Anglican Social Gospels and the Testimony of Science

Abstract

Gore, Temple and Tawney were dominant figures on the more radical flank of the Church of England in the interwar period. There were strong personal ties between them, dating in the case of the two younger men from boyhood at Rugby and their subsequent careers at Balliol.¹ All three were associated, in different ways, with the ICF. Tawney, ‘a discriminating satellite in the outer orbit of the Church of England’,² joined the Council but only for a year, in 1923–4, and attended neither of the meetings. Gore attended committee meetings and three Council meetings in 1920–1, while Temple, who became Bishop of Manchester in January 1921, attended a Council meeting in 1920. Like Gore, he continued his formal membership and encouraged the organisation, which was active in his diocese, but apart from certain public activities at the time of the General Strike, neither man was identified particularly closely with it. Indeed, the ICF was just one element, though an important one, in the consortium which Temple drew into the organisation associated with his 1924 Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship in Birmingham (COPEC). The support of such widely known Christian Socialists was, nevertheless, of prime importance to the ICF and both Gore and Temple were major influences on its Messenger. An influence in some respects more fundamental, though unacknowledged and submerged, was, it will be suggested, that of the Rev. William Cunningham (d. 1919). Like Tawney, he was a distinguished economic historian.