RELIGION, SEX, AND MODERNITY: PERIODIZATION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

The concept of modernity has been identified by historians as the formation of a particular cultural sensibility between approximately 1880 and 1940 that, among other things, privileged scientific and secular rather than religious accounts of the world and humanity's place within it. In addition, as Alex Owen has argued, modern constructions of selfhood prioritized the notion of a “reclusive inner singularity” as distinct from that of social character or identity, marking out “an individual, embodied consciousness through which an expressive language of the self, the ‘I’, emerge[d].”Footnote ⁸ Although the language of interiority has always been present in the Western Christian tradition, the theological concept of human nature was ruptured at this point by new, psychologized readings of subjectivity in which meaning and authority resided not in some transcendental, divine adjudicator but in the secular, autonomous self.Footnote ⁹ As historians of sexuality have made clear, in the Foucauldian paradigm the “core essence” of the increasingly therapeutic model of modern selfhood and the key to individual personality were no longer defined by religious belief but by sexual desire. As “the conceptual, experiential and institutional apparatus … built around the body and its erotic pleasures,” modern sexuality emerged as an all-pervasive discourse of medical and scientific expertise that worshipped at the shrine of an endless recalibration of sexual types.Footnote ¹⁰

This secularization or, more specifically, this de-Christianization metanarrative, with its central shift from religious to scientific forms of authority, has retained a remarkable explanatory power in the histories of both religion and sexuality, due largely to the seductiveness of what Erdozain has described as its “crashing sociological simplicity.”Footnote ¹¹ Some interesting divergences are now apparent, however, not least in terms of chronologies of change. In the history of religion, the secularization orthodoxy of the 1960s (which viewed the slow decline of church affiliation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a predictable by-product of modern industrialization) has undergone a steady refutation. In the last thirty years or so, social scientific, positivist, and class-based approaches have been augmented by revisionist cultural histories in which neither the inevitability nor the linearity of secularization is uncritically assumed. As David Nash has commented, religious history is no longer “at the mercy of a predetermined historical direction and outcome,” nor is it “a subject conducting a strange series of dialogues about its own eclipse.”Footnote ¹² To be sure, the subsequent emphasis on the persistence and adaptability of religious forms in modern British culture has not been unproblematic. It has, however, produced a major reperiodization of secularization, pushing the moment of what has been described as Christianity's “cultural displacement” forward from the mid-nineteenth century to the interwar period, and, most controversially, into the 1960s—a decade identified by archrevisionist Callum Brown as witnessing the “death of Christian Britain.”Footnote ¹³ Consequently, the middle decades of the twentieth century are now being increasingly seen as part of a relatively coherent phase of faith-oriented British culture in which Christianity continued to permeate public life not least through radio broadcasts, royal ceremonies, and remembrance rituals. As Matthew Grimley has argued, after the First World War (and despite the 1927 Prayer Book Controversy), the Church of England actually strengthened its position as a national voice, with senior clergy still “commanding significant national respect and attention as political players.”Footnote ¹⁴ Church association and attendance between 1900 and 1950, while declining, did so relatively modestly in comparison with the post-1960 decades, and according to Brown, a “vibrant Christian identity remained central to British popular culture” during the period, notably in female and family-centred rituals such as marriage, the churching of women, baptism, and Sunday school attendance.Footnote ¹⁵

Yet despite the far from absent religiosity of the period and the liveliness of these recent religious revisionist debates, most historians of sexuality still work mainly within the more conventional late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century timeframe of secularization in their discussions of sexual modernity. Thus, in a recent edited collection on The History of Modern Sexuality, H. G. Cocks' insightful chapter on “Religion and Spirituality”—an important inclusion in itself—outlined the rich interconnections between late nineteenth-century British spiritualism and early scientific discourses such as sexology and psychology, but then argued for “a general de-coupling of the link between religion, spirituality and sexuality” after the First World War as a result of the anti-Victorian disillusionment of self-styled modernist commentators.Footnote ¹⁶ Whereas the cultural weight and prestige of nineteenth-century religion “meant that it might cover a variety of polymorphous and unspecific transgressions of gender and sexuality,” Cocks explained, “by the early twentieth century religion had come under suspicion and fallen into decay as one of the principal locations for sexual expression of all kinds.”Footnote ¹⁷

To many working in the field, this has proved a persuasive reading, but its largely unquestioned chronology has been shaped by, and persists due to, an emphasis on dissident forms of sexuality. As the work of David Hilliard, Martha Vicinus, Fred Rosen, and others has shown, the rich historical interconnectivity between religious and homoerotic identities and the queering of late Victorian Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic spaces was undoubtedly curtailed by the developing taxonomies of the new sexual sciences.Footnote ¹⁸ As Tim Jones has argued, the period in question witnessed a simultaneous appearance and disappearance of the homosexual with the “innocence of earlier homoaffective and homoerotic Catholic culture” trapped, almost instantaneously, inside the heteronormative closet.Footnote ¹⁹ But as Jones himself goes on to show, recognizing religion's undeniably problematic legacy of historical censorship and repression is not at all the same thing as asserting its demise per se as an important site of reference for modern articulations of sexual identity. In fact, it is precisely because of its ongoing status as a dominant, heterocentric discourse well into the first half of the twentieth century that Christianity's operations of power, with all those inherent contradictions and instabilities, demand greater attention.

Joy Dixon's recent discussion of “Modernity, Heterodoxy and the Transformation of Religious Cultures” provides a useful example of how such a deconstructive approach might work when considering the negotiations among gender, modernity, and more marginal religious movements and organizations. She argues that in order to find new and more nuanced ways of thinking about secularization and modernity, historians would do well to focus on the constant slippages rather than the rigid demarcations between the sacred and the secular, thus constructing a more dynamic epistemological framework that emphasizes “fluidity, contingency, rewriting, and dialogue.”Footnote ²⁰ “Slippages” are similarly highlighted by Lynda Nead's and Jay Winter's discussions of modernity, this time between the “old” and the “new” as well as, in Winter's influential study of war and memory, between the religious and the secular. Modern sensibilities, it was argued, were always unable entirely to escape more conventional ideals and ways of thinking. “There can never be a pure, clean modernity,” observed Nead, “for the discourses that constitute that historical temporality bear the ghosts of the past, of modernity's own other.”Footnote ²¹ Rather than some monolithic, teleological process, modernity is thus better understood as a configuration of diverse, multifaceted, and unresolved historical formations. This is not to abandon the concept altogether, Nead cautions, but rather to prioritize its local applications and “the tensions and irregularities that create modernity's conditions of existence.”Footnote ²²

Such “tensions and irregularities” abound in Royden's Sex and Common-Sense, whether between notions of old and new, Victorian and modern, or religious and scientific, as she endeavored radically, yet cautiously, to modernize church attitudes and Christianize public moral behavior. She was not the first to attempt this—indeed, her writings can be located within a powerful historical tradition of Christian women speaking out on sex. Recent scholarship has shown, for example, that frequently it was not the urging of the clerical elite but the prominent contribution of laywomen orators, writers, and activists that ensured religion remained an influential arbiter of modern sexual behavior and gender norms. As Chris Waters has suggested, “[T]he initial influence of sexology … enjoyed only marginal status in medical circles.”Footnote ²³ Thus, while renowned sexologists such as Havelock Ellis struggled to secure publishers for their controversial theories, literally thousands of marriage and sex advice manuals authored by devout churchwomen flooded late Victorian and Edwardian middle- and working-class culture via youth movements, diocesan organizations, philanthropic societies, and the armed services. Excluded from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Royden's predecessors such as the evangelical feminist Josephine Butler and the High Church social purity advocate Ellice Hopkins, as well as her peers who included the bishop of London's widow Louise Creighton and the pioneering Anglo-Catholic doctor Mary Scharlieb (and Royden's own physician for a short while), all spoke and wrote from the sidelines of institutional power, arguably empowered to communicate more freely on sexuality by virtue of their gendered occupation of a distinctive space between ordained hierarchical and lay popular religious cultures.Footnote ²⁴ Within this discursive milieu, Royden's Sex and Common-Sense arguably provides one of the most systematic, self-consciously “modern” reformulation of sexual ethics by a Christian woman in the early twentieth century. Before analyzing in greater detail its thematic content, the following discussion outlines selected moments from Royden's own religious and political formation in order to contextualize the circumstances of the book's production.

MAUDE ROYDEN (1876–1956) AND SEX AND COMMON-SENSE

Royden was the youngest daughter of the wealthy Liverpool shipowner and Conservative MP Sir Thomas Royden. Born with both hips dislocated, her disability profoundly influenced her personal life and public agency, preventing her from becoming “a regular society girl” (dancing was difficult while the general steadiness of her overall gait remained a constant source of personal pride) and rendering the prospect of married life remote.Footnote ²⁵ Determined, nevertheless, to live a meaningful life, her experience of “lameness” inspired in her empathy for the socially marginalized and helped to shape her highly somatic theology. From her youth, she exhibited many features later associated with modern independent womanhood—a love of fashion and the theater (she was a serious amateur actor) and a passion for the outdoor life. She was also well educated, attending Cheltenham Ladies College and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Despite the nineteenth-century feminization of piety and thus the dominant Victorian symbolic gendering of religious doubt as masculine, Royden underwent an intense spiritual crisis during the 1890s while at Lady Margaret Hall. As the spiritual home of Anglo-Catholicism, Oxford was then at the center of the storm still raging over the ritualistic controversies. Royden's reservations, which were not over Christianity itself but rather the revelatory witness of the Anglican tradition, involved lengthy deliberations over whether or not to convert to Roman Catholicism. She read Auguste Comte on positivism, debated the merits of fasting, apostolic succession, and Mariolatry, and attended the Puseyite church of the Cowley Fathers at Littlemore.Footnote ²⁶ In 1901, she wrote to her lifelong friend, the suffragist and peace campaigner Kathleen Courtney, urging her to read Newman's Apologia Pro Sua Vita so that she might sympathize with her own “hero-worship of this saint of God.”Footnote ²⁷ Her love of the more aesthetic qualities of religion—the beauty and drama of the colors, sounds, and smells of worship—never left her, but she did not go to Rome. Instead, she remained an ardent High Anglican, convinced that the “exceeding toleration” of the national church best suited her own liberal, often unorthodox spiritual and political views.

During her spiritual vacillations, Royden received counseling from the Reverend William Hudson Shaw, then a well-respected lecturer with the Oxford University Extension Scheme. At his suggestion, she served as his parish assistant in South Luffenham, Rutland, supporting him and his wife, Effie, who, after a difficult birth with their only child Bernard, had retreated into a reclusive world of postnatal depression and precarious mental health, suffering with a permanently debilitating form of puerperal psychosis. Royden lived on and off with the Shaws in a devoted three-way friendship for the next forty-two years. “I am well and happy,” she wrote to Courtney. “Mrs Shaw and I are in love with each other. I have taught her to smoke!”Footnote ²⁸ Hudson Shaw became the love of her life, and their passionate yet celibate relationship, which Effie was both aware of and endorsed, provided the emotional and spiritual landscape against which Royden mapped out her Christian sexual ethics. They finally married after Effie's death in September 1944 when she was aged sixty-eight and Hudson Shaw was eight-five. He died just two months later.Footnote ²⁹

Although strongly influenced by Victorian evangelical ideals of service and social duty, Royden's entry onto the national political stage occurred through the distinctively modern causes of suffrage, pacifism, and women's ministry. According to Sheila Fletcher, Royden's “idiosyncratic” mixture of religion and feminism was responsible for her later historical invisibility.Footnote ³⁰ But late twentieth-century historians' suspicion of Christianity's paradoxical message for women (defined simultaneously as the “spiritual sex” while systematically excluded from positions of institutional religious authority) was not shared by first-wave feminists. As Jacqueline deVries has shown, constitutional and militant suffragists alike appropriated a plethora of religious symbols, structures, and vocabulary.Footnote ³¹ Like Butler and Hopkins before her, Royden saw no disjuncture between her faith and feminist politics; instead, both were integral to her humanist vision of a more just and egalitarian society. Throughout the pre-1914 period, she outlined Christianity's ethical importance for the women's movement through her presidency of the Anglican Church League for Women's Suffrage, her campaigning speeches for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and her editorship of The Common Cause. Christ never articulated class- or gender-specific virtues, she argued, but called all men and women to be perfect. “[T]he denial of political freedom to women is the denial to them of the right to develop their full humanity,” she declared at Anerley Hall on 11 May, 1910.Footnote ³² “This is not … a feminist movement, but more rightly a humanist movement, because we ask for the whole human ideal for all…. The franchise we ask for is the franchise of the Kingdom of God.”Footnote ³³

While a law-abiding constitutional suffragist, Royden was an ecclesiastical militant who represented the most radical wing of Edwardian and interwar church feminism.Footnote ³⁴ In 1918, with suffrage achieved but little visible progress on women's sacerdotal equality, she confided to Courtney that “with the chilliest mis-givings,” she now felt “bound to try and reform the Church of England.”Footnote ³⁵ Accordingly, the campaign for women's ministry dominated Royden's life for the next twenty years and earned her an international reputation. Her appointment as assistant pastor to the Congregational City Temple in 1917 and the sheer novelty of a woman in its famous Holborn pulpit generated a predictable press commentary on both her attire and her vocal pitch. More seriously, it portrayed her as the symbolic and physical embodiment of a new phase of modern religion. The Midland Courier, for example, suggested female priests as an effective solution to the churches' attendance problem (police had been called to control the crowds gathered to hear Royden's first sermon), and the Daily Chronicle congratulated the City Temple on “living up to its reputation for modernity in religion.”Footnote ³⁶ Four years later, Hudson Shaw, then vicar of St. Botolph's at Bishopsgate, disobeyed Bishop Winnington-Ingram and risked his own career by allowing Royden to preach to an overflowing congregation in his church at the Three Hours Service on Easter Friday. The Times announced in 1921, with hopelessly misplaced optimism, that she had “broken through one of the thorniest and most rigid of barriers” and that “the woman bishop belong[ed] to the near future.”Footnote ³⁷

Royden's growing reputation as a religious and political radical (her pacifist beliefs earned her considerable public opprobrium) whose relationship with the church establishment was, at best, provocative, instilled in her a self-perception as the high representative of a “modern” egalitarian Christianity in which men and women worshipped and ministered alongside each other. Sexual equality was fundamental to this vision. Just as her suffrage feminism was inspired by the late Victorian social purity tradition of outrage over prostitution and women's sexual exploitation so, she argued, the churches' theological negativity toward the female body was pivotal to women's sacerdotal inequality. “It is urged that some men are afraid of being sexually excited if they are addressed by a woman-preacher,” she wrote scornfully in Sex and Common-Sense.Footnote ³⁸ The reason for women's exclusion from the priesthood was “almost always based, not upon intellectual, physical, or spiritual disabilities, but upon some magical tabu involving the ideas of ceremonial uncleanness”; in other words, on men's inability to control their sexual desires and their attribution of this failure to women.Footnote ³⁹

Frustrated by the intransigence of the Anglican episcopate, Royden cofounded the Guildhouse Fellowship in 1920 in a converted chapel in Eccleston Square along with the talented liturgist Percy Dearmer and the composer and organist Martin Shaw. The Guildhouse was a remarkable experiment in modern ecclesiology (she and Dearmer were insistent upon its firmly Anglican credentials) and deserves greater attention from historians. The fellowship's ecumenical advisory council, composed of progressive churchmen, Labour politicians, and leading women reformers, declared itself committed to the pursuit of “the good, the beautiful [and] the true” and saw the Guildhouse as “a clearing-house of thought … moral energy and intellectual enthusiasm.”Footnote ⁴⁰ An impressive series of free lectures was run between 1924 and 1935 in which invited speakers—the list of which reads like a guide to the major political, religious, and cultural developments of the period—included Lady Astor, Julian Huxley, G. K. Chesterton, John MacMurray, Alfred Hitchcock, Lloyd George, Jane Addams, Lady Lutyens, Gandhi, Oswald Mosley, and Lord Beaverbrook. Royden's spiritual and intellectual liberalism, not to mention her social connections, were clearly on display here. She embraced evolutionary theory and higher biblical criticism; the Creation story was neither historical nor scientific fact, she declared, but a work of poetry, folklore, and “crystallised human experience.”Footnote ⁴¹ Theologically, her understanding of biblical revelation as historically contingent and subject to the new insights of each generation drew her to leading Roman Catholic modernists such as George Tyrell and Friedrich von Hugel for inspiration. Her particular friendship with, and admiration for, Albert Schweitzer, whose landmark text The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) marked him as an “arch-heretic,” was indicative of her doctrinal heterodoxy. Audiences came in the hundreds to hear her preach at the Guildhouse's evening services on themes as varied as national morality, unemployment, pacifism, the Palestinian crisis, and the contribution of science to religion. No other public figure, declared “Xanthippe” in The Times in 1921, stood “so truly representative of the conscience of the community.”Footnote ⁴²

It was from the Guildhouse pulpit that Sex and Common-Sense first materialized as a series of sermons, and it is noteworthy that Royden chose to preach extensively on sexual morality during her first year at Eccleston Square. As extensively discussed by historians of sexuality such as Lesley Hall, an entirely new genre of marital literature—spearheaded by international best sellers such as Marie Stopes's Married Love and Theo Van de Velde's Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Techniques—was launched after the First World War, reconfiguring gender relations in terms of mutual intimacy rather than sexual antagonism.Footnote ⁴³ As one of the welter of these postwar, postfranchise publications, Sex and Common-Sense's spirit of optimism and anticipation was palpable. Critical of Bertrand Russell's Principles of Social Regulation for its despondent view of modern morality, Royden dismissed the sexual hedonism of 1920s Britain as merely a passing stage in the new generation's search for an authentic morality. “[P]romiscuity is not as vile as prostitution,” she declared, “which has been accepted … [and] defended by Christian people!” Because of this, she explained, “the present chaos, though it has its elements of anxiety and its obvious dangers, leaves me unafraid.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Like so many of her contemporaries, Royden depicted the post–Great War moment as one of profound moral rupture where relations between the sexes were poised for unprecedented new possibilities. Unlike Stopes's work, however, she was less concerned with the physiological technicalities of reproduction and more with the systematic articulation of a new “morality of sex” based on human needs and aspirations. As the review editor of the Journal of Social Hygiene commented approvingly in 1923, Sex and Common-Sense's main appeal was that it dealt not with “cold scientific facts” but with “a clear understanding of the higher meanings of sex in life.”Footnote ⁴⁵ While late nineteenth-century religious efforts at sex education had often been spiritualized to the point of incomprehensibility, and Royden's own sexual lexicon was certainly diffident at times, Sex and Common-Sense included candid discussions of diverse issues such as the demographic imbalance of the sexes, marriage, divorce, celibacy, homosexuality, and birth control. Underpinning these discussions was a deeper question: what, if anything, could Christianity contribute to the sexual ethics and moral standards of a new scientific epoch, a modern age? The dialogical relationship between the spoken and written word (as well as her own sermon notes Royden used an amanuensis, Miss Irene Taylor, in order to ensure her entire oratory was accurately recorded) gave Sex and Common-Sense a particularly engaged and often humorous tone. More important, it facilitated an inherent conceptual fluidity, symptomatic of Royden's own shifting formation of sexual theories whereby “secular” morality and Christian ethics were constantly in play—not as oppositional forces but as reciprocally shaping influences. This was amply illustrated in the amendments to content, structure, and terminology made between the three revised editions of 1921, 1922, and 1947. This interactive quality persisted throughout the book's publishing history, with Royden clarifying and reformulating ideas in response to readers' concerns.Footnote ⁴⁶Sex and Common-Sense was thus in many ways a sexual palimpsest, repeatedly overwritten as part of an ongoing dialogue with the Guildhouse congregation and, by the late 1920s, her global community of readers. In the 1921 and 1922 editions, chapters I to VI dealt with immediate postwar concerns around “the disproportion of the sexes” and “the problem of the unmarried,” as well as longer-term considerations of the meaning of marriage, parenthood, and the need for greater sex education. Chapters VII to X focused on “misunderstandings” concerning Christian guilt over the active sex instinct arising directly from her innovative practice of question and answer sessions run after the Sunday evening sermon. The complete text stands, therefore, as indexical of the specific sexual concerns of an early twentieth-century metropolitan congregation.

The impact of Sex and Common-Sense has been problematic to gauge in terms of hard sales figures. It was never the blockbuster that Stopes's Married Love was, but it may reasonably be inferred that through the active promotion of the Guildhouse Fellowship, which numbered in the thousands, Royden found an appreciative and sizable audience at home and abroad. Great swathes of the text were reproduced in other publications published by international religious societies, including the Student Christian Movement and the Young Women's Christian Association, as well as by the League of the Church Militant, successor from 1918 onward to the Church League for Women's Suffrage. Preaching tours and worldwide contacts with newspaper editors and radio broadcasters also ensured the book's wider dissemination. Catherine King from the Australian Broadcasting Commission, for example, wrote to Royden on 14 June 1948 thanking her for the new edition of Sex and CommonSense and promising to promote it on the air as soon as it had become available in the shops.Footnote ⁴⁷

Correspondents expressed deep gratitude to her for the honest treatment of sexual issues. “So often one approaches the sex question with feelings of dread and fear,” wrote the teacher Hetty Wyon, but “as one reads your book one feels at last an atmosphere in which it is possible to breathe freely.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Others, such as Mrs. Piper from Market Harborough in Leicestershire, captured the extent to which Royden had, by the mid-1930s, become the center of a devoted female coterie: “I must thank you for all you are to the thousands of women who love and admire and follow you, and thank God for you as a leader with courage and vision and as a champion of professional women in all lands…. In my circle … we refer to you as ‘the beloved Maude.’ We read your books and pamphlets and watch all your movements and thank God for you continuously.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Against the above context, then, I now examine selected themes from Sex and Common-Sense under two main headings, “Sacramental Sex” and “The Secularisation of Sex?” through which I articulate the ambiguous and often controversial views Royden held on changing constructions of sexual identities in interwar British culture.

SACRAMENTAL SEX

As Alison Falby has shown, the sacred nature of marital sex was reaffirmed by the Lambeth Conferences of 1920 and 1930 as part of the Church of England's response to postwar anxieties over illegitimate births and the notable increases in divorce, developments that appeared to indicate the breakdown of the Christian family home.Footnote ⁵⁰ The sacramental status of the body's sex instinct and its constituent role in human identity was also central to Royden's sexual theology, but with more far-reaching ramifications. Some of her ideas appeared in embryonic form prior to the publication of Sex and Common-Sense, notably in a persistent critique of institutional Christianity's dualistic theology. At the 1913 Southampton Church Congress, for example, she announced that the church had been guilty for centuries of a major heresy: “the heresy of despising the human body.”Footnote ⁵¹ From where else had doctrines such as the Virgin Birth arisen, she asked in The City Temple Pulpit in 1919, if not from the fundamental belief that sexual relations were sinful and degrading?Footnote ⁵² Dismissing the Book of Common Prayer's prophylactic reading of marriage as nonsense, she declared in Sex and Common-Sense that the sex instinct was not some “grimy secret between two rather shamed human beings” but instead “a great impulse of life and love.”Footnote ⁵³ In so doing, Royden echoed the ideas of late Victorian purity advocates such as Elizabeth Blackwell and Ellice Hopkins who had also claimed that the degradation of sex originated not with God but with man. It was time, therefore, she argued, to conceive of a new humanity that was not “begotten in sin” and of a modern sexuality in which body, mind, and spirit were equally honored.

Royden's pro-sensual reimagination of the body drew upon two important concepts from her High Church heritage, the incarnation and sacramentalism, which had been in the ascendant since the apex of Anglo-Catholic popularity in the late nineteenth century. The former doctrine emphasized Christ's corporeality and thus the body's sanctified status (Christ was for Royden literally “the embodiment of love”), whereas the latter viewed all material phenomena—whether an inspiring landscape, a religious ritual, or the human body—as capable of expressing God's presence.Footnote ⁵⁴ For the sacramentalist, rites such as baptism, Holy Communion, and marriage were symbolic of more important spiritual truths concerning an individual's relationship with the church and God. Thus in Royden's sexual theology, the physical marital union was metonymic of the deeper spiritual connection between husband and wife: sex as the sacrament of spousal love. The most destructive historical effect of the church's dualistic construction of human nature, she argued, had been that of a deeply dichotomized female sexuality. Better have no morals at all, she declared with Stracheyan-like ferocity, than accept the infamy of the nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky's pronouncements on the prostitute as “the most efficient guardian of virtue” and “call it morals.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Prostitution, for Royden, was the total derogation of women's humanity, but so was its Victorian sexual counterpart, the “horrifying superstition” of passionless femininity.Footnote ⁵⁶ “The modern woman may, or may not, be passionate: that is a matter of individual temperament,” she acknowledged, but, unlike her Victorian and Edwardian predecessors, “she does not elevate a defect into a quality, or think of sex as something alien and base.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Royden's rejection of the separate spheres sexual ideology and her affirmation of a positive, autonomous sexuality for women was apparent when, in 1923 and while a member of the National Church Assembly, she joined forces with Louise Creighton in attempting to have the word “obey” excised from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer marriage service.Footnote ⁵⁸ Her discussion of active sexual desire and frustration was also a striking modern feature of Sex and Common-Sense, fascinating not only for its candor but also for its autobiographical and allegorical features. Although stoic in what became their forty-plus years of celibate love for each other, neither she nor Hudson Shaw lacked passion. Her description of male sexual ardor as “like a storm at sea” may well have had Shaw in mind.Footnote ⁵⁹ In her later, controversial memoir, A Threefold Cord (1947), she recalled on one occasion, when returning from a trip to Dartmoor, “the cry of pain in his voice when … as twilight fell … we saw the lights coming out in cottage windows as we passed; and suddenly he said—‘Every peasant in the land can have tonight what I must never have.’”Footnote ⁶⁰ Twenty-five years earlier, in the first edition of Sex and Common-Sense, she drew an intriguing analogy between the implosion of female sexual frustration and the demise of institutional religion. Women's sexual needs, she explained, were “less violent, and more persistent,” like the “silent, uninterrupted thrust of an arch against the wall, of a dome on the walls that support it.” Slowly, imperceptibly, the increase in pressure forced the arches outward, she wrote, until “the walls on which they rested gave way and the church was in ruins.”Footnote ⁶¹ This arresting depiction, inspired by a visit to Italy in 1900 where she witnessed a proliferation of derelict domed churches, arguably also functioned as a warning to the church hierarchy concerning its inequitable treatment of women. Most conspicuous of all, however, was the self-referential quality of this image. Only after Hudson Shaw had died did Royden feel able to articulate the emotional strain under which they had both lived. “Hudson and I knew that we must always think of life as including all three,” she explained in A Threefold Cord, as any sort of “furtive love affair” was simply impossible.Footnote ⁶² Hudson Shaw's ardent belief that she belonged to the world rather than to any man strengthened her resolve. “We lived our lives to the full,” she wrote. “[W]e had our work—work that we loved—and were neither crippled nor repressed by the discipline we accepted.”Footnote ⁶³

This self-imposed discipline and its spiritual foundations distinguished her sexual theorizing in important ways from that of her contemporaries. According to Marcus Collins, the Christian mutualism of religious progressives such as Royden comprised an important strand of modern love after 1918, highlighting more enlightened biblical ideas on human relations, advocating coeducation, and emphasizing a gendered equality of passion and intimacy.Footnote ⁶⁴ But Royden's mutualist credentials were complex and always incomplete. Against the dominant current of new interwar vocabularies of sexology and psychology that enshrined reciprocal heterosexual pleasure as normative for individual health and happiness, she defended older models of celibate femininity. Unlike leading British sex reformers such as Havelock Ellis, Dora Russell, and Norman Haire, for whom sexual abstinence signified mental, physical, and racial decline, Royden condemned the derisive cultural stereotype of the embittered parson-worshipping “old maid” and reconfigured female celibacy as a meaningful form of theological, social, and political agency. Single women, she suggested, might imitate Christ's life in a particularly resonant way. As a virile yet celibate man who must have experienced genuine sexual temptation, Christ had succeeded in transforming the “sex side” of His nature into “the service of Humanity itself.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This was a far greater mission than the love of just one man or woman. The choice “is not easy,” she admitted, “but it is possible. It is possible, and it is glorious.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Such rhetoric was highly redolent not only of High Church asceticism but also of late Victorian and Edwardian feminism's politics of spinsterhood and the right to an existence outside of marriage, although Royden stopped short of positing celibacy as a preferable option to matrimony. Single women like herself, she reflected, simply had to settle for an alternative call to freedom and adventure.

If women's spiritual and human value was not dependent upon marriage, however, their sexual agency certainly was. Alongside her acknowledgment of the creative sexual impulse as a significant factor in women's lives, Royden described the spiritual and material meanings of “home” and motherhood in ways typical of the idealization of domestic bliss so prevalent in interwar literature. Children had a right to be brought up in a stable, loving environment, she commented, dismissing single women's postwar claims to maternal rights as antipathetic to Christian family values. “If women are convinced of their right to motherhood, let them adopt the thousands of waifs already in the world,” she exclaimed (Royden herself had adopted a daughter, Helen, in 1918).Footnote ⁶⁷ Modern women had the right to choose between a career or motherhood but, having chosen, should not then continually resent the freedom of men. Both she and Courtney, as keen supporters of Eleanor Rathbone's postsuffrage feminism of the 1920s and 1930s, campaigned actively for the national endowment of motherhood and related family welfare reforms. The extent to which this constituted a retrograde ideological shift on Royden's part from an older, egalitarian vision of sexual emancipation to a new feminist version of the separate spheres, however, is, as Lucy Delap has commented in her analyses of the mutually overlapping intellectual traditions of interwar feminism and antifeminism, an “unhelpful simplification” that ignores more radical church feminist activity.Footnote ⁶⁸

Interestingly, despite her orthodox attitudes toward a procreative female sexuality boundaried exclusively by marriage, Royden was not unsympathetic to advocates of free love, some of whom she respected as fellow seekers after a higher truth. Their teaching was often “not a mere excuse for licence,” she commented, “but an attempt to reach something lovelier and nobler than the present moral code.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, when the sex reformer Dora Russell spoke on “Marriage” at the Guildhouse in October 1927, her address generated a storm of controversy. Christian mutualists and secular sex radicals like Russell clashed not only over their sexual manifestos but also in their assessment of the legacy of organized religion. Russell blamed Christianity for the annihilation of women's sexual pleasure, proposed sex as a vehicle primarily for exploring individual human understanding and “the really big passions” rather than procreation, and urged society to be more tolerant of premarital and multiple sexual partners.Footnote ⁷⁰ Royden, who was heavily criticized by Guildhouse members for inviting Russell in the first place, rejected much of what she perceived as Russell's rampant individualism and asserted instead the wider social dimension of human identity and moral decision making. The public declaration of the marriage service was the rightful concern of the wider community of church and state, she wrote, because of the “solidarity of the human race.”Footnote ⁷¹ To posit the “imperious urge of sex” above all else and seek to remodel society entirely to meet its demands was neither pragmatic nor moral. Writing in the Guildhouse Monthly, she concluded that Russell had made a “passing salute to the beauty of monogamy and its assurance of respect for the rights of children; coupled with the deplorable conclusion of unwanted babies before marriage and half-orphaned children afterwards.”Footnote ⁷² Ultimately, “experimental marriages” were a moral contradiction. If love “is not given outright in the belief that the gift is final, can the ‘experiment’ be valid?” she asked. “Is not this very sense of finality—this desire to give and burn one's ships—of the very essence of love?”Footnote ⁷³

With divorce rates quadrupling between 1910 and 1920, divorce law reform became a pressing subject of debate. The church remained intransigent on the issue throughout the interwar years, maintaining a position unchanged since the late nineteenth century, which approved divorce solely on the exceptional grounds of adultery (the so-called Matthean exception) but prohibited remarriage during the lifetime of either spouse.Footnote ⁷⁴ Powerful women's organizations such as the Mothers' Union and the Catholic Women's League were equally, if not more, uncompromising.Footnote ⁷⁵ Despite their fundamental disagreement over marriage, Royden's stance on divorce was actually closer to Russell's secular radicalism than that of her Anglican or Catholic counterparts. Paradoxical though this might appear in relation to her emphasis upon permanence and marital fidelity, her elevated, sacramental reading of marriage and her insistence upon following the spirit rather than the letter of Christ's teaching resulted in a position not unlike that of today's “irretrievable breakdown”: “Christ held that marriage should be permanent and indissoluble,” she observed, “but that He should insist on a legal contract from which all reality had departed … seems to me as … far from the spirit of Christ as east is from west.”Footnote ⁷⁶ If there was one striking characteristic of Christ's teaching, she observed, it was “His emphasis on reality.” Individual conscience should always take precedence over social conformity, thus any attempt by church and state to hold a husband and wife together in an ignoble marriage was “futile and immoral.”

The revised US edition of Sex and Common-Sense in 1922 contained an additional chapter on divorce law in which Royden expanded upon her strategies for reform. Rather than any further extension of causes for divorce, she favored an “equitable jurisdiction” with each case decided by the court on its own merits. Because judicial separations condemned men and women to a “legal lie,” marriages should be completely dissolved, she argued, “with freedom of re-marriage to other partners.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Only if, after substantial efforts at reconciliation, both parties remained “immovably and rationally convinced” that their marriage was over should they be “released” from the bond. For those considering remarriage, argued Royden, the need for premarital guidance on love, fidelity, sex, and children was essential. Children had a right to be brought up in a home “ruled by love,” thus the law was right to “rescue them from the misery of a home full of unhappiness and hatred, and … assign them to the parent who, in the judgment of the court, [wa]s best fitted to care for them.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Dora Russell would have agreed.

The radicalism of Royden's views on divorce came to a head in the fiasco over Edward VIII's abdication. In the mid-1930s she had decided to focus her energies on pacifism and resign from the Guildhouse Fellowship. At her farewell sermon in December 1936, with over one thousand people reported present, and in direct disobedience to the archbishop of Canterbury's wishes that those on the pulpit remain silent on the matter, she vehemently defended the king's actions. In proposing to marry Mrs. Wallis Simpson “for no other reason that than he loves her,” she declared, “the King has by his straightforwardness and courage challenged our insincere politics, our murky morality, and our conventional religion.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Guildhouse members and the national press were electrified. The News Chronicle and the Daily Herald carried the entire sermon. “Woman Pastor defends the King,” ran the Daily Express headline of 7 December.Footnote ⁸⁰ Most evident in the correspondence from Guildhouse members was an overwhelming sense of shock, confusion, and disappointment. “Even with your very advanced liberal political and distinctly modern Christian views,” exclaimed one correspondent, the king's behavior was hardly that of “a Christian gentleman.”Footnote ⁸¹ “I have heard you preach and admired you as a courageous leader of religious thought,” wrote a youth worker from Ipswich. “[T]herefore your support of the King's film star morality bewilders me.”Footnote ⁸² “I have set great store by your own Ministry and been helped,” wrote J. P. Brindley from Pontefract, “but I do not wonder you are giving up. After your letter so am I.”Footnote ⁸³ That there was a higher morality than that of the church's teaching, and one that resided in the decidedly modern construction of individual conscience and autonomy, was not an easy message to convey to a religious audience.

The Lambeth Conference of 1930 reaffirmed its refusal to remarry divorcees in church, but it simultaneously approved the use of artificial methods of birth control in cases of a “clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood” that was “decided on Christian principles.”Footnote ⁸⁴ As Tim Jones and Alison Falby have shown, Anglican attitudes toward family limitation shifted significantly between 1908 and 1930 from outright denunciation on moral, theological, and racial grounds, to one of guarded acceptance.Footnote ⁸⁵ The recognition of birth control as a key component of companionate marriage and a fulfilling sex life, pioneered almost single-handedly by Marie Stopes, met with stiff opposition from many Anglican and Catholic women during the 1920s and 1930s. Mothers' Union and Catholic Women's League members opposed contraception as emblematic of everything that was wrong with modern sexual morality, and the Anglo-Catholic Mary Scharlieb dismissed it as an excuse for “unlimited sexual gratification.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Royden's own attitude was one of moral pragmatism. She never regarded birth control as the ideal, and against more progressive feminist colleagues who saw it as the cornerstone of modern motherhood, she defended the Christian practice of sexual abstinence vigorously. In such marriages, couples “are not prigs,” she remarked. “[T]hey are not asexual, they do not drift apart.”Footnote ⁸⁷ But she was also convinced that “every child that is born should be desired.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the 1947 edition of Sex and CommonSense, she devoted an entire chapter to the subject, citing her own childhood as evidence of the estranged relations between parents and children in large families and reflecting back on her wartime experiences at Clapham Maternity Hospital. “A woman came in to have her ninth baby,” she recounted. “It was dead when born—a mass of syphilis. So were the preceding eight.” In such circumstances, she argued, it was “difficult to see how the merciful can condemn the use of contraceptives.”Footnote ⁸⁹

By the mid-1920s, the issue of family limitation had become part of a wider series of feminist campaigns around women's economic and social rights as mothers. Royden actively supported the provision of contraceptive advice at the newly established Maternity and Infant Welfare Centres and in 1926 coedited the translation of Austrian reformer Johann Ferch's book, Birth Control. In the introduction, she protested against the Labour government's refusal to authorize the dissemination of birth control literature to poorer women. Such information should be based on need, she argued, not on the ability to pay.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moral practicalities dominated her analysis, but it was not devoid of theological foundations. It was coercive sex and multiple pregnancies that profaned the sacredness of the human body and women's basic dignity, she insisted, not artificial forms of birth control as so many of her religious colleagues believed. Sex, although fundamentally procreative, had a sacramental status beyond reproduction: “The sex-love of men and women for each other is not a shameful thing, to be allowed only because the Almighty, in his inscrutable purpose, made it the only means by which the race could be continued. It is a lovely thing, lovely, in itself and even if no children are created by it.”Footnote ⁹¹

THE SECULARIZATION OF SEX?

Mathew Thomson has argued that by the early twentieth century psychology had become the embodiment of a particular “consciousness of modernity,” successfully replacing “alternative secular and religious frameworks for locating the self in the world.”Footnote ⁹² Freudian ideas of the self and sexuality, although never uncontested, were increasingly accepted by the British public by the 1930s, and new understandings of the subliminal, unconscious aspects of subjectivity along with the growth of an increasingly interior language of “personality” replaced the more visible hallmarks of Victorian discourses of the self—“character” and “conduct.”Footnote ⁹³ The church was not oblivious to these intellectual developments. Indeed, recent scholarship in the history of religion and sexuality has shown the way in which British and European sexologists and psychologists were cited in a range of institutional publications such as Lambeth Conference reports and the sex education literature of the Anglican White Cross League from the early 1900s.Footnote ⁹⁴ But the moral/medical nexus developed erratically and unevenly in interwar religious discourses. The following discussion examines one of the most fascinating palimpsestic features of Sex and Common-Sense—Royden's twenty-five-year engagement with the vocabularies of sexology (with reference to homosexuality) and the new British psychology—and explores the extent to which her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality can be seen as an unwitting secularization of her own ideas. As Jones has argued, the contiguity between Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic aestheticism and homoerotic sensibilities at the turn of the twentieth century never amounted to an official institutional acceptance of homosexuality. Not until the 1950s and D. S. Bailey's important writings for the Moral Welfare Council did the Church of England hierarchy formally recognize homosexuality as a distinct sexual identity.Footnote ⁹⁵ Yet thirty years earlier, Royden had both preached and written publicly on the subject. Although she regarded homosexual practice as a perversion of the creative function of heterosex, the 1921 edition of Sex and Common-Sense described the homosexual condition in remarkably compassionate terms as misunderstood and maltreated: “No one has suffered more cruelly or … hopelessly than those whose temperament or abnormality has been treated by most of us as though it were in itself, and without actual wrong-doing, a crime worthy of denunciation and scorn.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Although Royden was heavily influenced in her assessment of homosexuality by sexological categories and concepts, she vehemently disputed the way in which Edward Carpenter, in particular, “preached homosexuality as a kind of gospel.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In her chapter on “Friendship,” she conducted a detailed criticism of his definition of the homosexual as discussed in The Intermediate Sex and Love's Coming of Age.Footnote ⁹⁸ She acknowledged the changing historical constructions of homosexuality, noted its Hellenistic and biblical origins, and in the 1947 edition, described Ruth's devotion to her mother-in-law, Naomi, and the words spoken between David and Jonathan as the “noblest and most poignant utterances of love” in the Bible.Footnote ⁹⁹ Still, she argued, it was not possible to infer, as Carpenter did, that every intimate same-sex friendship in the past was homosexual and, as such, of a superior kind. The most evolved human types were not those who contained “the temperament of one sex in the body of another” but men and women who displayed the qualities of both sexes in a single hypostatic union. Think, for example, she wrote, of “the exquisite tenderness and joy of a St. Francis of Assisi, the courage and determination of a St Joan of Arc, the intellectual power of a St. Catherine of Siena.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The supreme example and pattern of humanity was not the homosexual, as the sexologists would have it, but Christ, in whom “power and tenderness, strength and insight, courage and compassion, were equally present.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Royden's consciousness of female homoeroticism was further raised in 1928 with the publication and subsequent obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's landmark lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. The contrast between her reaction to the book and that of the Anglican hierarchy could not have been greater. Despite a request from the Home Secretary and fervent evangelical, William Joynson-Hicks, Archbishop Cosmo Lang declined to comment and instead invited Bishops Garbett (Southwark) and Henson (Durham) to write in his place. Henson's disinclination and sheer bad-temperedness at being asked was evident in his reply to Lang: “I do not feel myself disposed, nor am I in the least competent to argue the case,” he wrote. “Moreover, the whole subject is disgusting to me and I have no desire to be mixed up with it.”Footnote ¹⁰² Royden entertained no such inhibitions. Having recently returned from a successful world lecture tour, she preached on “passionate friendships” and The Well of Loneliness to an attentive Guildhouse congregation in February 1929. In a remarkable sermon that echoed strongly the sexological rhetoric of Radclyffe Hall herself, Royden allied her own condition with that of the homosexual's, explaining both as an unfortunate “disharmony” of temperament. “God … no more made you an invert than he made me lame,” she declared. “These burdens that you and I carry, yours so much heavier than mine, were not imposed on us by God, but are the consequences of our social and individual disorders.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Censorship was not the way to improve the nation's morals: “But if there is to be censorship, why was this book chosen? I wish publicly to state that I honour the woman who wrote it, alike for her courage and her understanding; that I find her book as just as she is merciful and merciful as she is just; that her book seems to me to be altogether on the side of what is normal and right.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When she was made a Companion of Honor in 1930, Royden received a grateful letter of thanks and congratulations from Radclyffe Hall: “[T]o feel that a leader of thought like yourself had extended to me your understanding,” she wrote, “was, and still is, a source of strength and encouragement—thank you.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Some years later, Royden reflected with disgust in the 1947 edition of Sex and CommonSense on the hypocritical, prejudicial proceedings of The Well's trial itself where she had been called to give evidence. Once in court she found that neither judge nor jury had read the book and that witnesses were directed to read selected “indecent” passages in silence. “One … of the paragraphs cited was to my mind so innocent (and even, let me say, actually beautiful) that I thought I must be looking at the wrong page,” she recalled: “It referred to the possibility of a marriage being consummated out-of-doors on some warm summer night among the trees. I could not see any glimmer of obscenity in it and said so. The barrister was so amazed that he was silent.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

With an extended chapter on “Love and Friendship” and published correspondence on lesbian love in the appendix, the final edition of Sex and CommonSense offers a fascinating insight into the ambiguities and tensions involved in a modern religious articulation of homosexuality. Royden had certainly once held quite negative attitudes toward female homoeroticism, as when she warned midwifery student colleague Charis Frankenburg during the First World War about the advances of a “predatory lesbian.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ But in 1947 and by then seventy-one years of age, she wrote openly of how lesbian women “by mutual masturbation provoke a sexual orgasm similar to that which is the culmination of ordinary sexual intercourse between persons of different sexes” and even acknowledged that the tenderness of lesbian sex might pose a serious threat to marriage, given that “men were rarely as considerate to a woman's personality in the matter of sexual intercourse as a woman.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Like Edward Carpenter and Radclyffe Hall, she consistently demanded greater social tolerance and compassion for the congenital invert. But, unlike them, she envisaged God's plan as the transcendence rather than the consummation of same-sex erotic desire, offering homosexuals instead the spiritual compensation of a shared communion of suffering and the opportunity to join the “host of martyrs, prophets and saints.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ At the same time she recognized the inconsistency of a position that acknowledged the right of individuals to enjoy sexual pleasure outside of procreation while advocating that homosexuals themselves abstain from such activity: “Perhaps the best that I can get to is that in such cases lovers should aim at passing beyond the sacramental stage of love as soon as they can…. Physical passion usually dies at last even in the most passionate body and this should not be regretted as a loss but as an advance towards that celestial being into which physical passion does not enter.” “You will judge for yourself,” she concludes, “we all have to in the end, don't we?”Footnote ¹¹⁰

Having penetrated the fringe religious coteries of spiritualism and theosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, psychology had extended its popular influence into more mainstream religious circles by the 1920s and 1930s. As Mathew Thomson has suggested, rather than opposing religion, psychology meshed well with a “new spirituality of personal development, a modernist openness to the discoveries of science, and a reinvigorated practical pastoralism.”Footnote ¹¹¹ As well as Royden herself, many leading religious commentators on sexual morality—including the Reverend Arthur Herbert Gray (a Scottish Presbyterian minister who helped found the first Marriage Guidance Council in 1938) and the leading Methodist preacher Leslie Weatherhead—recognized the importance of scientific language in situating Christian discourses on sex as “modern,” as well as the potential of popular readings of Sigmund Freud in “reenchanting” and reanimating public interest in discussions of human ontology.Footnote ¹¹² The chapter headings and conceptual language used in the 1947 edition of Sex and CommonSense would suggest that, by this point, Royden had acceded to the increasingly secular, psychosexual mind-set of her readership. Her terminology was now replete with sexological and psychological vocabularies of “perversion,” “repression,” and “sublimation.” A new chapter, “Freud and After,” was located at the beginning of the volume, and her discussion of Christian sexual ethics, which was situated toward the end, began somewhat apologetically: “To those who do not call themselves Christians this chapter may seem unnecessary.”Footnote ¹¹³ Royden admitted that psychology had accomplished a great service to humanity in explaining the “scientific laws” regulating sexual conduct, something the church had been unable to do. Freud, she observed, had achieved a momentous act of human liberation in speaking openly of sex and the body not as sinful, not as the subject of fantasy or disgust, but as a series of physiological facts concerning human instincts and desires. The implications of this for female sexual repression were immense. “If Freud has taken the roof off the stuffy house in which civilized men have lived their sexual life, he may be said to have taken the roof off the world for women,” she declared.Footnote ¹¹⁴ “If there are statues put up to Freud, the first should be erected by universal subscription of all civilized women.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

Joy Dixon has suggested that the psychologization of religion “affected women more than men” due to “long-standing links between femininity, religious mania and hysteria which underpinned sexological and psychological writing on sexuality and religion.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Yet although appreciative of modern science's contribution to a more enlightened attitude toward sex, Royden was not uncritical of psychology's burgeoning cultural influence, nor did she favor the wholesale privatization of piety advocated by the American psychologist of religion William James, whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) she had read and dismissed as “vulgar” and not very profound.Footnote ¹¹⁷ She attributed the rapid dissemination of Freud's theories to the exceptional social conditions brought on by the First World War, which meant that “things that would have shocked a pre-war generation ceased to shock anybody,” and she thought that his “disciples” had profoundly misinterpreted his ideas. Freud certainly did not advocate the total renunciation of sexual self-control, she argued, he simply pointed out the psychological dangers of repressed erotic desire—not at all the same thing as a self-aware, intentional disciplining of one's physical passions.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Despite this, psychoanalysts had mistakenly ascribed to a single instinct the solution to individual happiness, national welfare, and even international peace, and in so doing had ignored the fundamental political, social, and economic analyses of human misery. The result of this exaggerated oversexualization of human nature, she wrote, was a widespread “sex obsession” encouraged by pseudoscientific texts, popular novels, and the cinema, rendering “sex appeal” a “commercial asset … as never before.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ “There are quite a lot of us who are thankful to get away from the continued and monotonous recital of people promiscuously going to bed with one another,” she commented drily of her favorite genre, the detective novel.Footnote ¹²⁰ One could certainly claim a great deal for sex, but not everything: “The time has come for a return to sanity. The main part of Freud's teaching stands because it is true…. Our task now is to get it into proportion. Sex is a part of life. It is an enormously important part…. But it is not everything. To sex we must add commonsense.”Footnote ¹²¹

Christian ethics and a good stiff dose of British practicality were what was missing in the sex-obsessed modern world, according to Royden. In the final edition of Sex and CommonSense, she depicted Christ less overtly as a divine being and more as a human figure of unrivaled historical influence upon Western civilization. Christ was the exemplar of an unsurpassed moral standard in which the body was honored as sacred, marriage was exalted, the adulterous woman was forgiven, and the prostitute was treated with compassion and dignity. Without the teaching of modern psychology, remarked Royden, he was “the greatest psychologist in history.”Footnote ¹²² He understood that the power to create sexually was just part of a much greater power of social creativity and that in order to advance human civilization, sexual discipline and self-control were vital.

Written in a similar postwar, nation-building context to that of the 1921 publication, Royden located her final discussion of sexuality in the 1947 edition of Sex and CommonSense within the wider framework of civilization and human progress. Whereas she had initially seen the sexual license of the 1920s as a transitory stage in human development, she now regarded the apparent hedonism of the past decades as an “enormous waste of creative power.”Footnote ¹²³ Drawing on British anthropologist J. D. Unwin's study Sex and Culture (1934), which identified monogamous sexual practice as a key component of all advanced societies, Royden maintained that as the historical injustice of the sexual double standard was passing, modernity, civilization, and the quest for human advancement were best pursued not by the selfish wastefulness of sexual excess but by the sublimation of individual pleasure for the common good and the diversion of erotic energies toward more socially valuable ends. On that principle, at least, she remarked, both Freud and Christ might agree.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

As Mathew Thomson has suggested, religion's appropriation of psychological ideas undoubtedly helped it to respond to the secularizing process by modernizing orthodox Christian categories.Footnote ¹²⁴ By the late 1940s, however, the pace of change in Britain's sexual landscape and the array of intellectual scientific responses to these developments meant that Sex and Common-Sense no longer struck quite the same note of radical Christian optimism as when Royden first preached its contents to the Guildhouse congregation twenty-six years earlier. Although still active in her seventies, writing and broadcasting, Royden's public image was less militant and her recommendation of the Marriage Guidance Council in the 1947 preface was indicative of the way in which institutional religious practices had eventually caught up with some of her more progressive sexual attitudes. Not that her discourse of high-minded Christian ideals had convinced everyone. When Bertrand Russell wrote to her on 5 October 1917, for example, he evinced a very different perception of modern moral standards. Not only did he dismiss organized religion as an “ancient superstition,” he also accused her of concentrating her attention upon “the rather serious reformers whom one is likely to know best” and therefore being out of touch with the great moral changes taking place in the “frank pursuit of pleasure by men and women alike.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Too naïve and reactionary for radical secular reformers like the Russells, too controversial for the Anglican hierarchy, the very embodiment of a progressive modern Christianity to many in the British press and (most of the time) her devoted Guildhouse members—such differing responses to Sex and Common-Sense only served to illustrate the multiplicity of available notions of modernity during the period. As a recent review of approaches to modern selfhood has shown, historians of sexuality have begun increasingly to speak in terms of “diverging modernities … productive of correspondingly diverse identities and selves.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Such highly individualized, localized, and multifarious readings would appear to negate any easy assumptions as to the intrinsically or uniformly secular character of modern culture. As this article has indicated, shifting social attitudes toward, and definitions of, sex provided early twentieth-century religion with some of its keenest opportunities to demonstrate the relevance of faith to a modern age. The individual case study of Maude Royden suggests that Christian discourses, particularly noninstitutional ones, did not simply drop off the sexual radar after 1918 but continued to influence and engage with British public opinion throughout the interwar decades and beyond.

The analytical potential of sexuality and gender as theoretical categories through which to illustrate mainstream Christianity's “liquid,” shape-shifting qualities is a challenge yet to be fully undertaken by historians of religion as part of wider debates on secularization: Callum Brown's thesis on the simultaneous demise of pious femininity and institutional religion in the 1960s is a notable, albeit problematic, exception.Footnote ¹²⁷ Similarly, rather than asserting religion as modernity's “other,” historians of sexuality could profitably explore the symbiotic slippages between the sacred and the secular, not as a marginal concern, but as a critical dynamic of British twentieth-century sexual culture. This would enable not only the hidden heterocentrist operations of institutional religious power but also more populist equivocal discourses such as that of Royden's to be exposed, as British public opinion reinvented its imaginative identification with Christianity. The palimpsestic qualities and unresolved internal contradictions of Sex and Common-Sense illustrate that Royden's own interrogation of the secular, her own reading of the “modern” and “sexuality,” was always profoundly unstable. So, too, was the de-Christianization narrative. Far messier and more complex than its comfortable linear trajectory would have us believe, Royden's textual ambiguities and tensions signalled, metonymically, modernity's “reality.”