Callum Brown (author)

Callum Graham Brown (b.1953) is a Scottish historian and author. He has published widely since the 1980s on the histories of secularisation, the secular humanist movement, the social history of religion, on popular culture and everyday life, and gender history. He is currently Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Brown was born in 1953 and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland.

He is married to fellow historian, Lynn Abrams.^[1]

Callum Brown has studied the decline of religion for fifty years, dealt with in 15 research monographs, principally in Britain, though also in Canada and the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. For the first phase of his career, he focused upon the 19th century. In 1987, Brown's first monograph appeared, the Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730. Here, he adhered to a then current academic orthodoxy which had envisaged religion diminishing during the late nineteenth century as a result of urbanisation. During the course of the following decade, he came to believe that instead, secularisation did not properly take hold until the mid-twentieth century.^[2] The book was heavily revised for a new edition which appeared in 1997 as Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707.^[3]

Brown then reconceptualised secularisation in the mid 20th-century. His central argument has been that secularisation in the western Christian world has been 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. Delinating five forms of secularisation which had previously been ignored by historians, Brown wrote a book on each of them. First, he identified secularisation 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). This book was termed by a reviewer ‘one of the most moving, stimulating and entertaining works’ which they had read on modern British Christianity.^[4]

Secondly, in Religion and the Demographic Revolution (2012) secularisation was investigated as a demographic phenomenon, with women grasping ultra-low fertility and rejecting restrictive religiousity.^[5] Third, 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.^[6] Fourth, secularisation as a struggle between liberal and conservative moralities in the 1960s, considered in The Battle for Christian Britain (2019).^[7]

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.'^[8]

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.^[9] 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.^[10] 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.^[11] 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 were deposited in the Bishopsgate Archive, London.^[12] 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.^[13]

In 2020 he celebrated his 30th year in the industry.^[14] Brown retired from teaching at the University of Glasgow in 2023. ^[15] 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.”^[16]

• The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (Routledge, 1987)
• The People in the Pews: Religion and Society in Scotland since 1780 (Economic and Social History Society of Scotland, 1993)
• Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707 ( Edinburgh University Press, 1997)
• Up-helly-aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Mandolin, 1999)
• The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (Routledge, 2000)
• Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2006)
• Postmodernism for Historians (Routledge, 2013)
• Becoming Atheist: Humanism and the Secular West (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
• Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Boydell, 2012)
• The Battle for Christian Britain: Sex, Humanists and Secularisation, 1945-1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• Ninety Humanists and the Ethical Transformation of Britain: The Open Conspiracy, 1930-80 (Bloomsbury, 2026)

• The University Experience 1945-1975: An Oral History of the University of Strathclyde (with Arthur J. McIvor and Neil Rafeek) (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
• Britain Since 1707 (with Hamish Fraser) (Routledge, 2010)
• Religion in Scots Law (with Thomas Green and Jane Mair) (Edinburgh, Humanist Society Scotland, 2016), pp. 355; published online https://www.humanism.scot/what-we-do/research/religion-in-scots-law/
• The Humanist Movement in Modern Britain: a History of Ethicists, Rationalists and Humanists (with David Nash and Charlie Lynch) (Bloomsbury, 2023)

• A History of Everyday Life in Twentieth-century Scotland (ed. Callum G. Brown and Lynn Abrams) (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
• Secularisation in the Christian World c.1750-c.2000: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod (ed. Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape) (Ashgate, 2010)

• “The Curse: Film and the churches in the Western Isles 1945 to 1980” (with Ealasaid Munro), Northern Scotland v.11 iss.1 (2020), pp. 60-79.
• “The necessity of atheism: making sense of secularisation”, Journal of Religious History vol. 41(4) (2017), pp. 439-456.
• “The Unholy Mrs Knight” and the BBC: secular humanism and the threat to the Christian nation, c.1945-1960’, English Historical Review vol. 127 (2012), pp. 345-376.
• “The People of No Religion: the demographics of secularisation in the English-speaking world since c.1900”, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte vol. 51 (2011), pp. 37-61.

• “Sex, religion and the single woman c.1950-1975: the importance of a ‘short’ sexual revolution to the English religious crisis of the sixties”, Twentieth Century British History vol. 22 (2011), pp. 189-215.
• “What was the religious crisis of the 1960s?” Journal of Religious History vol. 34, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 468-79.
• “Secularisation, the growth of militancy and the spiritual revolution: religious change and gender power in Britain 1901-2001”, Historical Research vol. 80, no. 209 (August 2007), pp. 393-418.
• “Sport and the Scottish Office in the twentieth-century: the promotion of a social and gender policy”, European Sports History Review, vol. 1 (1999), pp. 183-202.
• “Sport and the Scottish Office in the twentieth-century: the control of a social problem”, European Sports History Review, vol. 1 (1999), pp. 164-82.
• “The Scottish Office and sport 1899-1972”, Scottish Centre Research Papers in Sport, Leisure and Society, vol. 2 (1997), pp. 1-18.

• ‘“To be aglow with civic ardours’: the Godly Commonwealth in Glasgow, 1843-1914’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society, vol. 26 (1996), pp. 169-95.
• “The religion of an industrial village: the churches in Balfron 1789-1850”, Scottish Local History Journal vol. 35 (1995), pp 9-15.
• “Secularization: a theory in danger?” Scottish Economic and Social History vol. 11 (1991), pp.52-58.
• “Did urbanization secularize Britain?” Urban History Yearbook (Leicester University Press) 1988, pp. 1-14.
• “The costs of pew-renting: church management, church-going and social class in nineteenth-century Glasgow”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 38 (1987), pp. 347-361.
• “The Sunday-school movement in Scotland 1780-1914”, Records of the Scottish Church History Society vol. xxi (1981), pp. 3-26.

• Glasgow University [1]
• Edinburgh University Press [2]