Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957

Uncovers a surprising history in which the Church of England successfully negotiated a series of sexual controversies. In contrast to its contemporary reputation, through much of this time the Church led social change in these areas, welcoming more equal relations between the sexes and embracing sexual pleasure as a deep human good.

The period between 1857 and 1957 saw a transformation in Anglican sexual understanding when the established church negotiated substantial new normative interpretations of marriage, sexuality, citizenship, and priesthood. Timothy Jones demonstrates how the introduction of female voices into the previously exclusively male spheres of power transformed understandings of gender. He also delineates the impact of the Anglo-Catholic revival on Anglican sexual culture, in particular, the significance of catholic sacramentality on understandings of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. Sexual Politics in the Church of England exposes a surprisingly dynamic and dialogical relationship between theology, feminism, and the new sexual sciences that resists the teleologies of secularisation that dominate the histories of sexuality and Christianity in Britain. The story of Anglican sexual politics told in this book firmly rebuts contemporary notions of the Church as an inevitably reactionary institution. On the contrary, it reveals the Church''s historic capacity to renegotiate gender and sexual ideologies, and shows how it was often at the forefront of sexual change in British society.