This article presents the scope and range of Christian involvement in establishing the field of education in England as a distinct area for scholarship between 1930 and 1960. It advocates greater study of the range of various denominational positions held in the period. This paper also illustrates the public debates of the time by focusing on the examples of a number of prominent educationists in leadership positions who were directly associated with the founding and running of major British education journals and societies. This article uses newly released personal archival records not previously available to accounts of the period. It begins by situating their perspectives in the wider historical context, particularly the intellectual background of ideas that influenced and set the tone for their work. It then introduces some of their beliefs and assumptions, as well as their achievements and failures, in the realm of religion and education. It reviews and critiques their different Christian conceptualisations of education, and offers reasons why they failed to make a lasting Christian impact on the subject under a newly emergent secular culture in the 1960s. This article argues that researchers have generally neglected the influence of Christianity in the early establishment of education as a discrete area of academic study. (Contains 110 footnotes.)