From Father to Friend: Faith, Feminism, and the Face of God in Modern Britain

How did the face of God change from all powerful Father in the 1840s to a loving Friend in the 1930s? Koven analyzes the private ethical dilemmas of women and men of faith living sexually non-conforming lives with their public advocacy of new kinds of non-hierarchical relations between God and humanity. He begins his story by analyzing the relationship between Victorian Britain’s most influential, albeit controversial, theologian, the Christian socialist Frederick Denison Maurice and his failed curate, Edward Carpenter, democratic socialist and champion of homosexual rights. Carpenter transformed Maurice’s celebrated assertion that the Fatherhood of God necessitated the brotherhood of mankind into a call for a new kind of manly comradeship across boundaries of class, nation, creed, race, and religion. Koven tracks the implications of Carpenter’s radical recasting of brotherhood through various communitarian experiments in religion, ethics and politics with the emergence of Brotherhood churches in the last decades of the 19^th century. He ends his story exploring the theology and sexology of early 20^th century Britain’s most celebrated woman preacher, the pacifist feminist Agnes Maude Royden.  In the early 1920s, Royden published her best seller, Sex and Common Sense and a collection of sermons, The Friendship of God. Koven argues that Royden’s frank embrace of the sacramental goodness of sex – as well as her capacious sympathy for a broad range of forms of sexual selfhood – went hand in hand with her refiguring of God as friend.