Christian Radicalism and the Hope of Transcending ‘Religion’

Abstract

This chapter outlines the radical Anglican contribution to the ‘secularization’ metanarrative, which suddenly achieved cultural dominance in British discussion in the early 1960s. During the early Cold War, it had been widely assumed that ‘religious decline’ was a regressive phenomenon, fatally detrimental to human freedom, as apparently exemplified by the Soviet Union. From the late 1950s, however, Anglican radicals drew on Christian eschatology to propagate a radically alternative vision, which interpreted recent declines in ‘religion’ as evidence of humanity’s permanent transition into an unprecedented new ‘secular age’. Once this interpretation had achieved wide circulation in the British media, it broke free from its theological origins, entering both British conventional wisdom and conventional sociology. From the early 1960s, the secularization narrative was increasingly widely enacted in British culture, as more and more people imagined themselves and their society as being unprecedentedly and permanently non-religious.