While they have often mentioned in passing the importance of Anglican support for the 1957 Wolfenden Report, few accounts of the reform of the law on homosexuality have examined this role in detail.Footnote 1 This is symptomatic of a wider tendency by historians of the ‘permissive society’ to ignore the role played by official bodies in initiating reform.Footnote 2 Most histories of the permissive reforms have concentrated on the activities of pressure groups, assuming that the role of official bodies was always reactive rather than proactive. To argue that institutions (especially religious ones) could themselves have been agents of permissiveness has been too counter-cultural for some tastes. Some historians have also deprecated the conservatism of 1950s and early 1960s legislative reformers, upbraiding them for failing to espouse a modern doctrine of rights. There is a risk of anachronism here; the arguments of reformers need to be presented in the context and with the constraints within which they operated. Recently, some historians have begun to question the anti-authoritarian bias of accounts of the 1960s, by demonstrating the agency of central and local government, and professional bodies, in promoting permissive reform.Footnote 3 But the role of the Church of England in this process has still hardly been examined. The Church was prominent in a number of campaigns for legal reform, on homosexuality, the abolition of the death penalty and the rights of immigrants. Although it did not play as proactive or supportive a role in all the permissive reforms, it was also constructively involved in finding a settlement to thorny issues like divorce and abortion.Footnote 4 Oliver McGregor referred thirty-five years ago to the ‘remarkable and usually unnoticed role of the Church of England as an active agent of change’ in the 1960s, but this role remains largely unexplored.Footnote 5
A study of Anglican involvement in permissive reform has implications for the debate about secularisation. Secularisation theorists and revisionists alike have tended to agree that Christianity was a marginal and declining element in national life from the late 1950s. But the prominence of Anglicans in debate about moral reform suggests that this analysis may be misplaced. The Churches, and the Church of England in particular, were still deferred to as authorities on morality, even by those who were giving up religious observance. Stuart Hall has pointed to the apparent paradox of ‘the vital and continuing force of religion in the articulation of moral ideologies and the regulation of moral practice, even in our so-called “materialist” society – and at a time of their manifest institutional decline’.Footnote 6 Examination of the established Church's role in reform also refutes the assertion that the Churches were caught off guard by changes in public opinion or private morality.Footnote 7 On the question of homosexuality, the Church was a pioneering body in advocating reform, and was well in advance of public opinion on this question, something which caused it problems.
Nevertheless, there was a sort of secularisation process occurring in the permissive reforms of the 1960s, and in the debate which preceded them. This was the secularisation of the criminal law – an attempt at cutting the link between crime and sin. The secularisation of the law has been ignored by traditional secularisation narratives, which in Britain (though not elsewhere) have concentrated overwhelmingly on private practice rather than public authority. As H. L. A. Hart pointed out, the 1961 Suicide Act was a legislative ‘landmark,’ because it was ‘the first Act of Parliament for at least a century to remove altogether the penalties of the criminal law from a practice both clearly condemned by Christian morality and punishable by law’.Footnote 8 This was followed by other reforms in the same vein: the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the 1967 Abortion Act and the 1969 Divorce Reform Act. The removal of legal sanction from Christian morality was not a new process, but what was new was the passing of such a large number of pieces of legislation. This formal secularisation was encouraged by many (though not all) senior Anglicans, who were keen to unyoke the law from Christianity. The locus classicus on which the desirability of this process was debated during the later 1950s and early 1960s was homosexual law reform.
The Wolfenden Report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was convened in 1954, and reported in 1957.Footnote 9 More important than its specific provisions was Wolfenden's celebrated distinction between public and private morality: ‘There must remain a realm of private morality which is, in brief but crude terms, not the law's business.’Footnote 10 This principle lay behind the report's contradictory recommendations – tougher control of prostitution, insofar as it happened in public, liberalisation of homosexuality, insofar as it happened in private. But, as Jeffrey Weeks has pointed out, this distinction between private and public morality also became a touchstone for subsequent moral legislation.Footnote 11 The Wolfenden enquiry had been the product of a moral panic about sexual offences in the early 1950s. Although the government initially only intended it to cover prostitution, the issue of homosexuality was appended to it. There had been a steep rise in convictions for homosexual offences in the early 1950s, which led to increasing public concerns about the discrepant policies of different police forces, and about the employment of uncorroborated informants' evidence, which was used in the controversial conviction of three well-connected men, Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, in 1954.
Another factor which influenced the inclusion of homosexuality in the terms of the Wolfenden enquiry was the Church of England Moral Welfare Council's own 1954 interim report, The problem of homosexuality, which advocated both the legalisation of homosexual acts in private and the creation of a government commission on the question. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, an Anglican priest who was study secretary of the Moral Welfare Council, wrote an article in Theology in February 1952, arguing that the Church needed to explore the question of the legal position of homosexuals.Footnote 12 Having received a large postbag about this article, he persuaded the Moral Welfare Council to convene a panel of doctors, lawyers and clergy.Footnote 13 Although initially intended for internal circulation, its interim report was in fact widely circulated, even eliciting a fan letter from the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey.Footnote 14 The report came as a surprise to both reformers and their opponents, because it came from an unexpected source. Some of this surprise was expressed by Peter Wildeblood, then incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs, in his autobiography, Against the law:
This pamphlet must have come as a considerable shock to those state officials who were now in full cry after Edward Montagu, cutting, as it did, the moral ground from under their feet. It surprised me, too. I had always thought of the Church as the last stronghold of prejudice and had never found an occasion for praising it for its courage in controversial matters; yet here, from Church House, came an attack on the law which was as broad-minded, clear-headed and brilliantly argued as one could wish. It was all the more surprising because the English laws against homosexuality were religious in origin and widely held to represent the views of the Church.Footnote 15
The Moral Welfare Council report seems to have been instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of homosexuality in the terms of the Wolfenden Committee. It was certainly widely cited by other supporters of an enquiry, including Lord (Bob) Boothby and the Sunday Times. The Moral Welfare Council expanded on its arguments in its evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, published in 1956 as Sexual offenders and social punishment. Like The problem of homosexuality, this submission was substantially drafted by Derrick Sherwin Bailey. It ostensibly dealt with prostitution as well as homosexuality but, like the eventual Wolfenden Report itself, it concentrated overwhelmingly on homosexuality.
What arguments did Anglican leaders use in support of homosexual law reform? One reason was that they regarded homosexuality as ‘basically a psychological condition’.Footnote 16 Homosexuals were described in the Church's evidence to the Wolfenden Committee as ‘inverts’, and as ‘handicapped by inversion’ – a term which Sherwin Bailey took from the writings of the Edwardian sexologist Havelock Ellis. Homosexuals could not help their natures, which were held to be a result of over-attentive mothers, sexual segregation in adolescence or the disruption caused by the world wars, and the reports were suspicious of the argument that homosexuality could be cured. Anglican categorisation of homosexuality as a disorder did not mean, however, that homosexual acts were right; far from it, they were ‘contrary to the will of God for human sexuality, and are therefore sinful per se’.Footnote 17 The Church thus drew a distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual acts (a distinction which is still controversially invoked today). Inversion could ‘no more be regarded as God's will for a person than can, for example, deformity or mental deficiency’. The designation of ‘invert’ was by no means exclusive to the Church of England report; it was very pervasive in the 1950s and was used by many homosexuals, including Peter Wildeblood, though it was eschewed by the Wolfenden Committee in its report.Footnote 18
In their evidence to Wolfenden, church leaders also gave pragmatic grounds for changing the law. The current law was inconsistent because it punished male homosexuality and not lesbianism, and punished male homosexual acts committed in private, but not the equally sinful acts of heterosexual fornication and adultery. Another pragmatic argument was that illegality could leave homosexuals open to blackmail or suicide, and could even lead to the rise of a ‘homosexual underworld’, investing homosexuality with the status of a secret society.Footnote 19
There was a further reason for reforming the law on homosexuality which was more theologically and philosophically rooted. To the authors of the two Church reports on homosexuality in the mid-1950s, it was axiomatic that public and private morality ought to be separated, and that the law should not punish acts committed in private. Law was ‘not to safeguard private morality or to shield the mature citizen from the temptation to do wrong’.Footnote 20 This separation of law and morality was the principle that Wolfenden later applied, but for churchmen, it had theological implications, because it involved separating sin from crime. Thus the Church's submission to Wolfenden said that ‘we would submit … that it is not the function of the state and the law to constitute themselves the guardians of private morality, and that to deal with sin as such belongs to the province of the Church’.Footnote 21 For churchmen, this debate was partly about drawing a line between the jurisdiction of Church and State.
Why did leading Anglicans draw this distinction between public and private morality, between crime and sin? It appeared to run counter to much earlier Anglican ethical commentary, which held that morality was a continuum, and that public and private could not be separated. Partly, no doubt, it was a result of a wider change in the conceptualisation of the state after 1945. The desire to delineate an area of private life that was outside the province of the state was expressed widely by politicians and philosophers after the Second World War, which had exposed the dangers of totalitarianism. This suspicion of the public and collective, and a preference for individual liberty, could be seen in Isaiah Berlin's inaugural lecture on Two concepts of liberty delivered in Oxford in 1958. In politics, the Conservatives appealed to individual liberty against late 1940s austerity, using a rhetoric of ‘setting the people free’.Footnote 22 Stung by the electoral defeats of the 1950s, Labour revisionists picked up this theme, and in The future of Socialism (1956), published the year before Wolfenden in 1956, Tony Crosland criticised the ‘public virtues’ of socialist moralists like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, arguing that these needed to be replaced by ‘a greater emphasis on private life, on freedom and dissent, on culture, beauty, leisure and even frivolity’.Footnote 23 So there was a general intellectual shift from the common good to the private.
But there were also internal reasons why the Church of England wanted to separate law and morality. Although it had happened nearly thirty years previously, the experience of the Prayer Book crisis of 1927–8 had scarred the Church of England, leaving a generation of Anglicans wary of state intrusion into the province of the Church. Few went as far as Hensley Henson, who advocated full-scale disestablishment, but some did begin to wonder aloud about the relationship between the law and Christian morality. When A. P. Herbert's Matrimonial Causes Act, which liberalised divorce law, passed in 1937, Cosmo Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, had concluded that ‘it was no longer possible to impose the full Christian standards by law on a largely non-Christian population, but that the witness to that standard … must be left to the Church’.Footnote 24 Others, including Michael Ramsey, had drawn the same conclusions from the Herbert Act. Having been ordained during the Prayer Book controversy (and having also come from a Congregationalist family background), Ramsey shared the desire to draw back from too close a relationship with the state. He later observed that establishment had ‘never been one of my enthusiasms’.Footnote 25
Although calls for greater separation of Church and State were quelled by the Second World War, they began to resurface in the 1950s. A number of young Anglicans advocated disestablishment in the pages of the radical journal Prism from the late 1950s.Footnote 26 Some, like Valerie Pitt, were radical Anglo-Catholics who were reviving the anti-statism of the Edwardian theorist, J. N. Figgis. This argument was also later pursued in books like Denis Munby's The idea of a secular society (1963), and The secular promise (1964) by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, a Mirfield monk and literary critic who had been called as a defence witness in the Lady Chatterley case.Footnote 27 Edward Norman rightly points out that these books exaggerated the extent to which Britain was, in fact, a secular society.Footnote 28 There was a degree of wishful thinking here – of willing the process of secularisation. Although many Anglicans were still reluctant to support full disestablishment, there was much general support for cutting other potentially oppressive ties with the State, including the Church's association with the criminal law.
It is hard to say how far Wolfenden's eventual conclusions were influenced by the Church of England's evidence. The Church of England was just one of a number of bodies (the Roman Catholic Church was another) which advocated reform. The committee also rejected aspects of the Anglican evidence, such as its use of the typology of inversion.Footnote 29 Wolfenden's distinction between crime and sin was not new – it had been made by John Stuart Mill in On liberty, and had received official sanction in the 1928 report on Street Offences. It is also true that the report was deliberate in not referring to any religious authority. It contained the disclaimer that it did not ‘extend to assessing the teaching of theology, sociology or psychology in these questions’.Footnote 30 This has led Patrick Higgins to dismiss the argument that the Church of England played an important role in the Wolfenden Report as ‘a piece of pure propaganda’.Footnote 31 But in concentrating on the wording of the report, Higgins ignores the Church's key role in establishing the Wolfenden Committee, and the close links between Wolfenden himself and the Church of England.Footnote 32 Though born a Methodist, Wolfenden conformed to Anglicanism as an adult, corresponded closely with bishops throughout the period of the production of the report, and was appointed by Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher as chairman of the Board of Social Responsibility – the new umbrella body for the Moral Welfare Council – after the report was published in 1958.Footnote 33 While it is true that the report itself was secular in tone, this secularity was endorsed by senior Anglicans, who shared its premise that sin and crime should be separated. And while historians have noted the report's deference towards the opinion of experts, it has often been overlooked that it treated the clergy as experts, alongside doctors and lawyers. The Wolfenden Committee certainly drew strength from the fact that the Church of England had supported reform, and Peter Richards has argued that the Church's was ‘by far the most influential submission to the Committee’.Footnote 34 It is worth speculating on what would have been the effect if the Church of England had instead opposed reform. The example of Scotland, where (after fierce internal debate) the Church of Scotland opposed the Wolfenden Report, and where homosexual law reform did not occur until 1980, suggests that clerical obstruction might have delayed reform well beyond 1967, though it is true that the established Church was by no means the only body opposing reform in the Scottish case.Footnote 35
The Moral Welfare Council's position was strongly opposed from within the Church of England. Anglican opposition to homosexual law reform was as striking for what it did not say as for what it did. Arguments from Scripture about the legitimacy of homosexual acts were very seldom deployed by senior clergy, though they did feature in correspondence by lay people and some parish clergy who opposed the Church's position.Footnote 36 The absence of appeals to Scripture partly reflects the sparsity of Evangelicals among the episcopate, but it was also partly because the debate was not about the morality of homosexual acts per se, but about their legal status. Most opponents argued in pragmatic terms that the general public was just not ready for reform. The bishop of Carlisle, Thomas Bloomer, warned the House of Lords in 1957 that ‘there is a great gap between the thinking of many people on the subject of the relationship of law and morality and the thinking of ordinary folk, in the highways and byways of life, who do not think very much about it at all’.Footnote 37
Critics also argued that the Moral Welfare Council was not even representative of opinion within the Church of England. The bishop of Rochester, Christopher Chavasse, wrote to Wolfenden in 1955 warning him that the Moral Welfare Council's evidence was ‘not the view of the Church of England as a whole’.Footnote 38 There was some truth in this, as Wolfenden himself acknowledged when he pointed out to his committee that ‘by no means all theologians (and still less all lay people) are so enlightened on these matters as Bailey and [his Catholic counterpart] Mgr Tomlinson and their colleagues’.Footnote 39 In their oral evidence to the committee, members of the Moral Welfare Council conceded that they could not speak on behalf of the Church as a whole; as Sherwin Bailey put it, ‘we might be disowned by the Church Assembly at any moment’.Footnote 40 This caveat was almost borne out when the Church Assembly voted on the Wolfenden Report's recommendations on homosexuality in 1957. The vote was extremely close, 155 in favour of legalisation, to 138 against. The narrowness of this victory shocked some erstwhile reformers, who began to worry that the Moral Welfare Council had gone too far, too fast. Bishops were also aware of the large amounts of correspondence they were receiving from laypeople and parish clergy expressing bemusement or aggravation at what they saw as an unheralded volte-face in favour of reform. Ordinary churchgoers' feelings of disempowerment at being presented with a fait-accompli on homosexual law reform anticipated those expressed by both Anglican and Catholic congregations in the 1960s and 1970s, when liturgical reforms were introduced without (as they saw it) adequate consultation.Footnote 41
Some opponents developed the pragmatic argument that the reformers were not representative of public opinion into a more detailed theory about the relationship of law and public opinion. They argued that as a moral community, the nation needed a moral framework, and that law should embody the morals (and by extension the religion) of the majority of the population. The idea of the nation as a moral community – so essential to wartime morale – remained pervasive in 1950s Britain. In their article on ‘The meaning of the coronation’ in 1953, the sociologists Edward Shils and Michael Young described the recent coronation ceremony as evidence of Britain's shared conception of virtue, ‘a degree of moral consensus such as few large societies have ever manifested’. For Shils and Young, it was natural that this moral consensus had been expressed in Christian ritual, because ‘Britain is still generally a Christian country’.Footnote 42 In the same year, in the debate on the Queen's Speech, the eighty-three-year old veteran Liberal politician Viscount Samuel expressed his view that ‘the moral side of the nation is at the base of everything else’. Samuel's target was sexual immorality, which he attributed partly to the decline of religious sanctions, and he rather luridly declaimed that ‘we find to our dismay that the vices of Sodom and Gomorrha, of the cities of the plain, appear to be rife among us’.Footnote 43 The implication of Samuel's warning was that if religion could not provide a moral framework, something else, probably the criminal law, would have to do so. This argument was taken up by the opposition to the Wolfenden proposals. Bishop Bloomer told the House of Lords in December 1957 that ‘the abolition of this law would take away props from many people who need help’.Footnote 44 As Home Secretary, R. A. Butler used the same argument to justify the government's refusal to implement Wolfenden's recommendations on homosexuality, telling the Commons in 1960 that ‘in a period when religious and ethical restraints are weak, as undoubtedly they are now – and they should be strengthened – the restraints of the criminal law acquire a special significance’.Footnote 45
The most thorough articulation of the argument that law was an expression of moral solidarity came from the Catholic judge Sir Patrick Devlin in his Maccabaean lecture to the British Academy on ‘Morals and the criminal law’ in 1959. In his own evidence to Wolfenden, Devlin had supported the repeal of the law against homosexual acts committed in private (though he favoured the retention of buggery as a crime).Footnote 46 But he took issue with the basic premise of the Wolfenden Report. He denied that it was possible to separate public and private acts, as Wolfenden had claimed, because acts committed in private could still have an impact on social cohesion. Devlin argued that if the majority of the population found an activity like homosexuality disgusting, and decided that it undermined social cohesion, then it should be illegal. More broadly, he argued that no society could exist ‘without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics’, and that Christianity should provide these moral ideas, because ‘morals and religion are inextricably joined’, and the majority of the country was Christian. Devlin assumed that on most issues there was ‘no practical difference’ between Christian morals and ‘those which every right-minded member of society is expected to believe’.Footnote 47
Devlin's lecture drew a famous response from another jurist, H. L. A. Hart, in his book Law, liberty and morality, the argument between the two reprising John Stuart Mill's Victorian argument with James Fitzjames Stephen.Footnote 48 Hart argued that Devlin's argument that certain forms of immorality could undermine social stability was as baseless as the Emperor Justinian's belief that homosexuality caused earthquakes.Footnote 49 He argued that it was ‘sociologically naïve’ to suggest that there was any longer a consensus on sexual morality in England:
The fact that there is lip service to an official sexual morality should not lead us to neglect the possibility that in sexual, as in other matters, there may be a number of mutually tolerant moralities, and that even where there is some homogeneity of practice and belief, offenders may be viewed not with hatred or resentment but with amused contempt or pity.Footnote 50
Devlin's idea of punishing sexual offenders ‘simply as a means of venting or expressing moral condemnation’ was ‘uncomfortably close to human sacrifice as an expression of religious worship’.Footnote 51
This debate was largely a good-natured battle, conducted between members of the establishment who knew and liked one another. Hart and Wolfenden remarked to one another in their letters that they liked Devlin, in spite of finding his arguments naïve.Footnote 52 Wolfenden wrote to Devlin saying that ‘one of these days we really must have a drink or a meal together, and have a good old up-and-downer on the whole subject’.Footnote 53 The debate also cut across religious and friendship ties. The Anglican Wolfenden found himself on the same side as the Jewish atheist Hart, while Devlin found himself on a different side of the argument from his old Cambridge Union friend Michael Ramsey.Footnote 54 A number of other Anglicans also took Hart's side in the debate, because they feared the implications of Devlin's argument that law should reflect the morality of the majority. Writing in Prism, David Nicholls warned that Devlin's majoritarianism was ‘based on the sands of moral scepticism and relativism’, and was ‘very much more dangerous to morality than anything which the Wolfenden Report puts forward’.Footnote 55
Nevertheless, while rejecting Devlin's main thesis, a number of Anglicans conceded that he had raised a significant difficulty – his argument that the law was an expression of the moral solidarity of a community, and that to change it could thus have profound implications for that community. Devlin's view that society was based on ‘community of ideas’ was in line with much Anglican communitarian thought, which had been strongly influenced by Oxford Idealism.Footnote 56 The publication of Devlin's lecture in 1959 coincided with Sherwin Bailey's departure from the Moral Welfare Council. His effective successor, G. R. Dunstan, took a more conservative view of homosexuality, and drew a more nuanced distinction between law and morality. Writing in 1960 to the head of the newly-launched Homosexual Law Reform Society, J. N. F. Newell, Dunstan complained:
I wish the moral issues were already as clear as you suggest. They are clear to the Bishop of Exeter [Robert Mortimer] and to moralists and thinkers of his calibre. But there is still widespread confusion in the nation at large. In my view, we have patiently to enlighten this confused mind before a change in the law is likely to come about. What effective answer, for instance, has been made to Sir Patrick Devlin's Maccabaean Lecture? Indeed to amend the law in advance of this clarification of the general mind is really to invite further confusion and conflict.Footnote 57
The sense that public opinion was not yet ready for reform led the Moral Welfare Council to revisit the issue of homosexuality. Dunstan convened a group to see if a compromise could be found which would make homosexuality unlawful, but not illegal.Footnote 58 In other words, the law would still indicate its disapproval of homosexuality, but it would not punish homosexual acts. Dunstan attempted to enlist the support of Lord Denning in this plan, although Denning thought the distinction was too narrow to be understood by the public.Footnote 59
There was also some disquiet that Sherwin Bailey had drawn a specious distinction between crime and sin, and between public and private morality. This had been raised by the Wolfenden Committee itself. Cross-examining Sherwin Bailey and two other representatives of the Moral Welfare Council for the committee, V. A. Demant argued that they had adopted too hard and fast a distinction between law and morality, and Sherwin Bailey conceded that this may have been the case.Footnote 60 When the Moral Welfare Council produced a report advocating the decriminalisation of suicide in 1959, it appeared to be rowing back from the crime–sin distinction, actually saying that ‘it seems difficult, if not impossible, to welcome any dichotomy between law and morality, let alone between both and religion. The Christian must continue to see in law an embodiment of his religious and moral insights, insights which are there translated into rules for the ordering and well-being of a community’.Footnote 61 While the report advocated the legalisation of suicide, it was careful to do so on pragmatic grounds, rather than on the grounds that crime and sin should be separated. Robert Mortimer, bishop of Exeter and the leading ethicist on the bench, also denied a hard and fast distinction between public and private, writing in 1960 that ‘it is indeed questionable whether there is such a thing as private morals’.Footnote 62
One reason why senior churchmen were so attuned to public and church misgivings about Wolfenden was that some of them shared these misgivings. Archbishop Fisher was a case in point. Although he became something of a hero after supporting reform in 1957, drawing effusive tributes from Peter Wildeblood and Wolfenden, Fisher had always been a reluctant reformer. As late as 1953, he had been an opponent of reform, writing to a campaigner for it that ‘quite obviously society must protect itself against this as against any other anti-social moral perversion. This is hardly the moment at which to put in a plea for a better law or for public sympathy’.Footnote 63 In 1954 Fisher had tried to get the director-general of the BBC, Sir Ian Jacob, to stop John Gielgud, who had recently been convicted of a homosexual offence, from appearing in a radio play.Footnote 64 Fisher repeatedly tried to get the Moral Welfare Council to tone down its demands for reform in the early 1950s. After the Wolfenden Report was published, he wrote privately to Wolfenden, confessing that
I am not quite sure about the Homosexual question. I have some evidence that there is a kind of Freemasonry between homosexuals which include [sic] definite group organisation for its propagation and for handing on young initiates from one local group to another. If so, this comes very near to anti-social disturbance of public decency.Footnote 65
Indeed, Fisher actually favoured extending the law's control over sexual morality. The logic of the discrepancy between illegal homosexuality and legal adultery was not that homosexuality should be legalised, but that adultery should be criminalised. Reacting to Wolfenden in 1957, he appeared to be arguing that adultery should be made illegal.Footnote 66 His advisors may subsequently have intervened to stop him making a fool of himself on this question: a letter to The Times in which he advocated criminalising adultery was marked ‘not to go’, perhaps by a Lambeth Palace official.Footnote 67 But in private he was forthright. ‘What a splendid thing it would be if every adulterer found himself sent to gaol for six months’, he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Scarborough, in 1958.Footnote 68
After Fisher's retirement in 1961, the consensus in the Church seemed to move back in favour of liberalisation. The new archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, was far more sympathetic to reform than Fisher, and had been a patron of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS). The activities of the HLRS also contributed to a change in public opinion in favour of homosexual law reform, which left Anglican reformers feeling less exposed.Footnote 69 Ramsey's archiepiscopate coincided with the permissive legislation passed from 1966 onwards under the aegis of the Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins. Jane Lewis and Patrick Wallis have already demonstrated the extent of the collaboration between Ramsey and the government on divorce law reform.Footnote 70 The same close collaboration occurred on homosexuality, with Lambeth Palace acting as a point of liaison between backbench peers and MPs who were promoting legislation, and mounting an effective whipping operation to ensure that bishops turned up to support the reforms. When the earl of Arran introduced his bill in the House of Lords in 1965, the bishops put down helpful amendments (drafted by Parliamentary Counsel at the behest of the Home Office).Footnote 71 When a successor bill to Arran's, Leo Abse's Sexual Offences Bill eventually passed in July 1967, Ramsey wrote to Arran saying ‘with all my heart I send you my congratulations and gratitude for your leadership throughout this long and often painful struggle’.Footnote 72
On the face of it, the spectacle of the archbishop of Canterbury working with Labour ministers and the HLRS might seem to confirm Edward Norman's thesis that the Church of England was simply aping the mores of the secular intelligentsia.Footnote 73 But it is important to recognise that moderate reformers like Michael Ramsey did not support reform on grounds of moral relativism. Indeed, they still insisted that homosexuality was wrong. It is true that there were some in the Church who did seem to be espousing a relativist position in the early 1960s, and the actions of Ramsey were conditioned by a perceived need to face down these radicals. Modernist proponents of ‘South Bank religion’, so called because of its association with the diocese of Southwark, were championing the ‘new morality’ and ‘situational morality’, espoused by John Robinson in Honest to God (1963) and by another South Bank theologian, Douglas Rhymes, in No new morality (1964).Footnote 74 The ‘new morality’ argued that Christianity had retained too much of an attachment to the idea of law, as exemplified by St Paul, rather than the ethics of love taught by Christ, while situation ethicists held that whether or not something was immoral depended on the situation.Footnote 75 Ramsey supported the same reforms as some of the modernists, but he did so from a very different position. They argued that because society was changing, the Church should change its moral teachings. Ramsey held that because society was changing, the criminal law should change, but Christian teaching should not. Splitting Christian teaching from criminal law was in fact a way of holding the line against theological change, by walling off Christian moral teaching from the pressures of a changing society. In a speech in the Lords in favour of homosexual law reform in 1965, he was careful to distinguish himself from supporters of the new morality, insisting that ‘Amid the modern talk about the “new morality” I would uphold the belief that just as fornication is always wrong, so homosexual acts are always wrong.’Footnote 76
Study of the Anglican role in the debate on homosexuality has implications for two contested historiographical concepts – secularisation and permissiveness. When church leaders backed reform of the law on homosexuality, they were supporting a process of secularisation of the law, which they felt was a necessary response to the wider secularisation of society. The interesting thing was that this wider secularisation was perhaps more imagined than real; as Callum Brown points out, church attendances were still very resilient in the late 1950s, peaking in 1958.Footnote 77 This raises the possibility that the idea of secularisation had an imaginative appeal which did not necessarily relate to statistical reality, but which informed the clergy's decisions. Secularisation was a process that was about much more than church attendance. It was also about the structures of public authority, and in this respect some clergy were willing agents of secularisation. But the very weight accorded to their interventions on moral questions by the government and the media suggests that their diagnosis that Britain had become a secular society was misplaced.
What are the implications of the debate for the historian of the permissive society? A first point to make is that this is one example of how the ‘establishment’ did not always oppose reform, but could also promote it. In this case, there was little ‘pressure from without’ for reform of the law on homosexuality; it was pressure from within, initially in advance of public opinion, which prompted re-examination of the issue. To some extent, this bears out Noel Annan's depiction in Our Age of a closely-knit liberal establishment.Footnote 78 Senior clergy, along with other public intellectuals, still envisaged themselves in Arnoldian terms, as having a duty to educate public opinion. But, as this episode shows, they were also becoming increasingly nervous about the dangers of running ahead of public opinion. A second point is the almost complete absence of individual rights from reform discourse in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 79 Insofar as there was concern for individual homosexuals, it was still expressed in communitarian terms: the law was wrong because it estranged them from community, not because it infringed their right to express their sexuality. Much of the debate about homosexuality in the 1950s and '60s was really an argument about the sustainability of a national moral community, bearing out Abigail Wills's argument that ‘the transformation of the ideology of reform in the 1960s can be best understood not simply as a move towards “permissiveness,” but as a fundamental shift in ideas about the nation’.Footnote 80
The Church of England's decision to support homosexual law reform was highly qualified. For many liberal Anglicans, the conviction that the law needed to be reformed did not detract from a belief that homosexual acts were wrong. The consensus achieved in support of Wolfenden's proposals was thus an uneasy one, which was to come under attack after 1967 from protest movements on both sides – from radical supporters of gay liberation who decried the compromises of the 1967 legislation, and from conservative morality campaigners like Mary Whitehouse. Mrs Whitehouse herself drew support for her campaigns from a mounting sense among lay people that their moral values were not being adequately represented by a liberalising bench of bishops, and the debate on Wolfenden gives an early indication of this rift between senior clergy and their grassroots. With hindsight, it is astonishing that the liberals prevailed in this early skirmish. As Wolfenden observed to Fisher in 1957, the incredible thing was not that the Church Assembly had voted only narrowly in favour of the Wolfenden Report, but that that it had voted in favour at all: ‘If you or I had said 5 years ago that in November 1957 the Church Assembly would decide by a majority that adult consenting homosexual acts should be taken out of the criminal law, we should have been removed to a lunatic asylum.’Footnote 81 Many Anglicans seem to have been torn between their liberalising instincts and a vestigial sense of the nation as a Christian moral community. Their reluctant conclusion that this moral community could no longer be sustained is an important aspect both of the process of secularisation, and of the creation of a ‘permissive society’ in post-war Britain.
