This book presents an original and archivally rich account of the Church of England’s institutional grappling with matters of sex, relationships, marriage, birth control, and same-sex attraction between 1918 and 1980, uncovering a long and complex history of debates and disagreements that led to its present-day impasse over issues of sexuality. Across a long and previously underexplored chronology, the book examines various ways in which Anglicans shaped and popularised understandings of s...

During the twentieth century, the relationship between the Church of England and the British state was transformed. The character and dynamics of the connections shifted as politics became more democratic and society more secular,as the role of the Crown and parliament in Church government was curtailed, and as the Christian foundations of secular law were weakened. Yet the increasing formal separation of Church and state was not accompanied by ecclesiastical disengagement from politics an...