How the Network began

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12 July 2024
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At the heart of the Sea of Faith network is an open, uninhibited conversation. It’s how it all began. Early in 1984, Ronald Pearse, a Leicestershire priest, after reading Don Cupitt’s Taking Leave of God, wrote to him to say how his book articulated a theology and spirituality he had been moving towards over many years. Another Leicestershire priest had also written to Don Cupitt that year and Don put the two in touch with each other. The conversation had begun.

Later that same year, the BBC broadcast The Sea of Faith, a series of six programmes written and presented by Don Cupitt. Taking its title from Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach, the series explored the implications for faith of the work of thinkers such as Galileo, Neitzsche, Freud, Jung and Wittgenstein.

Meanwhile the little Leicestershire group was growing, more people were joining the conversation. More people were also writing to Don in response to the programmes. In July 1988, the Leicestershire group invited those who had written to Don to a conference in Loughborough. The first Sea of Faith conference was held. The conversation was growing.

After two conferences, the question was “What next?” and sixteen people from across the country met in Loughborough to decide future policy and strategy. The Sea of Faith was founded as a “network exploring and promoting religious faith as a human creation”. Now the conversation was growing through a magazine first published in 1990 and through local groups across the country modelled on the little Leicestershire group.

Since these early beginnings, the conversation has spread through the website, an on-line discussion group, local one-day conferences, publications and other networks in New Zealand and Australia.

There are now local groups in most parts of England, and one in Wales. Anyone can join a local group; you don’t have to join the Network, though we hope you will.

Click here to read this article from the spring 1990 edition of the Sea of Faith Magazine.

Don Cupitt’s influence

Since he began writing in 1971 Cupitt has produced 36 books and during this time his views have continued to evolve and change. Thus, in his early books such as Taking Leave of God and The Sea of Faith Cupitt talks of God alone as non-real but by the end of the Eighties he has moved into all-out postmodernism, describing his position as empty radical humanism – there is nothing but our language, our world, and the meanings, truths and interpretations that we have generated. Everything is non-real – including God.

While Cupitt was the founding influence of SoF and is much respected for his work for the network it would not be true to say that he is regarded as a guru or leader of SoF. Members are free to dissent from his views and Cupitt himself has argued strongly that SoF should never be a fan club. Both Cupitt and the network emphasise the importance of autonomous critical thought and reject authoritarianism in all forms.

Don Cupitt is an English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. Cupitt was born in Oldham and educated at Charterhouse, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Westcott House, Cambridge. He studied, successively, natural sciences, theology and the philosophy of religion.

In 1959 he was ordained deacon in the Church of England, becoming a priest in 1960. After short periods as a curate in the North of England, and as vice-principal of Westcott House, Cupitt was elected to a Fellowship and appointed dean at Emmanuel College, Cambridge late in 1965. Since then he has remained at the college.

In 1968 he was appointed to a university teaching post in philosophy of religion, a position in which he continued until his retirement for health reasons in 1996. At that time he proceeded to a life fellowship at Emmanuel College, which remains his base today.

In the early 1990s he stopped officiating at public worship and in 2008 he ceased to be a communicant member of the church. Although he has been a priest, he is better known as a writer, broadcaster and populariser of innovative theological ideas.

He has written 40 books—which have been translated into Dutch, Persian, Polish, Korean, Portuguese, Danish, German and Chinese—as well as chapters in more than 30 multi-authored volumes.

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