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Western Religion in the Long 1960s

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Comment notre monde a cessé d'être chrétien. By GuillaumeCuchet. Pp. 283 incl. 13 figs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2018. €21. 9782021021295.
Religion und Lebensführung im Umbruch der langen 1960er Jahre. Edited by ClaudiaLepp, HarryOelke and DetlefPollack. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. Pp. 370 incl. 13 figs. €80. 9783525557792.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2019

HUGH MCLEOD
HUGH MCLEOD*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham; e-mail: d.h.mcleod@bham.ac.uk
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Extract

The Yale church historian, Sydney Ahlstrom, had just emerged somewhat dazed from the Sixties when he reviewed the religious trajectory of the United States during that decade. He wrote that by 1966 it was clear that ‘the post-war religious revival had completely frittered out, that the nation was moving towards a crise de la conscience of unprecedented depth’. As well as a ‘growing attachment to naturalism and “secularism”’ he mentioned ‘a creeping or galloping awareness of vast contradictions in American life between profession and performance, the ideal and the actual’ and ‘increasing doubt concerning the capacity of present-day ecclesiastical, political, social and educational institutions to rectify these contradictions’. As Ahlstrom made clear in a later essay, he saw the crisis faced both by the Roman Catholic Church and by the ‘mainline’ Protestant Churches as part of a wider loss of ‘confidence or hope’ in American society and a passing away of ‘the certitudes that had always shaped the nation's well-being and sense of destiny’.

Type
Review Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 70 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 823 - 831
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Ahlstrom, S., ‘The radical turn in theology and ethics: why it occurred in the 1960s’, Annals of the American Academy of Political Science ccclxxxvii (1970), 2–3, 7–8Google Scholar.

2 Idem, ‘National trauma and changing religious values’, Daedalus cvii (1978), 13–29Google Scholar.

3 Ibid. 19.

4 Gilbert, A. D., The making of post-Christian Britain, London 1980Google Scholar; McLeod, H., Religion and the people of Western Europe, 1789–1970, Oxford 1981Google Scholar; Hastings, A., A history of English Christianity, 1920-1985, London 1986Google Scholar; Cholvy, G. and Hilaire, Y.-M., Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 1930–1988, Toulouse 1988Google Scholar.

5 Hilliard, D., ‘The religious crisis of the 1960s: the experience of the Australian Churches’, Journal of Religious History xxi (1997), 209–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Brown, C. G., The death of Christian Britain, London 2001Google Scholar; a second edition, in which Brown replied to his critics, was published in 2009.

7 Hilliard, ‘Crisis’, 227. For my own answers see McLeod, H., The religious crisis of the 1960s, Oxford 2007CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Brown, C. G., ‘The secularisation decade: what the 1960s have done to the study of religious history’, in McLeod, H. and Ustorf, W. (eds), The decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, Cambridge 2003, 29–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Brown, The death of Christian Britain, 9.

10 Ibid. 175–80.

11 Ibid. 192.

12 Ibid. 190–1.

13 Blaschke, O. (ed.), Konfessionen im Konflikt: Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter, Göttingen 2002, 9Google Scholar; Pasture, P., ‘Christendom and the legacy of the Sixties: between the secular city and the age of Aquarius’, Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique ic (2004), 82–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rooden, P. van, ‘The strange death of Dutch Christendom’, in Brown, C. G. and Snape, M. (eds), Secularisation in the Christian world, Farnham 2010, 175–95Google Scholar.

14 He did, however, have the support of Pasture: ‘Christendom’, 86, 114–15; L. W. Tentler agrees on the centrality of sex and gender but her argument is essentially different: ‘Sex and subculture: American Catholicism since 1945’, in Christie, N. and Gauvreau, M. (eds), The Sixties and beyond: deChristianisation in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, Toronto 2013, 157–85Google Scholar.

15 Garnett, J., Grimley, M., Harris, A., Whyte, W. and Williams, S. (eds), Redefining Christian Britain: post-1945 perspectives, London 2006, 290Google Scholar. Their emphasis on the continuing vitality of ‘Christian Britain', albeit mainly after 1980, is shared by the contributors to Goodhew, D. (ed.), Church growth in Britain: 1980 to the present, Farnham 2012Google Scholar, and to Goodhew, D. and Cooper, A.-P. (eds), The desecularisation of the city: London's Churches, 1980 to the present, Abingdon 2019Google Scholar.

16 Green, S. J. D., The passing of Protestant England: secularisation and social change, Cambridge 2011Google Scholar; Field, C., Secularization in the long 1960s, Oxford 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brewitt-Taylor, S., Christian radicalism in the Church of England and the invention of the British Sixties: the hope of a world transformed, Oxford 2018Google Scholar.

17 See especially Field, C., Britain's last religious revival? Quantifying belonging, behaving and believing in the long 1950s, Basingstoke 2015Google Scholar.

18 For example, Ormières, J.-L., L'Europe désenchantèe: la fin de l'Europe chrétienne: France, Belgique, Espagne, Italie, Portugal, Paris 2005, 7–16Google Scholar, and Sykes, R., ‘Popular religion in decline: a study from the Black Country’, this Journal lvi (2002), 287–307Google Scholar. See also Tenfelde, K. (ed.), Religiöse Sozialisationen im 20. Jahrhundert, Essen 2010Google Scholar.

19 Brown, C. G., Religion and the demographic revolution: women and secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s, Woodbridge 2012Google Scholar, and Becoming atheist, London 2016Google Scholar.

20 For example, Ormières, L'Europe, and Grossbölting, T., Der verlorene Himmel: Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945, Göttingen 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Fuller, L., ‘Catholicism in twentieth-century Ireland: from “an atmosphere steeped in the faith” to à la carte Catholicism’, Journal of Religion in Europe v (2012), 484–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For example, Putnam, R. D. and Campbell, D. E., American grace: how religion divides and unites us, New York 2010Google Scholar.

23 For example, Dochuk, D., From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: plain folk religion, grassroots politics and the rise of Evangelical conservatism, New York 2011Google Scholar.

24 For example, Hartman, A., A war for the soul of America: a history of the culture wars, Chicago 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Schulman, B. J. and Zelizer, J. E. (eds), Rightward bound: making America conservative in the 1970s, Cambridge, Ma 2008Google Scholar. See also McLeod, H., ‘“Religious America, secular Europe”: are they really so different?’, in Hempton, D. and McLeod, H. (eds), Secularization and religious innovation in the North Atlantic world, Oxford 2017, 345–8Google Scholar.

26 For example, Hermle, S., Lepp, C. and Oelke, H. (eds), Umbrüche: der deutsche Protestantismus und die sozialen Bewegungen in den 1960er und 70er Jahren, Göttingen 2007Google Scholar.

27 Brown, The death of Christian Britain, 11–14, and Brewitt-Taylor, Radicalism, 5–17, both start with an exposition of the author's approach to historical explanation and a critique of other more familiar approaches.

28 Beaumont, J. and Cloke, P. (eds), Faith-based organisations and exclusion in European cities, Bristol 2012CrossRefGoogle Scholar.