John Nurser reviews The Religious Crisis of the 1960s by Hugh McLeod Oxford University Press (2007).282 pages. Hbk.
ISBN: 978019-9298259. £45.
A principal thread of Hugh McLeod’s career in the University of Birmingham has been the history of Christendom and its secularisation (principally in Western Europe and North America) since the mid 19th century. By ‘Christendom’ he understands ‘a social order in which, regardless of individual belief, Christian language, rites, moral teachings and personnel were part of the taken-for-granted environment’. That is now dead (at least in that definition), and the convulsions of the 1960s signified its passing.
It was a ‘religious crisis’, in the sense that Reinhold Niebuhr chose to call the newsletter he launched in 1941, Christianity and Crisis, in order to highlight the epochal challenge to Christian faith with which Hitler and Stalin had confronted the western democracies and their institutional churches in a way that ‘Christendom’ was no longer helpful in answering. World War II ended in a ‘global order’ that Hiroshima (and universal human rights) had heralded. The crisis of the 1960s was largely within Christianity but it erupted – astonishingly – within a handful of years in every part of this globalised scene.
Baptism into national identity of the traditional European kind had become intensely inflammatory. It was an affront to ‘personal authenticity’. It precluded the blossoming (and savouring) of other ways of living-out religious (and following Bonhoeffer ‘religionless’) faith commitments. The WCC’s ‘Church and Society’ conference at Geneva in 1966 marked the ‘radical Christian’ multi-cultural elite grabbing the microphone.
At the same moment the bishops of the Catholic church were back home from Vatican II to apply their manuals of renovatio. Eventually the fever of the 1960s subsided, and wan convalescents had to face the oil crisis of 1973 with – in Britain – only an Austin Allegro to comfort them.
An outsider can perhaps comment that Pope Benedict XVI and the ‘Sea of Faith’ are only explicable from that decade. The point at issue was and is important. Were the 1960s more like the 16th century ‘reformations’ within Christian self-understanding or the life and death conflicts within Judaism (and among Gentile congregations) in the 1st century over Jesus of Nazareth?
Who had he been? What was his relation to the God of Moses (whose image, it was widely proclaimed in the 1960s, ‘had to go’ and who might even be ‘dead’)? It is too early to say. If the latter comparison is nearer the truth, then our continued struggling to grow corn from the seeds of our tradition away from home makes sense.
The title of ‘Christian’ remains a vigorously claimed (and contested) identity, and Christopher Evans’s Is Holy Scripture Christian? (1972) remains required reading.
To someone who lived through 1955 to 1972, McLeod’s narrative and analysis ring true. The ‘long 60s’, began with Suez and ended with Vietnam. The Cold War was at its most immediately dangerous. In millions of homes, the intimate conventions of how old and young, male and female, teachers and taught, behave to each other were stretched and snapped. Yet we’d ‘never had it so good’. Television, a washing machine, and a family car became normal. Sunday worship was ill-equipped to fight off this competition for a weekly time-slot. The strength of McLeod’s history is first, that it uses the oral-history experiences of ordinary people, in a variety of national cultures, who lived through these years, and second (and perhaps for the first time among those who have engaged with this decade), that it takes seriously the complexity of the changes that came and the significance of their sequencing and social contexts.
What is often forgotten is how positive was the ‘adult education’ interest in Christianity among the population at large in those years. McLeod argues that until 1967 it would be more accurate to speak of an eager ‘religious ferment’, which only became ‘crisis’ in the succeeding five years. The congregational scene was often not of a mind to receive this ‘new wine’; and in truth new wineskins are still hard to find. McLeod puts great weight on Vietnam. My hunch would be – at least in England – to major on 1950s apartheid. If whites in South Africa were getting more ideologically fascist, and US America was so painfully slow in enforcing colourblindness, then it became a kind of litmus test of Christian discipleship in Britain to prove we could do better. My first experience of the 1960s was at Wells Theological College in 1958. The lady from Church House who came annually to whisk us through teaching Sunday School was flummoxed entirely when one of us refused to consider ‘duty’, but only ‘love’.
I hope this book will soon be published in paperback and read widely. It is the 1960s that locate us all.
John Nurser is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex and Canon Emeritus of Lincoln Cathedral.