Christian Radicalism and the Hope of a Revolution of Love

Abstract

This chapter explores the radical Anglican contribution to the wider Sixties cultural revolution in the realm of personal and sexual morality. Prior to the 1960s it had been widely assumed that loving other people involved adhering to norms of respectability, but the re-imagination of Britain as a secular society gave unprecedented legitimacy to the idea that future moralities would necessarily be antinomian. Radical Anglicans played an important role in the early stages of this development, using their clerical credentials to disseminate antinomian moralities chiefly derived from their readings of Christian eschatology. In this way, they played a central role in framing and disseminating the myth that a permanent ‘sexual revolution’ was occurring. Once widely accepted in the British media in the mid-1960s, these ideas were enacted by increasingly large sections of the British population thereafter, leading to a slow but profound transformation of British moral culture.