The last gasp of political Protestantism

I'm very pleased to be able to say that an preview is available of an article that John Maiden and I have had accepted for publication in Parliamentary History. It should appear sometime in 2012/13. This version is that accepted for publication, but before the (minor) amendments made in response to peer review and before copy-editing. Read it in SAS-Space:   'Parliament, the Church of England and the last gasp of political Protestantism, 1963-4.'

It looks at the attempts by evangelicals to prevent the passage through parliament of controversial measures relating to canon law revision in 1963-4. It assesses the interaction between church and legislature, the influence of both evangelical lobbyists and MPs, and the terms by which issues relating to religion and national identity were debated in parliament. It shows that while evangelicals were able to stir up a surprising level of controversy over canon law revision in the 1960s, the influence of political protestantism, and thus a significant long-term theme in British politics, had finally run its course.

National days of prayer in a period of crisis, 1966-74

Dipping one's toe tentatively into the new world of Open Peer Review, a draft paper of mine on archbishop Michael Ramsey is now available for comment and criticism at the History Working Papers Project. The idea is that HWPP can re-create the interchange of a seminar online, with readers commenting on the paper as a whole and on individual paragraphs, with an opportunity for the author to respond, and post revised versions for subsequent rounds of review. More on the HWPP project is available here.

The paper examines the petitions that were made to Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, to call a national day of prayer. It considers the grounds upon which the petitions was made, and the Church’s official reactions to them. In doing so, it sheds light from an unaccustomed angle onto attitudes towards petitionary prayer among some of the British public, on understandings of the role of the archbishop as leader of the nation’s religious life, and of the recent providential history of the nation, particularly during the 1939-45 war.