Callum Graham Brown (b.1953) is a Scottish historian and author. Currently Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow, Brown is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Biography
Callum Brown was born in 1953 and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. Following a brief period as a civil servant, he embarked on an academic career, teaching first at Lancashire Polytechnic (now the University of Lancashire) and then the University of Strathclyde from 1985 to 2004. He then moved to the University of Dundee, where he was Professor of History. Brown was latterly Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of Glasgow. In 2020 he celebrated his 30th year in the industry. Brown retired from teaching at the University of Glasgow in 2023.University of Glasgow Centre for Gender History Newsletter, Issue 9, January 2024, p.2 In July 2025, Brown was among 92 academics elected to the British Academy's Fellowship, recognising their outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences. He commented that after over forty years working as a historian, he was “delighted to be joining the British Academy.” "Though retired”, Brown said that he still “got a buzz from discovery in the archives”, and that he “hoped to continue researching and writing twentieth century British history for many years yet.” He is married to fellow historian, Lynn Abrams. Research and Publications
Secularisation For fifty years, Callum Brown has studied the decline of religion, principally focusing upon Britain, but also Canada and the United States, and, to a lesser extent, Europe. In the first phase of his academic career, research concentrated upon the 19th century. His first monograph, the Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 adhered to a then current orthodoxy which envisaged the influence of religion having diminished during the late 19th century as a result of urbanisation. Later, Brown came to believe that this thesis was incorrect, and that secularisation did not properly take hold in Britain until the mid-twentieth century.1] This first book was heavily revised for a new edition which appeared in 1997 as Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707.2] The later edition argued that nineteenth century clergy had created a discourse of the 'unchurched' urban working classes which later influenced what historians believed, but that in reality, religiosity remained strong. It also drew upon then emerging trends in history writing, chiefly a burgeoning concern with identities. The book was perhaps the first Scottish history which related the marginalisation of a culture of puritanism in the 1960s and 1970s to arguments about changing expectations about leisure time. By the mid-2020s, Brown believed that the progress of secularisation had been sufficiently thorough in Scotland that if published today, Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 might struggle to gain a significant readership due to low levels of public knowledge about churches, particularly amongst younger generations, coupled with the dwindling appeal of religious history.
Brown's focus then turned to reconceptualising secularisation in the twentieth century. His research moved beyond the borders of Scotland. He developed a central thesis which asserts that secularisation in the western Christian world has been both rapid and intense since the 1960s, but should not be regarded as confined to decline of churches, faith or religious behaviour. Secularisation, Brown argues, is multi-faceted. Eventually, he came to delineate five forms of secularisation which had previously been overlooked by historians, proceeding to research and write a book on each of them.
Firstly, secularisation was identified as the breakdown of hegemonic Christian culture, triggered by the collapse of conventional female piety in the 1960s, in The Death of Christian Britain (2000). Here, the ‘death’ of Christian Britain stands for the demise of the nation’s core religious and moral identity. For a thousand years, Brown reminds the reader, Christianity 'penetrated deeply into the lives of the people, enduring Reformation, Enlightenment and industrial revolution' by adapting. Then, in the 1960s, there was a ‘profound rupture’ which sent organised Christianity into a ‘downward spiral into the margins of social significance.’ When writing, Brown innovated using discourse analysis and women's history, both of which he had then recently been introduced to by Abrams, rejected the primacy of social class as insufficient to explain the magnitude of change in religious fortunes, instead alighting upon gender history. The Death of Christian Britain deployed a postmodern-inspired approach of discourse analysis and personal testimony study, combined use of which in religious history was then relatively novel. The book was widely reviewed upon publication and generated some controversy; Brown received biblical texts and warnings of hell, while some Christian historians and sociologists were hostile. In the early years of the internet, The Death of Christian Britain generated vigorous online discussion and engagement.
Secondly, in Religion and the Demographic Revolution (2012) secularisation was investigated as a demographic phenomenon. Secularisation was, Brown demonstrates, accompanied by a demographic revolution, in which family structure was revolutionised by plunging fertility and marriage rates, and in women's identities, a transformation in the social construction of gender, involving the search for autonomy in sexual expression, education and economic life. Secularisation has, Brown argues, been a gendered event, perhaps even 'highly feminine.' It emerges into sight as a 'process in which women's participation was slight before the 1960s, and major thereafter, with an impulse to reconstruction of female selfhood 'embroiled in the sixties revolution' and the ideological impulse of second-wave feminism.
Thirdly, secularisation was seen as the recrafting of the self, studied through oral history, in Becoming Atheist (2017). Based on interviews with 80 people stretching from Estonia in the east to Vancouver and San Francisco in the west, this book was the first to analyse how people narrated their loss of religion in and after the 1960s, according to gender, age, ethnicity and cultural contexts.
Fourthly, secularisation was studied as a struggle between liberal and conservative moralities in the 1960s, considered in The Battle for Christian Britain (2019). This conflict, conceived of as a 'battle' between conservative religious morality and secular humanists, a 'tiny, but well-organised group who developed, between the 1930s and the 1970s, a specific ethical polity, based on the individual’s right to control over their own body.' Sex and morality were the site of ‘battles galore’ as humanist activists sought legislative change in sexual affairs, including decriminalisation of male homosexuality, medical abortion and attempted suicide, as well as marriage law and divorce law reform, liberalised access to contraception, and an end of literary censorship. ‘Holding this ethical polity together,’ was, as lawyer Glanville Williams laid out in 1958, ‘a need to set the human body free from external, state endorsed theocratic control.’ But for conservative Christians like Roman Catholic lawyer, Norman St-John Stevas, these policies 'represented a dangerous credo which would cut the human body adrift through theology, state control and sexual restraint.' Sex was, Brown argues, ‘complexly and intensely entwined in post-war conservative Christian thought’, a ‘fuel for moral frenzy.’ The ensuing ‘battle’ was one with at least seven different front-line zones.’ First, there was the ‘struggle of conservative religionists to impose upon the British people a high degree of ignorance about the human body and sex’ through mechanisms of censorship in print, broadcasts, stage performances, film and education.’ Secondly, the struggle waged by local authorities on behalf of the churches and their members to impose moral puritanism upon the people by means of the licensing system. Brown examines this process through archival case studies of ‘licensing in the provinces’ - Blackpool, Sheffield, Glasgow, and the Isle of Lewis, showing how the local state varied in its moral priorities. Thirdly, a struggle between religionists and their opponents in the theatre of moral and medical law, and fourthly, a contest around the Christian monopoly on ethical and religious broadcasting. Fifthly, a ‘discreet tussle’ between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church over who could ‘pick up the moral baton dropped in the face of the secular challenge.’ The two final battles are sparingly addressed in the book, the first, he explains; the state surveillance of humanist and secularist figures is hard to address due to inaccessibility of sources, while the struggle over sex between liberalism and conservatism inside the major churches ‘awaited comprehensive scrutiny.’
Finally, in Ninety Humanists and the Ethical Transition of Britain (2026) secularisation as ethical change between 1930 and 1980 in an ‘Open Conspiracy’ of intellectuals. Here, Brown charts the role of elites in engineering ethical change, a 'fifty year transition devoid of party politics and religion' led by 'just under a hundred of Britain's leading scientists, writers and social reformers', who, inspired by the work of H.G. Wells, 'created a diverse and remarkably successful social movement', which 'led to the dismantling of 'longstanding Christian moral legislation.'
Oral History Brown was one of the earlier pioneers of the use of oral history in Scotland. He began using the methodology in the early 1990s, when teaching and researching at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. In 1995, he co-founded, with Arthur McIvor, the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC), based at Strathclyde, as a hub for training, expertise and archiving oral history. The Centre reached its 30th anniversary in 2025. A book resulted from Brown's oral history work at Strathclyde, co-written with Arthur McIvor and the late Neil Rafeek, the University Experience 1945-75: An Oral History of the University of Strathclyde. For just under a decade, between 2009 and 2017, Brown worked on a rolling programme of oral history interviewing for his ‘Becoming Atheist’ research project, which investigated individual stories of secularisation since the 1960s. He enquired into the lives of humanists, atheists, agnostics, sceptics, secularists, rationalists, and freethinkers. Beginning in Scotland with the humanist celebrant who married him and his wife, Brown recruited informants across the United Kingdom, in Canada, and the United States, as well as in India, France and Estonia. The resulting collection of 78 interviews, supplemented by written testimonies, were transcribed manually by a team of transcribers, and assembled into a compendium of 649,257 words. Both the interview tapes and the compendia will be deposited in the Bishopsgate Archive, London. Between 2018 and 2020, Brown carried out oral history interviewing in the Western Highlands and Western Isles, investigating, with researcher, Ealasaid Munro, memories of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild, an organisation which brought cinema to rural communities.
Religion and the Heterosexual Revolution