ABSTRACT
‘To put it bluntly, religion attracts; the Church repels.’ So said Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Church of England’s Archbishop of York, in 1922, in analysing what many considered a religious crisis. The First World War, he felt, had shaken ideals as well as nerves, breaking confidence in ever-advancing social progress, with the result that ‘post-war confusions had left a taste of moral failure’. 1 Optimism was gone, replaced by a confused prognosis of Christian Britain’s condition. Did the future lie in ecumenical church union based on liberalism and compromise? Or was the way forward going to be in conservative retrenchment and religious puritanism?
