollection of interview with Nick Stacey, 6 July 2011.
30 Secular theology is the belief that God wishes all Christian beliefs and institutions to be reorientated towards the goal of improving ‘the secular world’, that is, human society.
31 For 1946, see John Robinson, ‘The Social Content of Salvation’, in idem, On Being the Church in the World (Harmondsworth, 1969; first publ. 1960), 20–38; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. R. H. Fuller (London, 1953).
32 James, Life of Robinson, 111.
33 John Robinson, ‘Dons and Parishes’, Church Times, 7 December 1962, 14.
34 Stacey, Who Cares, 74.
35 James, Life of Robinson, 111.
36 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 143.
37 Stacey, Who Cares, 61.
38 Ibid. 57–9.
39 Ibid. 61.
40 Nicolas Stacey, ‘The Church Must be Given a New Look’, Birmingham Post, 22 February 1960.
41 Robinson also drew on Bultmann and Tillich, but Bonhoeffer was the guiding influence, as Robinson's Observer article makes clear: ‘Our Image of God Must Go’, The Observer, 17 March 1963, 21.
42 For this context, see Sam Brewitt-Taylor, ‘Notes Toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization’, JBS, forthcoming.
43 Robinson, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’; cf. idem, ‘The Debate Continues’, in David Edwards, ed., The Honest to God Debate (London, 1963), 232–75, at 248. Robinson's gendered language is retained here from the original.
44 For the eschatological dimension, see Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 46–9.
45 See the reviews collected in Edwards, ed., Honest to God Debate, 82–186.
46 Robinson, Honest to God, 7.
47 Ibid. 135.
48 Ibid. 18, 85, 106; Robinson, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’.
49 Kirby, ‘Ecclesiastical McCarthyism’, 188. For a wider assessment of the political influence of the 1950s Church of England, see Matthew Grimley and Philip Williamson, ‘Introduction: The Church of England, the British State and British Politics during the Twentieth Century’, in Tom Rodger, Philip Williamson and Matthew Grimley, eds, The Church of England and British Politics since 1900 (Woodbridge, 2020), 1–35, at 30–1.
50 Mark Roodhouse, ‘Lady Chatterley and the Monk: Anglican Radicals and the Lady Chatterley Trial of 1960’, JEH 59 (2008), 475–500, at 490, 492.
51 Robin Gill, Society shaped by Theology (Farnham, 2013), 49.
52 Green, Passing of Protestant England, 291; James, ‘Robinson, John Arthur Thomas’.
53 Gill, Society shaped by Theology, 49; Robinson, Honest to God, 7, 10.
54 John Robinson, The New Reformation? (London, 1965), front cover.
55 LPL, Ramsey papers, vol. 50, fol. 137, Ramsey to all English diocesan bishops, 26 April 1963 (on Honest to God), cited in Peter Webster, Archbishop Ramsey: The Shape of the Church (Farnham, 2015), 158.
56 Stacey, Who Cares, 85.
57 ‘Church to have Coffee Bar and Creche’, Kentish Independent, 29 July 1960.
58 Stacey, Who Cares, 71–3, 77–8.
59 Robinson, ‘Our Image of God Must Go’.
60 Summary of Robinson's arguments on the back cover of Robinson, New Reformation?
61 Ibid. 98.
62 Ibid. 99.
63 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 149.
64 ‘Local Enterprise’, New Christian no. 35 (26 January 1967), 3.
65 Nicolas Stacey, ‘A Mission's Failure: The Story of One Church in Pagan Britain’, Observer Colour Magazine, 6 December 1964, 30–40.
66 Ibid. 33.
67 Nicolas Stacey, ‘How the Church could Survive’, The Observer, 23 May 1965, 21.
68 Ibid.
69 Stacey, Who Cares, 239.
70 Ibid. 261–2.
71 Ibid. 262.
72 ‘Switched-On Church opens Discothèque in Crypt’, The Times, 24 January 1967, 10; Stacey, Who Cares, 268–72, 275.
73 ‘Discothèque in Crypt’, The Times, 24 January 1967, 10.
74 Nicholas Stacey, ‘Transforming the Church’, The Times, 10 February 1967, 10; italics original.
75 Robinson, ‘And What Next?’, Prism 101 (September 1965), 9–17, at 17, 15.
76 LPL, MS 4357, Robinson correspondence and papers, fols 43–4, John Robinson to Michael Ramsey, 23 February 1966.
77 John Robinson, Christian Freedom in a Permissive Society (London, 1970), 150.
78 Ibid. 238.
79 Cited in James, Life of Robinson, 139–44.
80 Ibid. 140–1.
81 Quoted ibid. 145.
82 Ibid. 153.
83 Quoted Ibid. 154.
84 Ibid.
85 Stacey, Who Cares, 282.
86 Nicolas Stacey, ‘The End of Honest-to-God’, Sunday Times, 28 September 1969, 12.
87 Malcolm Torry, Mediating Institutions: Creating Relationships between Religion and an Urban World (London, 2016), 126.
88 Stacey, Who Cares, 283–5.
89 Ibid. 294–6.
90 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 225–6.
91 McLeod, Religious Crisis, 194.
92 Andrew Atherstone, ‘The Keele Congress of 1967: A Paradigm Shift in Anglican Evangelical Attitudes’, Journal of Anglican Studies 9 (2011), 175–97, at 188.
93 Stacey, Who Cares, 283.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. 303, 299.
96 Brand, Stacey and Kent Social Services, 14.
97 Ibid. 12, 14.
98 London, BL, Sound Archive Transcript, ‘National Life Stories: Nicolas Stacey’, 92, online at <https://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/TRANSCRIPTS/021T-C1155X0007XX-0000A1.pdf>, accessed 13 January 2020.
99 Tim Wyatt, ‘Archive Interview with Pioneering Priest and Social Worker sheds Light on Kendall House Abuse’, Church Times, 14 July 2017, online at: <https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/14-july/news/uk/archive-interview-sheds-light-on-abuse>, accessed 13 January 2020.
100 Brand, Stacey and Kent Social Services, 59–60.
101 Ibid., inside front cover.
102 Nicolas Stacey, ‘Church Leadership in a Time of Change’, The Times, 28 September 2012, 35.
103 As his biographer unmistakably implies: James, Life of Robinson, 190–1.
104 Ibid. 191.
105 Ibid. 195.
106 Ibid. 227.
107 Green, Passing of Protestant England, 291.
108 For Robinson's academic reputation, see James, Life of Robinson, 242–3.
109 Ibid. 233–4.
110 Ibid. 234–5.
111 Ibid. 242, 316.
112 John Robinson, ‘The Roots of a Radical’, in idem, The Roots of a Radical (London, 1980), 10–58, at 10.
113 James, Life of Robinson, 254.
114 Ibid. 314, 319.
115 Brewitt-Taylor, ‘Invention of a “Secular Society”?’, 340–6.
116 Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 26. For humanist voices, see Brown, Battle for Christian Britain.
117 For a fuller discussion, see ibid. 226–7.
118 See Mervyn Stockwood, ‘South Bank Religion: What I'm trying to do’, in idem, Bishop's Journal (London, 1964), 65–8.
119 This argument is developed in Brewitt-Taylor, Christian Radicalism, 81–104.
120 Despite earlier usages and meanings of the term ‘secularization’, Jan Bremmer has argued, ‘the rise of the term in the English world is clearly related to the theological debates of the early 1960s’: Jan Bremmer, ‘Secularization: Notes towards a Genealogy’, in Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008), 432–7, at 436.
121 For the dominance of the secularization paradigm in late twentieth-century scholarship, see Clark, J. C. D., ‘Secularization and Modernization: The Failure of a “Grand Narrative”’, HistJ 55 (2012), 161–94Google Scholar, at 161–2.