The Religious Crisis of the 1960s

by Hugh McLeod

The 1960s were a time of explosive religious change. In the Christian churches, it was a time of innovation, from the "new theology" and "new morality" of Bishop Robinson to the evangelicalism of the Charismatic Movement, and of charismatic leaders such as Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King. But it was also a time of rapid social and cultural change when Christianity faced challenges from Eastern religions, from Marxism and feminism, and above all from new "affluent" lifestyles. Hugh McLeod tells in detail, using oral history, how these movements and conflicts were experienced in England, but because the Sixties were an international phenomenon, he looks at other countries as well, especially the U.S. and France. McLeod explains what happened to religion in the 1960s, why it happened, and how the events of that decade shaped the rest of the 20th century.

Genres: History, Religion

302 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2007

About the author

Professor Hugh McLeod teaches in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a nuanced, empirically dense reconstruction of Christian decline and religious innovation across the "long 1960s," (engaging with the unobvious debate over when the 1960s really began and ended). This book has become a standard point of entry into the historiography of post‑war secularisation, engaging with the debate between sociologists and revisionist historians such as Callum Brown.

Mcleod positions himself between the sociological long‑run-secularism accounts and Callum Brown’s thesis of an abrupt 1960s rupture of "discursive Christianity". He endorses elements of Brown’s timing, which challenge the accounts that find the causes of secularism in industrialisation or rationalisation, but rejects Brown's single‑cause narrative too. McLeod astutely pinpoints the problem with both ends of this spectrum: he rejects single master-factor explanations, and, I think wisely, concludes that the religious crisis resulted from a conjunction of multiple long and short‑term factors (family change, marriage and relationships, student protest, affluence, legal secularisation, erosion of "Christian nation" identity, etc.)

This book is a consciously synthetic work. McLeod addresses Brown at the outset, but also analyses the arguments of sociologists like Bruce and Davie. Indeed he gives much thought to Grace Davie's "Believing without Belonging" thesis, and draws together a huge amount of data and a very impressive bibliography. It is a much needed contribution that accepts what Brown has demonstrated but moves beyond Brown, and engages carefully with the response to Brown from sociologists too.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Religious Crisis of the 1960s" gives a good overview of the rapid and radical changes that occurred during that decade. Hugh McLeod locates the roots for much of the changes in earlier periods, such as the gradual acceptance of contraceptives by Protestant denominations paving the way for the acceptance of the Pill, the secularization of Sunday as this became the day for family leisure, and the transformation of marriages from something more merely functional to "companionate." One interesting paradox is that the 1960s' ethos led to a greater emphasis on individual rights and a private sphere ("There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" - Pierre Elliott Trudeau) but that at the same time, previously taboo topics like sexuality were being brought into the public sphere thanks to the media and entertainment. This book is mostly focused on the U.K., with the United States being a secondary concern. Only the most cursory attention is given to other Western nations such as Canada, Australia and Germany, although the general tendencies and trajectories of the 1960s affected virtually all Western countries.

[Phelix Hua · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to like this way of writing history. Can the arrangement of fragmented materials and the weakening of the author's position as much as possible really avoid ontological obscuration?

War, the Cold War, youth subcultures, countercultures, gender issues, 1968, the post-68 era, Vatican II, each theme has a bunch of material to show, but only to be shown.

The conclusion is that there is no major factor that led to the religious crisis of the 60s, but the product of the accumulation of multiple factors. History is written like a machine

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid academic history of the changes in the religious cultures of Western Europe and the United States (with small nods to Canada and Australia) during the "long sixties," roughly 1958-1973. There's nothing exciting about McLeod's writing, but you can definitely trust him to have done all of the relevant reading related to his issues. (Which is to say it's a very English style of scholarship.) He's judicious in balancing competing arguments concerning the sixties as the outgrowth of long-term secularization and more immediate forces; and recognizes the equal importance of liberal, conservative and what he calls pragmatic approaches. He's most at home with the English dimensions of the story, setting John Robinson and Mary Whitehouse up as the representative figures, and working through the complex politics surrounding the liberalizing of laws on homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. When he turns to the U.S., he focuses almost entirely on white churches, which is a limitation, but he does a good job with the countercultural spiritualities, observing that in some surprising ways their legacies are visible within the non-denominational evangelical movements usually thought of as being conservative. There are some points where he digresses, as in a long (and as far as I could tell not particularly germane to his focus on the 60s) section on immigration and the impact of Hindu and Muslim communities on much more recent English society.

A good resource for anyone interested in the topic. Not a compelling read for non-specialists.