Callum Brown's collection of books on religious and sexual change in modern Britain have provoked heated and healthy contestation amongst scholars of both religion and sexuality; this latest offering will be no different. In The Battle for Christian Britain, Brown reaffirms and offers some new perspectives on his central thesis that “discursive Christianity” (vii)—the dominant culture through which people made sense of their lives through the long 1950s—was abruptly halted by a short sexual revolution in the mid-1960s. He focuses here on two new casts of characters—conservative Christian vigilantes, such as the Public Morality Council, bent on quelling and policing deviancy, and ascendant, publicly visible humanists working to free Britain from the shackles of Christian prudishness, censorship, and misery. Brown argues that these two groups were locked in a series of battles over the moral and epistemological foundations of British society that played out in various frontline arenas: censorship of print, stage, film, and education; licensing of public venues; legal reform around medico-moral issues and broadcasting; and tangential contests between and within different denominations and the security services. According to Brown (and with a somewhat unnecessary spoiler alert for anyone familiar with his oeuvre), conservative Christianity lost.

Brown's work is a meticulously researched meditation on the entanglements between sex and religion. He persuasively entreats historians of modern Britain to pay more attention to this nexus, analyzing materials from a range of local and national archives that reveal both the power and demise of Christian regimes of sexual regulation. Illuminating oral history interviews with BBC producers demonstrate how religion became a subject of satire at the very moment that atheists took a leading role in pioneering secular programming. The real significance of Brown's intervention lies in his complication of the sexual geography of mid-century Britain. By reorienting attention away from the well-trodden spaces of Soho and the metropolitan avant-garde toward provincial areas such as Blackpool, Sheffield, Glasgow, and the Isle of Lewis, Brown animates new questions about where and how cultural change is located.

Brown's prose is characteristically snappy, combative, and compelling. Barbed reproach is dealt out to not only the Christian moralists who “imposed upon the British people a high degree of ignorance about the human body and sex” (5) but also “revisionist” historians of religion who have focused on liberal Christianity at the expense of conservative groups, such as the Public Morality Council. There is some truth to the claim that historians of modern British Christianity have overcompensated in their attempts to disrupt assumptions about the repressive, reactionary and antimodern nature of religion. But Brown's survey of the field is, at times, reductive. Some of the gaps in the literature that he identifies are not as gaping as he insists: where he claims that there has been “zero recognition” of “women's choices” in a post-1960s context (22), the recent (perhaps too recent for the date of Brown's publication) research of Ruth Linley (“The Personal is Political is Spiritual: Feminism and Religion in Modern Britain, PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2019) and my book, The Pope and the Pill: Sex, Catholicism and Women in Post-war Britain (2019) will come as informative reading. Important work that has teased out the nuanced and contingent relationship between religion and sexual liberation—such as Timothy Jones's Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857–1957 (2012); Laura Ramsay's “The Ambiguities of Christian Sexual Discourse in Post-war Britain: The British Council of Churches and Its Early Moral Welfare Work” (Journal of Religious History, 40, no. 1, [2012]: 82–103); and perhaps most pertinently, Sam Brewitt-Taylor's Christian Radicalism in the Church of England and the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957–1970 (2018)—is lumped together and broadly dismissed. Consequentially, Brown slips into the very trap that he accuses “revisionist” religious historians of being ensnared in—namely treating a particular strand of Christianity, a strand constituted by a diffuse and often contradictory constellation of individuals, ideas and theologies, as the epitome of Britain's “dominant” (287) Christian culture. As such, the framework of a battle, with historical actors ushered into one side or another, presents a falsely dichotomous view of postwar British society that irons out the textured contests and dialogues which circulated around sexual morality, the ethics of behavior, and the politics of the body. Brown's contention, for example, that Blackpool was more demographically important than Soho to the liberalization of the national sexual culture is well made; it was a space where the working family, as opposed to an artistic elite, encountered seminudity on a darkened stage, double entendres from comedians, and saucy cartoon postcards. But when we consider Brown's didactic—in the words of Bernice Martin, “self-righteous” (review of The Battle for Christian Britain in Church Times, 28 February 2020)—framing of these developments as unproblematically progressive, typified by lines such as “Blackpool showed ordinary young women how to be proud of their bodies on near-naked display” (91)—we are left wondering what the often secular and in many cases avowedly Humanist second wave feminists of the early 1970s might have made of it. A myriad of responses no doubt, but these complexities are lost in the pursuit of a binary battle.

Brown's turn to the provinces can also be placed in the context of recent work which has contended that, largely due to the growth of migrant communities, London became a locus of “desecularisation” from the late 1970s (David Goodhew and Anthony-Paul Cooper, eds., The Desecularisation of the City: London's Churches, 1980 to the Present [2019]). The dominant Christian culture that Brown traces is a predominantly white culture. Brown's seminal book The Death of Christian Britain (2000) reframed approaches to religious change by demonstrating that women experienced the traditional drivers of secularization, particularly industrialization and urbanization, differently to men (Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 [2000]). The field would now benefit from a fuller attention to how race and ethnicity intersected with trajectories of sexual and religious change in an age of migration and apparent postcolonialism.

A stimulating, if skewed, survey of a shifting moral culture, this book will provoke lively debate among historians of modern Britain.