Towards the Dawn was originally published in 1980. A revised version was published in 2020.
Subtitled 'What's Going to Happen to Britain', in this book Clifford Hill uses the intellectual tools provided by sociology to understand what is going on, and the changes shaking the foundations of society today.
In the foreword to the 2020 edition, Clifford writes: 'It is 40 years since I wrote this book in the summer of 1979. So much has happened since then. The world is very different. The World Wide Web had not yet been developed. Mobile phones were a dream of science fiction. Social media had not yet been invented: the social environment was friendlier and the pace of life had not yet reached the frenzied heights of today. It was an age of transition. Britain was still recovering
from the Second World War in the immediate aftermath of which the Welfare State and programmes of social housing had been created to solve social problems which had now become the problems of the 1970s. Family breakdown was only just beginning to accelerate and the number of babies born out of wedlock had not yet reached 10%, in strong contrast to 2019 where more than half of all babies born today do not have the security of a mother and father in a
covenant relationship of married life and love. The year 1979 was also still in the early days of the Charismatic Movement that was penetrating all denominations of the Christian church in Britain. There were well-founded hopes of a spiritual revival. This hope for a spiritual revival is reflected in Towards the Dawn and the 1980s was designated as a ‘Decade of Evangelism’.