Joseph Forde’s Before and Beyond the “Big Society” is a book that contains two books. On the one hand, it is a normative political critique of the British Conservative government’s “Big Society” project of c. 2010–2013, and of what Forde sees as the Church of England’s overly enthusiastic reception of it. Forde concludes his volume with an eight-point manifesto that urges the Church of England to “return to a position of defending the Temple Welfare Statist legacy” (244). On the other hand, this book offers a historical critique of the political thought of the noted Anglo-Catholic theologian John Milbank. Forde wishes to show that Milbank’s critique of modern welfarism misunderstands the relationship between modernity, capitalism, and the Reformation, and that, therefore, his support for the “Big Society” is intellectually flawed. The glue holding these two discussions together is Milbank’s impact on early 21st century Anglican views of welfare, which Forde assures us is “considerable”, and partially responsible for an ideological “paradigm shift” in the Church of England’s thinking on welfare (1–2). Thus Forde aims to use the history of ideas to make a contribution to political theology (4).

This is a wide-ranging book. Forde discusses typologies for understanding the social thought of mid-20th-century Anglican socialists; the history and politics of 20th-century British welfare policy; John Milbank’s historical theology; Western historiography from 1935 onwards as it relates to the relationship between the Reformation and “the rise of capitalism”; the Church of England’s response to the Big Society project in 2010; and the Church of England’s proper welfare policies in the future. Inevitably, however, the broadness of this discussion places limits on its analytical depth and forces the author to lean heavily on secondary material. By historians’ standards, the primary foundations for the book’s discussion of 2010 are thin. Forde focuses on an advisory document about the “Big Society” debated by the General Synod in November 2010, contextualizing it with contemporary newspaper articles. He has also interviewed Rev. Malcolm Brown, the document’s author, and read quite a lot of Milbank.

It is at this point that interpretative difficulties set in, because Brown and Forde want to tell different stories. In Brown’s version, Anglican leaders had not become disciples of Milbank, but were rather acting from the short-term tactical motive of dispelling the impression that they were Labour partisans who hated the Conservative party (241). On Brown’s telling, therefore, Anglican support of “the Big Society” did not amount to an ideological paradigm-shift, was always conditional on “the Big Society” not being “an alibi for cuts”, and was indeed withdrawn by 2013 for that reason (192, 212, 220). Whilst Brown’s version might be vulnerable to critiques of its own, Forde does not seem to recognize the tension between his reading of the events of 2010 and Brown’s, and therefore often simply talks over the top of him. Indeed, the real primary source of Forde’s interpretation of 2010 seems to be his own personal impressions at the time (1).

Considered as a work of history, the book has significant issues. Forde establishes a correlation between Milbank’s views and the actions of the Anglican leadership, but does not demonstrate direct causation. A sophisticated treatment of the Church of England’s handling of the “Big Society” project would distinguish between the responses of its different elements, including General Synod, Archbishop Williams, Archbishop Sentamu, other bishops, the Church Commissioners, and the Mission and Public Affairs division, not to mention the opinions of “congregants in the pews”, for which Forde suggests there is “no historical record” (4), although some oral history might easily have rectified this. Such an approach would be able to reconstruct how these various elements possessed subtly different motivations and came to different positions. Forde, by contrast, frequently defaults to taking General Synod as representative of the Church of England as a whole. More broadly, the general level of historical discussion of events before 2000 is that of an able graduate who has read widely but not deeply. To take some examples at random, Forde insists on Chartism being a class movement whilst apparently unaware of the famous debates about the languages of class that arose from that question. He makes criticisms of Weber that Weber parried in his most famous work. He judges Milbank to be an abuser of the historical method, but his own views on historiographical methodology are idiosyncratic: in a long footnote, he suggests that most historians today are heavily influenced by “positivist thinking”, including self-confessedly post-modernist historians; that positivist and empiricist historical methods are essentially the same; and that the first major positivist historian was a nineteenth-century German called “L. Rank” (238n).

This reviewer is not a theologian, but a couple of outsider’s observations about the theological aspects of the book seem called for. The first is the striking absence of references to God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, or any Christian teaching older than 1500, with the exception of the controversial reading of Matthew xxv offered on the first page. Forde states he is writing as a Christian, but it was not clear to this reviewer in what sense this book is political theology rather than simple political advocacy. Forde states that the intellectual authority for his normative conclusions arises from his historical analysis, but does not clarify what, if anything, is distinctively theological about his reading of history. The second is the narrowness of ecclesiological focus. Forde does not tell us whether he thinks his conclusions are relevant to other denominations, other nations, or even other branches of the Anglican Communion. Clarity on that question might clarify in what sense this book is a work of theology.

Before and Beyond the “Big Society” is a trenchant book that will provoke discussion amongst Anglicans interested in the Church of England’s social policy in the 2010s. The full history of the Church of England and the “Big Society”, however, remains to be written.