Brixton and Belfast:The English Young Christian Students Movement and Grassroots, Liberatory Theologies in post-1968 Britain

This article considers the activities of a generation of young English Catholics – mostly middle-class convent and grammar school students – who belonged to the international Young Christian Students movement. Through examining two decades of the YCS magazine, alongside its detailed Study Programmes and annual Conferences, it charts the organisation’s increasingly politicised engagement with social justice and decolonisation agendas (especially in Africa) and its creative embrace of Christian-Marxism and Liberation Theology around 1968. With escalating tensions in Northern Ireland into the 1970s, the English YCS expanded out their focus to ecumenical Catholic-Protestant encounters in schools in Belfast and beyond, educating a wide readership of Catholic schoolchildren about the conflict and its causative links to British imperialism. As a case study of the religious experiences and faith-fuelled activism of thousands of young people in post-conciliar Britain, this recovered history of varieties of grassroots, liberatory theologies offers insight into present-day experiments with synodality.