- CU
Christian Union
- IVF
Inter-Varsity Fellowship
- WSCF
World Student Christian Federation
From the 1890s until the early 1960s the ecumenical Student Christian Movement of Britain and Ireland (SCM) was Britain's largest student religious body, but in 1963 it deliberately shed its ‘religious’ identity in favour of an emphasis on serving ‘the secular world’.Footnote 1 By 1964 it understood this emphasis primarily to imply general political struggle for world peace and social justice, and in 1968 it issued a manifesto calling for a world-wide revolution to achieve these ends, which it adopted as official policy in 1969.Footnote 2 In 1973, with student membership down 90 per cent since 1963, it sold its London headquarters and relocated to a rural commune.Footnote 3 Largely as a result of these events, the initiative in student Christianity has passed decisively to the Evangelical Christian Unions, with a range of knock-on effects for British Christianity as a whole.Footnote 4
The conventional explanation for this remarkable transformation is that the SCM was simply mimicking wider student political activism.Footnote 5 This view assumes the dominance of secular factors in an apparently secular age; not coincidentally, it was pioneered by the secularisation theorist Steve Bruce.Footnote 6 Ronald Preston rejected Bruce's use of terminology, but he followed Bruce's central argument: the SCM was brought ‘near to collapse’ because it was ‘sensitive’ to ‘student criticism of structured activities’ between 1963 and 1966, and then became ‘caught up in the student troubles of 1969–70’.Footnote 7 For E. D. H. Carmichael and later Kenneth Boyd, the SCM's staff had simply abandoned authentically Christian theology.Footnote 8 The historiography of 1960s British student radicalism also assumes the irrelevance of theological factors, in its case by failing to explore religious groups at all.Footnote 9 On this view, the transformation of the SCM was defensive, reactive, and, outside the religious sphere, irrelevant.
The key to dismantling this approach is the realisation that in the early 1960s ‘secularisation’ was an idea drawn chiefly from theological sources, at a time when Christianity still had significant cultural influence.Footnote 10 Accordingly, when reflecting on the early 1960s, ‘secularisation’ should be understood as a cultural discourse, and not as an unavoidable reality.Footnote 11 This article applies that insight to the story of the SCM, arguing that its eager adaptation to ‘secularisation’ is not evidence of its abandonment of theology, but rather of its principled adherence to theologies of secularisation. SCM leaders understood secularisation to be God's will; consequently, they felt inescapably obliged to retranslate their Christianity into secular concepts, and to redirect their energies into the secular world. Yet when this process of secular retranslation was applied to Christian eschatology, especially to the inauguration of the ‘Kingdom of God’, the result was a forceful imperative for social and political transformation. The SCM ‘has involved itself deeply in some battles for social justice, for example in race relations’, observed a senior official in September 1965. ‘In a secular society, that is the secular meaning of the Gospel.’Footnote 12 There was nothing inevitable about this process of deliberate self-secularisation. It was officially adopted in 1963, when student Christianity was still robust.Footnote 13 It prompted the SCM's politicisation in September 1964, during a lull in British student activism, well before the inauguration of the Radical Student Alliance in 1966, the wave of university occupations from 1967, or the emergence of ‘student revolutionaries’ as a media trope in 1968–9.Footnote 14 In short, this article inverts conventional accounts of the SCM's transformation and collapse by arguing that it pursued an independent, early, and theologically-driven path to political radicalism.
This approach permits the ironic realisation that it was precisely the SCM's religious heritage which enabled it to be a significant presence within British student activism. Unlike many of its secular equivalents,Footnote 15 the movement began its foray into political radicalism as a genuinely national organisation, with over 7,000 members.Footnote 16 Whilst this figure shrank rapidly in the years that followed (only 450 students applied for the SCM's 1973 Huddersfield conference, for example),Footnote 17 it withstands comparison with better-known secular groups such as the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, which in 1968 had respective estimated memberships of 500 and forty.Footnote 18 The SCM's religious heritage also conferred financial advantages; throughout the 1960s it enjoyed substantial income from investments made by its Trust Association, and from the theology-publishing SCM Press.Footnote 19 The sale of its London headquarters in 1973 raised enough money to buy a Tudor manor house, thus inaugurating one of the most ambitious British community-living experiments of the 1970s,Footnote 20 and the movement financed other groups: a 1972 loan, for example, enabled the London-based revolutionary propaganda service Agit-Prop to relocate to larger premises.Footnote 21 The SCM's religious past also bequeathed a heritage of organising major student events, enabling it to play an important networking role. In 1968 the government estimated that there were about a thousand revolutionary students in Britain,Footnote 22 and in 1969 the Revolutionary Socialists Student Federation, a hastily improvised umbrella body, had a membership list of 1,100.Footnote 23 Yet the SCM's 1969 Manchester congress hosted 1,500 students, including radical Christians, Communists, Young Liberals and anti-apartheid campaigners,Footnote 24 who reportedly responded with ‘torrents of adulation’ whenever the word ‘revolution’ was uttered from the platform.Footnote 25 By Christmas 1969 one could read in Tariq Ali's revolutionary newspaper Black Dwarf that Christianity was originally a ‘revolutionary ideology’; the relevant front cover depicted Christ wearing a halo and carrying a rifle.Footnote 26 Yet present-day histories of British student protest largely fail to explore the role of Christianity, despite the fact that the religious aspects of 1960s student activism were commented upon at the time, not least by the LSE sociologist David Martin.Footnote 27 This silence is part of a wider reticence about the role of religion in twentieth-century British social history.Footnote 28
This article seeks to help alleviate that problem by exploring the rise, development and impacts of theologies of secularisation in the collective imagination of the British SCM between 1963 and 1973. Such theologies were important agents in the very religious decline that they sought to describe. By shaping the imagined context against which SCM leaders planned their actions, they also had significant political consequences.
I
At the dawn of the sixties, British Christianity was still relatively self-confident,Footnote 29 despite the gentle decline of observance since the mid-1950s.Footnote 30 Early 1960s studies estimated nationwide church attendance at 15 per cent every week, rising to 25 per cent once a month.Footnote 31 Student attendance was significantly greater.Footnote 32 According to surveys taken between 1959 and 1961, more than 40 per cent of students at Liverpool, Edinburgh and Cambridge claimed to attend church ‘weekly’ or ‘frequently’.Footnote 33 At Oxford 28 per cent of respondents claimed to go weekly, and another 22 per cent monthly; 46 per cent claimed ‘regular’ attendance at Sheffield.Footnote 34 In 1962 nearly a quarter of Nottingham students reported weekly observance, as did 40 per cent of those at Cardiff, and 28 per cent of women and 20 per cent of men at a selection of colleges in London.Footnote 35 Additionally, according to figures compiled by the SCM in 1961, just under one fifth of all university students were also members of one or more religious societies, making religious societies ‘in many cases’ ‘the most active student societies in the university’.Footnote 36 If influence can be measured by the ability to motivate students to attend weekly meetings, these numbers suggest that in the early 1960s the various forms of Christianity were still a powerful ideological grouping within Britain's universities.
The SCM was the largest of Britain's student religious societies. By 1960 it was mature and stable, with clear bureaucratic procedures and long-standing membership of the World Student Christian Federation. Its 7,000 members and 250 branches were served by more than thirty full-time staff, many of whom were recent graduates acting as peripatetic ‘field secretaries’, travelling between universities and training colleges.Footnote 37 Until 1970 the upper reaches of the movement were dominated by clerics and adults, leaving local student executives to manage the individual branches. Central management was in the hands of a general secretary, invariably a clergyman; strategic decisions were made at regular meetings of General Council, which was dominated by staff-members. Oversight and much of the movement's finances were provided by influential old members, often clergymen themselves, known as ‘senior friends’. The SCM was thus an important link between the worlds of Church and University; its significance in these fields was such that its 1963 congress was addressed by both the minister for education and the archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote 38 Members met in university- or college-based branches for weekly prayer, study groups and talks, and attended centrally-organised summer conferences.Footnote 39 Particular interests during the 1950s included ecumenical activism, bible study, and social service, such as fundraising in aid of the War on Want.Footnote 40 Strength was concentrated in the older universities: in 1961 Cambridge claimed 477 members, Oxford 320, Glasgow 273 and Durham 240;Footnote 41 Belfast, Birmingham, Leeds, Hull, Edinburgh and St Andrews all claimed groups of over a hundred.Footnote 42 In the training colleges SCM groups tended to be rather smaller, averaging between thirty and fifty, but these institutions were themselves often only two or three hundred strong; consequently, where SCM branches existed in training colleges, membership was typically about a fifth of the student body.Footnote 43 Significantly, the SCM's rough gender-balance disguised its attractiveness to women: in the universities of 1961, women were about three times more likely than men to be members of the SCM.Footnote 44
Despite the expansion of higher education, SCM membership declined during the 1950s, from 9,500 in 1950 to just over 7,000 in 1963.Footnote 45 Since student church attendance was still robust, this decline was probably caused primarily by increased competition from other Christian groups, most especially the expanding ministries of denominational societies and chaplains, as well as the Evangelical Christian Unions. This was certainly a common contemporary view among SCM staff.Footnote 46 Yet these relatively healthy figures suggest that the transformation and collapse of the SCM was by no means inevitable.Footnote 47 It remains to be explained why the gentle decline and respectability of the 1950s was replaced by the fierce radicalism and catastrophic decline of the 1960s and 1970s.
II
The immediate trigger for that transformation was the SCM's replacement in 1962 of its general secretary with the radical bishop Ambrose Reeves. Reeves had lately been deported from South Africa for publicising the Sharpeville massacre,Footnote 48 and his recruitment was part of a self-conscious desire radically to transform the movement. ‘Changes in the SCM were certainly envisaged, and had been for a number of years’, noted the minutes of the meeting which confirmed Reeves’s appointment, ‘and it was believed that Bishop Reeves would lead the Movement into a radical involvement with the world and the colleges’.Footnote 49 In April 1963 Reeves duly unveiled a new agenda, the ‘openness policy’, which he felt constituted a ‘radical change’ from previous practice.Footnote 50 The SCM's new policy was also understood as such by the Church Times, which described it as ‘a radical change in the emphasis of its work in the universities’.Footnote 51 Briefly stated, the openness policy held that the SCM should refuse to recognise the distinction between Christians and non-Christians. It should abolish its membership lists, open its hierarchy to non-Christians, and adapt itself as much as possible to serve the needs of the secular world.
This policy shift reflected a conversation which had been going on within British theology since the early 1950s. In 1953 the final letters of the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer appeared in English,Footnote 52 and they became an important influence on the stream of Christian opinion which, once it had produced the bestselling Honest to God (1963), became known as ‘Christian radicalism’.Footnote 53 Bonhoeffer appeared to make the startling suggestion that after nineteen hundred years of ‘religious’ history, God was moving humanity into a new era of its spiritual existence. Mankind was becoming ‘religionless’, entirely ‘without religion’, having ‘come of age’ into a new spiritual adulthood. God's activity would henceforth be hidden within human activity, and Christianity should be retranslated into entirely secular terms.Footnote 54 On this view, secularisation, or the uniting of the sacred and the secular, was divinely ordained.Footnote 55 This theological narrative made two sociological predictions. First, as the secular invaded the sacred, organised religion would rapidly die off. Second, as the sacred penetrated the secular, the Christians of the future would concentrate on joining God's covert presence as ‘servants of the world’.Footnote 56
These ideas provided the SCM with an influential new language for imagining secularisation, and for advocating a ‘religionless’ Christianity of social activism in the secular world. Even in 1954 the movement's journal had hailed Bonhoeffer's letters as producing a ‘revolutionary’ ‘new theology’ in which the ‘secular’ world ‘must be accepted as such, for God has made it so’.Footnote 57 By 1963 the associate general secretary of the WSCF could declare that ‘present-day European SCM leaders are all good disciples of Bonhoeffer and therefore enthusiastic about a “religionless” interpretation of the Bible’.Footnote 58 In 1960 a British delegation attended the WSCF's international teaching conference in Strasbourg, and returned enthusiastic about the new theology. As the editor of the SCM journal put it, ‘those of us who were there gradually came to see that our approach to our calling had been wrong’; instead, he had discovered, modern Christians should focus on ‘the world which belongs to Christ and in which he is present’.Footnote 59 At Strasbourg one of the most Bonhoefferian speeches was given by Kathleen Bliss, then general secretary of the Church of England Board of Education, who spoke about ‘the Christian message to men without religion’.Footnote 60 Shortly afterwards she joined the advisory committee which appointed Ambrose Reeves.Footnote 61 In 1963 the SCM's quinquennial congress, which gathered 2,000 students in Bristol, was ‘largely influenced’ by Strasbourg. Bliss spoke on ‘Jesus the servant and man's coming of age’, and called on the Church to ‘meet the world on its own terms’.Footnote 62 Bishop Lesslie Newbigin gave a theological underpinning to the idea of secularisation by declaring that ‘society had been secularised irreversibly by the operation of forces originating in the gospel itself’. He deliberately transposed traditional Christian language into secular terms, arguing that Christians should think of modern society as ‘a secularised version of the Kingdom of God’.Footnote 63
This theology of secularisation was not an inevitable reaction to real secularisation; in common with many Bonhoeffer-inspired religious thinkers in this period,Footnote 64 SCM leaders dramatically overestimated the extent of religious decline. Kathleen Bliss's 1960 Strasbourg speech, for example, declared that the Church was ‘totally irrelevant’ to the modern world.Footnote 65 A 1961 SCM conference on ‘Christian faith and the secular’ asked in its advertising material, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian in a world that has no room for religion?’Footnote 66 Outlining his ‘openness’ policy in February 1963, Reeves described the early 1960s as ‘a time when the great mass of students are unconcerned with any type of organised religion’.Footnote 67 This was written at a time when between a quarter and a third of British students surveyed claimed to go to church every week. Even so, this vision of widespread secularisation not only prompted the new policy, but influenced its content. Reeves wished the SCM to become an ‘unreligious’ and ‘secular’ movement. ‘We shall become primarily concerned with students who are not Christians’, he wrote, ‘and it may well be that we can best serve the churches by ceasing to be a “religious” society.’Footnote 68 As he advised one field secretary, he felt that the more traditional SCM leader should be persuaded ‘that the task of his branch lies in the secular situation’.Footnote 69
By September 1964 General Council had concluded that this ‘religionless’ Christianity primarily involved political struggle to create a better world. Members, it declared, should ‘participate as fully as possible … in student politics, and in the activities of all groups seeking to promote justice and world peace’.Footnote 70 Responding to a request for an explanation of ‘openness’, General Council explained that ‘Jesus’ was even now ‘recreating and restoring’ the whole earth, and that Christ ‘calls us to be with him’ in this. Further, it argued, the universal scope of Christ's authority implied that the scope of the resulting political action should necessarily be global.Footnote 71 This eschatological justification for furthering ‘justice and world peace’ in general was then incarnated in specific policies. The assistant general secretary was mandated to write to national political parties urging the outlawing of racism, increases in foreign aid budgets, international price-fixing of basic commodities, a permanent UN army, and the implementation of the Wolfenden report.Footnote 72 Unsurprisingly, given Reeves’s personal background, special prominence was given to the campaign against Apartheid, for which ‘maximum publicity should be gained from press and television’.Footnote 73
This focus on general world transformation in September 1964 came at an early stage in the evolution of British student activism.Footnote 74 Whilst the late 1950s had seen single-issue campaigns concerning racism and nuclear disarmament, by 1966 these were a distant memory.Footnote 75 The first university to experience sit-ins was the LSE, in 1967;Footnote 76 the LSE's Socialist Society, which played a leading role in them, was only founded in October 1965.Footnote 77 The crucial meeting concerning the Young Liberals’ radicalisation occurred in mid-1966.Footnote 78 The Radical Student Alliance, the first national student organisation explicitly to advocate direct action, was first mooted in October 1966.Footnote 79 In 1963, by contrast, the SCM was mocked for being too internationally-minded even at SOAS: ‘If you drop anything’, students apparently joked, ‘the SCM catches it before it hits the floor and sends it to Africa.’Footnote 80
The ideological effect of Reeves's attempt to implement a theology of secularisation varied greatly across branches, creating considerable disruption and confusion.Footnote 81 Some branches interpreted it to imply abandonment of all specifically religious activities, including prayer, worship, and bible study;Footnote 82 some ignored the directive entirely; others attempted simply to study the world.Footnote 83 At Bristol, for example, the 1960–1 study programme had included sessions on the Psalms, Isaiah, Mark and Colossians, as well as on Communism and British industry; yet by 1964–5, the four study groups addressed philosophy, the ‘new morality’, politics and pop culture.Footnote 84 This blurring of the sacred and the secular was an early example of the wider desire to blur conceptual boundaries which Charles Taylor has identified as characterising the student movements of the late 1960s.Footnote 85
The overall organisational effect of the new policy was some initial success followed by widespread and dramatic decline. At Bristol open meetings featuring Christian-humanist dialogue were ‘the largest for years’, and at Cambridge the radical Anglican priest Werner Pelz spoke to ‘a very packed meeting’ on existentialism.Footnote 86 Some non-Christians were attracted by the secular version of Christianity being offered: at Queen's Belfast ‘a very large secular section of the University arrived and swallowed hook-line and sinker a reasonable presentation of the gospel’, and then ‘immersed themselves in SCM activities’, much to the bemusement of the executive.Footnote 87 At Matlock Training College one branch leader was singled out as ‘a tower of strength’ – ‘even though she isn't a Christian’.Footnote 88 Yet these results were exceptional. The majority of the SCM's constituency were Christians, and most Christians were not interested in the theology of secularisation. Between 1961 and 1966 the Cambridge group shrank from around 400 to about 40; that at Birmingham, from 134 to 24; at Bristol, from 80 to 26; at Hull, from 143 to 12; at Manchester, from 80 to 25.Footnote 89 In 1966 the typical university SCM meeting attracted no more than twenty members, and the largest had few more than sixty.Footnote 90 Other groups simply folded: in London the groups at Birkbeck, King's, Imperial, Queen Elizabeth's and Bedford colleges all failed.Footnote 91 At Moray House Training College in Edinburgh ‘quite a large SCM’ simply vanished.Footnote 92 That this was not a straightforward symptom of Christianity-wide ‘secularisation’ is indicated by the continuing flourishing of the Christian Unions.Footnote 93
The attempt to implement the theology of secularisation caused this decline in several ways. In the first place, it prompted significant numbers of students to defect to other organisations. In December 1964 the field secretary for the Manchester area reported that of the eleven groups in his region, five had disbanded and been replaced with Christian Union groups.Footnote 94 Others joined the ad hoc ‘Christian Associations’ which sprang up to carry on the SCM's former activities.Footnote 95 Second, secular theology's critique of ‘religion’ made it difficult to recruit young Christians. At a freshers’ meeting at Chester Training College, for example, a field secretary ‘pitched in whole-heartedly with the secular meaning of the gospel, and was met with almost total silence’.Footnote 96 Third, whilst theologies of secularisation promoted a theological vision of a changed world, it was unclear how this vision might be achieved in practice. As Reeves confessed in a September 1964 letter to branch presidents, ‘many of us have been uncertain as to what exactly the new emphasis on “openness” involves’.Footnote 97 A March 1967 questionnaire found that the Durham SCM had sunk into ‘utter apathy’, which ‘will only be removed when the leaders make clear what they are trying to do’.Footnote 98 A fourth factor was that the introduction of theologies of secularisation may have been especially alienating to women: as later feminists famously complained, the politically-minded leftist groups of the late 1960s were dominated both numerically and emotionally by men.Footnote 99 For example, in October 1968 women comprised only a fifth of the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam war protest, the biggest British demonstration of the late 1960s.Footnote 100 The politicisation of the movement was thus unlikely to appeal to the SCM's existing membership, which in 1962–3 was 57 per cent female.Footnote 101
Finally, the new policy crippled the movement's finances. Until 1963 the SCM's books had been relatively balanced, but thereafter the deficit spiraled, and by 1966 the movement's liquid capital reserves were exhausted, forcing it to cut its field staff by nearly half.Footnote 102 The new policy had alienated senior friends, harming fundraising, and the SCM's annual income shrank by a fifth between 1963–4 and 1964–5.Footnote 103 In 1965 it hired external consultants to assess the feasibility of a major fundraising drive conducted by senior friends, but the resultant report concluded that such a campaign was unworkable. ‘A feeling of doubt about the future of the Movement and of the course it is now taking’, it stated, ‘undoubtedly had an effect on the response.’Footnote 104 The consequent reduction of field secretaries meant that several large centres, such as Liverpool, lost their dedicated staff members. Overworked and increasingly peripatetic field staff often focused on the universities, with the result that the smaller women-dominated training colleges were overlooked. Not coincidentally, the number of technical and training colleges with Christian Unions increased dramatically, from thirty-five in 1956 to 350 in 1967.Footnote 105 In all these ways, the theologies of secularisation in the life of the SCM were an important cause of the very religious crisis that they claimed to describe.
Despite these difficulties, the central SCM leadership remained committed to the idea of divinely-ordained secularisation. As a 1965 internal appraisal put it, the costly transformation of 1963 was quite simply ‘a discernment of God's purpose in our situation’.Footnote 106 Even so, Reeves found himself an increasingly isolated figure, and in 1965 he resigned.Footnote 107 The Anglican clergyman and intellectual David Edwards, director of the SCM Press, agreed to act as caretaker, which he did for nine months in 1965 and 1966. He was succeeded by the younger and more radical Methodist minister David Head.
III
In 1968 the SCM took a further step of political radicalisation, adopting the cause of ‘revolution’ in order to achieve global racial and social equality. The political stance of the SCM, which expressly committed the movement to a ‘general commitment to revolutionary change’, was endorsed by General Council in September 1968, and after consultation was adopted as movement policy in September 1969.Footnote 108 This caused considerable friction within the movement. The Scottish delegates at the 1969 General Council meeting, for example, unanimously voted against it.Footnote 109
This advocacy of ‘revolution’ was to a significant extent a natural development from the theologies of secularisation introduced in 1963. The retranslation of Christian ideas into secular language had included the deliberate secularisation of Christian eschatology, and this gave rise to the idea that Christians should strive to bring about the kingdom of God on earth, an idea whose revolutionary implications were quickly recognised.Footnote 110 ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth’ ran the front cover of the Autumn 1964 issue of the SCM's journal, quoting the book of Revelation, as it introduced an issue which contained articles on both Karl Marx and ‘revolution’.Footnote 111 From 1964 the connection between a secularised eschatology and radical politics became a regular feature of SCM discourse. In 1966, for example, the radical Jesuit Laurence Bright, who would become the driving force behind the revolutionary Political stance of 1968,Footnote 112 defended his vision of ‘revolution’ by secularising Christian eschatology: ‘the Bible isn't about life in the next world but about politics in this’.Footnote 113 These themes also underlay the conference sermon at the SCM's 1969 Manchester Congress, in which the ecumenical leader Willem Visser't Hooft denounced the idea that ‘the Kingdom of God’ is ‘a paradise in the distant future’ as ‘heresy’. Instead, he stated, ‘it is present among us’. On this view, God wanted to use Christians to bring about a new world of peace and justice. ‘It is truly worthwhile to fight the battle for justice and freedom’, declared Visser't Hooft. ‘We may be used to introduce into the old world the ferment of the new age.’Footnote 114 In 1969 SCM's student president took this logic a step further by arguing that the parousia ‘does indeed come as the culmination of our efforts to transform the world’.Footnote 115 As these two examples illustrate, this secularisation of eschatology strongly encouraged belief in the power of political activism, since it implied that God would use such activism to bring about lasting change. In 1966 Martin Conway, a recent SCM staff member, argued in his Students explore a worldly Christianity that ‘what men do on earth’ contributes towards the establishment of the divinely orchestrated ‘new creation’.Footnote 116 In 1970 General Secretary David Head reflected on the pervasiveness of this secularised eschatology in the life of the SCM. ‘Nothing we do is without a “political” connotation’, he stated. ‘We are offering a vision of “the city of God” impinging on this immoral society of our experience. Nor would we doubt that individuals need a deep change of direction (conversion) if we are to taste – amid present power structures – the “powers of the new age”.’Footnote 117 The title of the movement's 1975–6 annual report was more succinct: ‘To see a new heaven – to make a new earth.’Footnote 118
These eschatological languages of world transformation prompted elements within the SCM to engage with the idea of ‘revolution’ throughout the mid-1960s. In 1964 the Irish secretary had written a piece on ‘Revolution’ for the SCM's journal, which looked forward to a revolution which symbolised ‘the process of hope, of recreation and of freedom’.Footnote 119 In 1966 David Head wrote an open letter to the ‘openness’ policy itself, declaring ‘it is clear that you are a bloody revolutionary’.Footnote 120 This engagement with ‘revolution’ included reflection on how Christians might make use of the tools of Marxism. In 1966 the movement organised a major conference on Marx, Freud and Jesus.Footnote 121 In the same year, a delegation from the Cambridge SCM visited Communist East Germany, and reported that ‘we came back with a new understanding of socialism’.Footnote 122 The assumed interchangeability of Christian and Marxist languages of world transformation was strikingly illustrated by an SCM staff worker in February 1969. ‘The overall purpose of the movement’, he suggested, in a letter endorsed and distributed by David Head, ‘would be to bring about a better and just society.’ ‘Call it “the revolution”, call it “the Kingdom”, call it what you will.’Footnote 123
Such early engagement with ‘revolution’ should be regarded as a genuinely theological phenomenon, for it was relatively unusual amongst British students before 1968. Indeed, British students were strikingly quiescent compared to their American, French, Italian or West German contemporaries.Footnote 124 Student protests ‘were about reform rather than revolution for the majority of the participants’,Footnote 125 and most of the clashes – such as those at the LSE (1967), Essex (1968), and Warwick (1970) – were local affairs, exacerbated by the actions of individual administrations.Footnote 126 The first secular student body to try to unite revolutionary student groups was the Revolutionary Socialists Student Federation, and this was not founded until May 1968.Footnote 127 As the revolutionary leader Tariq Ali noted in 1969, ‘a large majority’ of the ‘revolutionary left’ in Britain emerged in response to the various events of 1968.Footnote 128 On the other hand, interest in Marxism and in ‘Christ's revolution’ had long been a theme of radical forms of Christianity.Footnote 129 Revolutionary rhetoric was ultimately adopted by many of the British networks and individuals which attempted to develop the legacy of Honest to God, including the radical journal New Christian, and Honest to God's author, who had mooted it as early as 1959.Footnote 130 The SCM's attraction to ‘revolution’ was also part of a global trend in student Christianity; WSCF conferences in 1968 and 1969 were dominated by Christian student revolutionaries.Footnote 131
Even so, whilst the SCM's enthusiasm for ‘revolution’ drew on existing discussion within the movement, such enthusiasm was further encouraged by the global uprisings of 1968. Yet theology altered how these uprisings were imagined: a considerable proportion of the remaining SCM leadership interpreted the international student uprisings as harbingers of a secular apocalypse which God would use to inaugurate a just and peaceful society. In summer 1968, for example, David Head declared that the contemporary ‘crisis’ illustrated by ‘all manifestations of student unrest’ was part of the ‘wrath of God’ against all unjust institutions.Footnote 132 As another senior leader wrote the following October:
I share the feeling that the ‘student protest movement’ that we have seen in action in Europe this summer has within it at least a seed of a new departure for our sated continent, a seed which in his usual hidden way the Holy Spirit can put to major use in bringing on the fulness of salvation in Christ.Footnote 133
Indeed, by the late 1960s SCM leaders often felt able to detect the hand of God in any movement which authentically supported global social and racial justice. A Lent talk to the Cambridge SCM in 1968 on ‘the theology of revolution’ advised students to study ‘the revolutionary, overturning nature of Christ's proclamation of the Kingdom of God’, which could now be glimpsed in contemporary revolutionary movements, such as that in Algeria, which students should visit.Footnote 134 In September the revolutionary Political stance took it as axiomatic that ‘Christians will recognise the work of the Spirit wherever men strive to overcome the injustice which makes men less human.’Footnote 135 Such understandings not unnaturally led SCM leaders dramatically to overestimate the significance of the wave of global unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This transmutation of the Christian apocalyptic tradition provided the movement with an emotionally fraught sense of political and existential urgency. In 1969 a Cambridge newsletter suggested that even the existence of western civilisation was at stake, arguing that ‘our kind of life and its very survival is increasingly related to our treatment of people greatly removed from ourselves both physically and culturally’.Footnote 136 In 1973 the main speaker at the SCM's Huddersfield conference took hidden eschatological meanings a step further by identifying the ‘Beast’ described in Revelation xiii with the government of the United States of America – an identification which, it was reported, took ‘a firm hold on the collective imagination’.Footnote 137
This eschatological advocacy of revolution turned the SCM into a highly niche group: most Christians were not interested in fomenting ‘revolution’, and those non-Christians who were tended to join secular movements. Such forceful languages of moral obligation also clashed with the contemporary trend towards an ethic of personal authenticity.Footnote 138 In Cambridge the SCM's turn to revolution ‘was followed by an almost complete change in membership’.Footnote 139 Fifty-six people paid subscriptions for 1968–9, a relatively large number for such a group; even so, as the branch treasurer noted, ‘SCM is appealing to an increasingly small section of the Cambridge community.’Footnote 140 The move towards revolution further alienated the movement's senior friends, and was deplored by earlier leaders of the movement such as Kathleen Bliss and David Edwards.Footnote 141 The branch structure dwindled: in 1968 only twenty-five branches bothered to file annual reports.Footnote 142 In 1970 a memorandum for the south-west noted that the branches at Bristol, Bath and Southampton Technical were inactive; nobody at Southampton University or Portsmouth would answer London's letters.Footnote 143
Yet the SCM leadership was perfectly aware that their stance would be unpopular, and this awareness illustrates the principled nature of their decision-making.Footnote 144 The enormous organisational risks of pursuing revolution were commonly justified using biblical language, most especially by identification with Old Testament prophets who had been reviled in their own lifetimes. In 1969 a Cambridge SCM leader called for ‘prophetic acts’ in the tradition of ‘the watchmen of Israel’. Such an identification also implied eventual vindication for the Christian revolutionaries. ‘In the end’, he noted, ‘Ezekiel was shown and recognised to have been right.’Footnote 145 Such self-identification was an international phenomenon amongst politically radical Christians: in 1968, for example, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke named his newborn son after the Old Testament prophet Hosea.
As before, the SCM had difficulties translating its moral vision of a transformed world into an unambiguous plan of action. This was common to many late 1960s revolutionary groups.Footnote 146 Much of the movement's energy was spent in consciousness-raising, organising study-groups, and convening conferences, most notably the large-scale Manchester congress of 1969. The SCM was also involved in the ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign against South African rugby; in September 1969 David Head drew ire for publicly supporting disruptive action in the letter pages of the Church Times.Footnote 147 In 1970 the SCM released a report supporting violence against apartheid, and organised a boycott of Barclays Bank.Footnote 148 The movement hosted a range of external projects, including the Europe-Third World Research Centre, and launched a short-lived Free University of Black Studies.Footnote 149 It also purified its own administrative structures, dissolving General Council in favour of wider student representation in 1970, and abolishing hierarchies in its employment structure in 1972.Footnote 150 Yet by this point the movement was a junior player in the groups advocating revolution: whilst the SCM had dwindled to only a few hundred members, the International Socialists were now up to 3,000-strong, although this included a high proportion of non-students.Footnote 151
In 1973, as the optimism of the 1960s faded,Footnote 152 the SCM adopted a longer-term and more holistic approach, focusing on ‘personal politics’ and ‘the spiritual dimensions of political struggle’ in its pursuit of cultural change.Footnote 153 This refocus prompted the relocation of its headquarters to a hastily inaugurated commune at Wick Court, an Elizabethan manor house about twenty minutes’ drive from Bristol. This relocation reflected the growing middle-class interest in the natural and the rural in the early 1970s, as well as the widespread sense, especially amongst counter-cultural figures, that modern society was fundamentally corrupt.Footnote 154 Yet it also represented a desire to return to Christianity's spiritual roots.Footnote 155
The commune was intended to provide the crucible for the making of a spiritual and personal politics which would underpin the movement's renewal. Nevertheless, emotional tensions were such that founding members began leaving for other communities within the year. Despite the use of amateur labour, renovating the draughty and sometimes freezing manor house absorbed much of the SCM's remaining capital. The commune's first annual budget was overspent by more than half.Footnote 156 The experiment was wound up in 1977 owing to lack of funds.
Traces of the SCM's vision can be seen to this day. A whole host of different ways of relating Christianity to ‘the world’ continue to be explored in the Progressive Christian Network, the St Mark's Centre for Radical Christianity, and in the work of Bishop John Shelby Spong, amongst others. Whilst the SCM itself has retreated from ‘revolution’, has restored its earlier focus on the university, and now occupies a smaller headquarters in Birmingham, it continues to maintain a sharp focus on social justice.Footnote 157 The movement's understanding of ‘the Kingdom of God’ has continually evolved since the 1960s, with liberation theology, women's issues and gay rights having become central concerns in the 1980s.Footnote 158 Recent campaigns have been concerned with environmentalism, ethical consumerism and fair taxation. The SCM's current Faith in Action project ‘seeks to apply Dietrich Bonhoeffer's thinking about the role of faith in a secular society’ in areas as diverse as climate change and juvenile delinquency.Footnote 159 Yet whilst the movement has brought itself back from the brink of extinction, it remains only a fraction of its former size.Footnote 160
IV
This article has suggested that the SCM's transformation was not primarily due to external factors, but to the evolving ways in which the movement perceived its world through the lens of theologies of secularisation. By contextualising limited religious decline as part of God's plan to abolish organised religion,Footnote 161 such theologies prompted the SCM to take enormous organisational risks at a time when student Christianity was still robust. By deliberately translating Christian eschatologies into secular political language, they created a forceful set of moral concepts for challenging the political status quo. Yet the challenging nature of these theologies alienated the SCM's traditional constituency, and such theologies were in any case ambivalent about the existence of organised religion. They were the central cause of the collapse of liberal and ecumenical student work within Britain's universities. Largely unaffected by these theologies, the Evangelical Christian Unions succeeded in holding their ground.Footnote 162
This episode suggests two lessons and one question about the relationship between religion and society in 1960s Britain. First, it provides a key example of how perceptions of ‘secularisation’ were themselves an important factor during the early 1960s, in many cases creating the religious crisis that they claimed to describe. It problematises any notion that Christians were simply ‘victims’ of the religious crisis of that decade.Footnote 163 Second, this story complicates the secular picture of student radicalism which we currently have, showing that theology could and did influence the way in which some student radicals acted. Indeed, given the significant role played by the SCM, its eclipse from historical memory may itself be an example of the effects of discourses of secularisation.
Finally, this episode raises the wider question of Christianity's influence on Britain's shifting moral-political culture in the final third of the twentieth century.Footnote 164 Two of the overriding moral concerns of late twentieth-century British political culture have been the fights against racism and against global poverty. Given that Christianity was such a significant force in Britain's universities in the early 1960s, and given the activities of left-wing Christian organisations such as the SCM, it would be fascinating to know the extent to which Christian languages helped legitimate, or even originate, such wider moral developments in Britain's political culture.Footnote 165
