Christian Modernities in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century

John Carter Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032413945
• eBook ISBN: 9781000822373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The dramatic social, cultural, and political changes in the twentieth century posed challenges and opportunities to Christian believers in Britain and Ireland: many, whether in the churches or among the laity, sought to adapt their faith to what was seen as a new, "modern" world fundamentally different than the one in which Christianity had risen to a position of institutional and cultural dominance. Alongside the more long-term processes of industrialisation, urbanisation, and democratisation, the formative experiences of war and post-war reconstruction, confrontations with totalitarianism, changing relations between the sexes, and engagements with an increasingly assertive "secular" culture inspired many Christians not only to reconsider their faith but also to try to influence the emerging modernity.

The chapters in this volume address various specific topics – from mass politics to sexuality – but are linked by a stress on how Christians played active roles in building "modern" life in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. Tensions and ambiguities between "religious" and "secular" and between "modern" and "traditional" make understanding Christian encounters with modernity a valuable topic in the exploration of the complexities of twentieth-century cultural and intellectual history.

This book will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of history including modern British history, religion, and the intersectionality of gender and religion.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Christian modernities in Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century
• 1 Religion and the rise of mass democracy in Britain
• 2 Reframing the ‘laws of life’: catholic doctors, natural law and the evolution of catholic sexology in interwar Britain
• 3 ‘The Relation of the Sexes’: towards a Christian view of sex and citizenship in interwar Britain
• 4 Going ‘part of the way together’: Christian intellectuals, modernity and the secular in 1930s and 1940s Britain
• 5 ‘Christian civilisation’, ‘modern secularisation’, and the revolutionary re-imagination of British modernity, 1954-1965
• 6 Clerical modernisers and the media in Ireland: the journalism of Fr Gerry Reynolds
• Index