“Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.”
–Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis
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An elegiac verse from the patron saint of university librarians rather accurately dates the emergence of the permissive “Sixties,” more a state of mind than an exact decade—a change of social mood which mass media spread across the world, enfolding in itself the concept of a youth culture entitled to challenge the assumptions and mores of a previous generation, not least on matters of sex and gender. D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover may now seem a pretentiously overheated celebration of integrating mind and body in human love, but it was then notorious: after its first private publication in 1928, the unexpurgated text of the novel had never been legally available in Britain.
The prosecution of Penguin Books in 1960 for publishing an obscene book was a deliberately symbolic case, quietly arranged between the UK Director of Public Prosecutions and the publisher in order to test the boundaries of the recent Obscene Publications Act (1959). A policeman called at Penguin’s London offices by prior arrangement to collect a proof copy that counted as publication and therefore the basis of the court action. Among the expert witnesses lined up to defend it were prominent Anglican clergy, including an Anglican monk. Penguin’s acquittal ensured handsome sales across the world.
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What Philip Larkin’s verse does not capture is how unexpected the subsequent social and religious changes seemed at the beginning of the 1960s. In the USA, the 1950s have been viewed as another Protestant “Great Awakening,” with Church membership increasing from 50 per cent of the population in 1940 to almost 70 per cent in 1960: actual church attendance peaked at around half the American population in 1955. The two decades after the Second World War seemed peculiarly promising for mainstream Protestantism worldwide. It was possible to see the destruction of Nazism as a victory for the values of liberty and democracy much prized by anglophone Protestant societies—so long as one did not leave too much space on the moral high ground for Soviet Russia’s part in Hitler’s defeat.
Certainly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that accompanied the foundation of the United Nations in the late 1940s emerged from the same circle of liberal Protestants who had been active in developing ecumenical ties between Churches over the previous half-century.
Success bred ecclesiastical self-confidence, yet in the case of mainstream Protestantism, that meant a continuing openness to what might need modification in moral pronouncements.
The Atlantic Isles shadowed this north American profile in general ecclesiastical optimism. In 1959 the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson (soon to be notorious for disturbing British theological certainties) could assure his confirmation candidates that they were “at a time when great things are afoot” in the Church: “I believe that in England we may be at a turning of the tide. Indeed, in Cambridge, where I have recently come from, I am convinced that the tide has turned.” In the Republic of Ireland, now fully independent of the United Kingdom, a different cultural history underlay the unrivaled hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s. It was personified by the formidable figure of Archbishop John McQuaid in Dublin, assiduously courted by successive Irish governments and by President de Valera himself.
The Republic, sheltered by neutrality in the Second World War, had changed little after Independence in its Edwardian rural poverty. Over thirty years from the break with the British Empire, its Protestant population had plummeted, the lost Protestant Ascendancy visually symbolized across the Irish landscape by ruined gentry houses and derelict Church of Ireland parish churches. Outside the Protestant remnant, McQuaid and his lieutenants ruthlessly maintained Catholic family and clerical life in the image of Vatican I, and made sure that the Censorship of Publications Board protected the whole population from sexual filth.
Success bred ecclesiastical self-confidence, yet in the case of mainstream Protestantism, that meant a continuing openness to what might need modification in moral pronouncements. In the United Kingdom, there was general public surprise in the 1950s that influential clergy of the Church of England (and rather more hesitantly, the Church of Scotland) would consider the decriminalization of homosexuality.
Behind the scenes in the 1930s, Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had been involved in thoughtful correspondence about the wider implications of the decision on contraception at the 1930 Lambeth Conference, and after the hiatus of the Second World War, others felt impelled to revive the subject. Derrick Sherwin Bailey was a genial and scholarly Anglican clergyman who had the independence of mind to produce a general survey of Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, in a monograph of 1955 still worth reading; he carried his scholarship into public action in further publications and on the Church of England Moral Welfare Council.
As a result, Bailey’s was an influential voice when a series of gay sex scandals involving the prosecution of prominent people embarrassed the Conservative government into setting up a committee of inquiry chaired by Lord Wolfenden to investigate the laws on prostitution and homosexuality. It recommended a limited decriminalization. Even Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher—ever the public-school headmaster, after his years at Repton School—was cautiously in favor, though he would personally have preferred extending the criminal law to cover heterosexual adultery (on that subject, his staff at Lambeth Palace saved him from public ridicule by quietly intercepting his letter intended for The Times). Tory fears meant that legislation on Wolfenden’s recommendations was postponed into the time of a reform-minded Labour government in 1967; Scotland had to wait till 1980.
By 1967, the mood of the “Swinging Sixties” obscured how much the Church of England had been involved in the background of the law partially decriminalizing male homosexuality. Nevertheless, the then Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey robustly supported the Bill in the House of Lords, riding out criticism because of his Anglo-Catholic theological conviction that the law of the State had no business interfering in private morality, which should be the concern of the Church alone. He was one of a generation of liberal Anglo-Catholics who had already been infuriated by the secular Parliament interfering with reform of Anglican liturgy in 1927–8. Now in answering a private letter from one outraged opponent of changing the law, he tartly commented: “It seems to me that an enlightened Christian morality does require that we avoid suggesting that sexual sins are necessarily more terrible than others because Christ does not suggest this.”
In north American mainstream Protestantism, there was a similar mood. The National Council of Churches hearkened to changing medical and psychiatric opinion in the 1950s when it sought to reduce a quarter of a millennium of Western panic about masturbation. This emphasis on the necessity of drawing on supposedly objective medical expertise did raise the question of what special authority Christians would be bringing to such questions; Protestant liberals did their best. They reconsidered sexual activity among young people by applying criteria of reason and love, part of what was soon to be termed “the New Morality”—a term first given publicity in 1959 and taken up on both sides of the Atlantic: its first exponent, the Episcopalian priest Joseph Fletcher, pursued the theme in his book Situation Ethics (1966).
A five-day conference at Green Lake, Wisconsin, in 1961 on “Church and the Family” managed to push its agenda beyond the relatively uncontroversial discussion of sexual intercourse in marriage into sexual and “New Morality” matters generally: the Quaker Mary Steichen Calderone, a former Director of Planned Parenthood, in a speech that left a lasting impact, inter alia afforded various male delegates their first viewing of selected female hygiene products.
None of this was calculated to impress conservative Christians, and in the 1970s the already fragile nexus between liberal and conservative Protestants withered away. A century of mainstream Protestant dominance in American sex education was coming to an end; as gradually became apparent, so was the expansion of American churchgoing. One factor might be that liberal Protestants, mindful and approving of artificial contraception, were now planning smaller families than their conservative neighbors. Around the anglophone world, in a considerable irony, the family unit that had triumphed in the Protestant Reformation against centuries of celibate ascendancy now steadily undermined churchgoing.
The rhetoric of the twentieth-century family emphasized affectionate companionship—”Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage,” in the words of a popular song my early boyhood—and that family was smaller than in the past, inviting the prospect of a new intimacy. First the radio and then the television became fixtures to gather family members together in the evening, and on Sundays, the leisure day from work, they might all enjoy going out somewhere together in the newly acquired family car.
From the eighteenth century, anglophone parents (possibly with a sense of relief at having some time to themselves) had their children sent off to Sunday School, one of the chief success stories of the Evangelical Revival. From the late 1960s, they stopped doing so. British statistics tell the tale: in 1900, 55% of British children attended Sunday School, 24% in 1960, 9% in 1980, and 4% in 2000. Traditional Christian literacy, handed down the generations across the UK by such means, began to erode, and the habit of churchgoing along with it.
Such consequences were not immediately apparent, and Protestantism’s general mood of optimism and hospitality to a variety of changes in the Christian message seemed to be paralleled in Catholicism in the wake of the second Vatican Council, which generated unprecedented ecumenical warmth between Western Churches. This was particularly perceptible in Dutch Catholicism, right up to its leading figure, Cardinal Bernardus Alfrink, who attended the Council following a recent joyful swerve away from his previous conservatism.
The Dutch clergy proposed changes to canon law easing the way for those who entered “mixed” or cross-confessional marriages, already becoming more frequent in the Netherlands as traditional confessional “silos” in Dutch society broke down. They also voted overwhelmingly for an end to eight centuries of compulsory clerical celibacy. Pope Paul VI had been loyal to the agenda rather surprisingly set by progressives at the second Vatican Council with the encouragement of Pope John XXIII—liturgy in the vernacular, affirmation of lay ministry in the Church, openness to other Christian bodies and, indeed, to the world in general. But on issues of gender, family and sexuality, Paul VI found the limits of his progressive instincts: a year before his disastrous decision on artificial contraception, he reaffirmed the celibacy rule for the priesthood, and discouraged any further debate on the issue.
The angry reaction to this among many clergy anticipated the more general fury and disappointment at Humanae Vitae. Worldwide, priests renounced their public ministry to marry; in the West, numbers offering themselves for ordination began an inexorable decline. Among Catholics in many parts of Africa, where marriage was considered de rigueur for everyone regardless of clerical status, the reaction was simply to carry on as usual and to look benevolently on Catholic priests who cherished their spouses and offspring: a pattern with a precedent in many parts of medieval Europe. In Africa, significantly, vocations to the priesthood continued to flourish.
Through the 1970s and beyond, Western Churches contended with successive fallouts from the contraceptive revolution and the “New Morality:” first mainly in renewed campaigns for female ordination and then for acceptance of openly gay people and their relationships within Church membership. What had been a rather hesitant growth in Protestant Churches ordaining women broke a notable barrier in one of Europe’s most liberal countries when the established Lutheran Church of Sweden began such ordinations in 1960—now more than half the Swedish Church’s priests are women—and after that, anglophone Presbyterianism in various settings.
The Anglican Communion followed, with Hong Kong defiantly resuming the practice in 1971; British Methodists adopted female ordination without too much fuss in 1974, having already postponed the move in order to facilitate reunion schemes with the Church of England that ultimately failed. The dramatic Anglican sequence came not in the UK but in the USA and Canada, unilateral moves causing great unease in Lambeth Palace. The Church of England became an ecclesial battleground, postponing the ordination even of women deacons till 1987, and waiting till 1994 to ordain female priests. It then took twenty more years of argument and political maneuver in the Church’s General Synod to see the first consecration of a woman as bishop in England.
One of the reasons for that long-drawn-out result was the divisive effect of this issue on the theological parties that had emerged worldwide in the nineteenth-century Anglican Communion. Both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics now fissured between traditionalists and those sympathetic to change, and that has endured into subsequent fights, notably around attitudes to homosexuality. There has never been an exact transference: it is notable that a few female Evangelical bishops still fail to notice that the same theological arguments propelling them to consecration to the episcopate apply just as much to accepting homosexual relationships on equal terms, while the same inconsistency is perceptible among some gay Anglo-Catholics who still deplore the ordination of women while gratefully accepting the liberalization that has helped them organize their lives as they would wish. Indeed, for obvious historical reasons, conservative Anglo-Catholics have never been as convincing or full-throated opponents of gay equality as conservative Evangelicals, despite usually voting in the same direction when Church legislative bodies have proposed change.
In a considerable irony, the family unit that had triumphed in the Protestant Reformation against centuries of celibate ascendancy now steadily undermined churchgoing.
Campaigns for gay rights were the logical fulfillment of Bishop Charles Gore’s prophecy on contraception, though not a result he would have sought. The first impulse of gay Christians in the West, like African Americans in eighteenth-century north America or African Independent Churches in subsequent centuries, was to found their own Church communities, free of condescension or worse from the existing Churches.
So, in 1968, Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal pastor, gathered a little congregation, at first in his own home in Huntington Park, a low-income suburb of Los Angeles. Perry chose to call his congregation the “Metropolitan Community Church” (MCC). The carefully neutral description additionally reflected a consistent characteristic of the emerging gay liberation movement: as with self-assertions of identity throughout Western history, it was easier to make one’s own choice amid the relative anonymity of an urban setting.
The MCC ethos remained Bible-based in a Pentecostal fashion, though from the beginning a diverse sacramental flavor was mixed in by Perry’s insistence on the centrality of a weekly Eucharist. He performed the first public same-sex wedding of the modern age in 1969, and after many difficulties in finding a place to worship, the congregation gained its first permanent building in 1971—the victim of arson within two years. Conservative Evangelical hostility was predictable and vocal, often wildly misrepresenting the reality of the MCC.
Interestingly it echoed the anger that Evangelicals had expressed towards Pentecostalism in general at the beginning of the century, and for a similar reason: the MCC looked too infuriatingly similar to Evangelical revivalism for comfort, so much of the vitriol was directed to alerting those who might have been tempted by its devotional style to the moral dangers that the community offered. Evangelicals had some reason for their alarm: the MCC grew at a rate that Evangelicals or Pentecostalists could only envy, having within five years of its foundation achieved 40 congregations with 13,000 members. Over the following half-century MCC congregations have emerged in hundreds of different contexts, still largely urban, across at least thirty-seven different countries.
Just as in the days of slavery in America, other gay Christians were determined to make their presence felt within existing denominations. Roman Catholics, inspired by Vatican II, were pioneers, with pastoral counseling groups founded by clergy that turned into more public witness and campaign organizations: Dignity from 1969 in the USA and, in the UK, Quest from 1973. Hardly surprisingly the Quakers were early pioneers as well, in the UK founding the Friends’ Homosexual Fellowship that same year.
The next logical step was to try for a more ecumenical approach, witnessed by the creation of the Gay Christian Movement in 1976. The name was significantly male-centered, and the early ethos of GCM was predominantly Anglo-Catholic or liberal Anglican. In an organization notable for strongly fought internal debate, it took nearly a decade for a renaming as the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Since 2017 the recognition of further complexities in queer identities have brought a name that is a more inclusive as well as theological proclamation: OneBodyOneFaith.
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From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Copyright © 2025. Published by Viking, a division of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
