Going ‘part of the way together’: Christian intellectuals, modernity and the secular in 1930s and 1940s Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers how a British Christian intellectual group perceived the crises of the 1930s and 1940s as an epochal transformation and sought to restore ‘true’ freedom to a society dominated by ‘materialism’ and the loss of ‘community’. It sought to make Christianity relevant in new, ‘modern’ circumstances, asserting the transcendent elements of Christianity while condemning many Christians’ refusal to accept ‘secular’ knowledge and the ‘autonomy of the secular’ in some spheres of life. Its members were convinced that it would be possible to go at least ‘part of the way together’ with non-Christians in building a better modernity.