Contrasting ‘secular’ Europe with ‘religious’ America, and speculating about the reasons why, has been a recurrent western parlour-game since the days of de Tocqueville, and a perennial problem in secularisation debates since the 1960s. Perhaps surprisingly, though, the first extended scholarly discussion of this question was only published in 2008, with the 150-odd pages of Religious America, secular Europe? by the distinguished sociologists Peter Berger, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas. In 2013, however, David Hempton and Hugh McLeod assembled a formidable team of seventeen scholars, mostly historians, to revisit the subject in detail. The resulting 400-page anthology explores its topic with ground-breaking levels of sophistication and complexity. It deliberately confines itself to Christianity, and to the United States and northern and western Europe, but within this framework it covers nearly every major relevant theme in the last two centuries. It is a significant step forward in the transnationalisation of the history of western Christianity.

Hempton and McLeod proceed by pairing their contributors by theme, a device which often allows them to place scholars of the US and of Europe in implied conversation. The first five pairs of chapters mostly concentrate on the period from 1800 to 1945: there are case studies on Christianity's relationship with the state and with capital markets, on American new religious movements, on gender and on Christianity's relationship with popular culture; there are also more synoptic treatments of British and American evangelicalism. The remaining three pairs concentrate on the revivals of the early Cold War, on Catholicism and Vatican II, and on ‘the 1970s and after’. This policy of pairing is continued into the concluding section, where Hempton and McLeod offer their distinct perspectives. A review of this length cannot hope to do all the contributions justice, but can identify some emerging themes.

For this reviewer, the volume's central finding is that the US/Europe contrast has often been exaggerated, and that this binary model is helpfully replaced by a more variegated picture of ‘the North Atlantic world’, which contains many different trajectories of Christian growth and decline. This approach convincingly foregrounds regional variations within America, national and regional variations within Europe, and denominational differences within the whole. Second, and relatedly, most of the contributors agree that the major divergences between Europe and America only emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with relatively minor variations existing beforehand, and that there is no guarantee that these differences will endure permanently. This finding is significant, because it implies that ‘free-market’ theories that posit a structural advantage for American Christianity ever since the ratification of the First Amendment's ‘Establishment’ and ‘Free Exercise’ clauses are essentially mistaken. On the one hand, Stewart J. Brown's chapter successfully demonstrates that Britain's established Churches were no obstacle to British Christianity's growth before 1900. On the other, Michael Snape convincingly argues that US army-sponsored ‘official religion’ during the Second World War was significantly responsible for the GI generation's enduring commitment to Christianity.

A third theme is the relative strength of American and European Christianity in the 1940s and early 1950s, a finding which implies that it is correct to see the long 1960s as a major turning-point in the history of western Christianity. Uta Balbier's transnational account of Billy Graham's crusades highlights the significance of the Cold War context in prompting Christian revivals in the 1950s, whilst Leslie Woodcock Tentler's account of US Catholics since 1945 highlights the high levels of church-going characteristic of the 1950s, and the immense impact of the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s.

The US/Europe divergence since the 1960s attracts a range of explanations across the volume. McLeod highlights the significance of the early 1970s, arguing that American Christianity pushed back against Sixties secularity much more effectively than most of its European counterparts. In a slightly contrasting approach, Hempton suggests that post-1960s divergences may have been due to the accumulation of long-standing ‘small differences’, such as in patterns of theology, political culture and Church-State relations, which built up over the previous decades. This analysis fits with David Bebbington's comparative overview of British and American evangelicalism, which highlights divergences since about 1900; he argues that middle-class British Evangelicals, unlike their American counterparts, increasingly lost their links with popular culture, and failed to make effective use of mass media, thereby allowing British Christianity to become steadily less Evangelical. For Grace Davie, meanwhile, the differing patterns in American and European Christianity since the 1970s are indeed partly attributable to the American preference for ‘congregational’ rather than establishment-focussed modes of organising Churches, an analysis which finds support in Wilhelm Damberg's comparison between US and German Catholics.

Finally, this volume brings home the sheer range of Christianities available in Europe and America since 1800, and the ingenuity of many of these groups in promoting their messages. Thus there are chapters on imaginative methods of financing church-building (Eric Baldwin), the growth of women's organisations (Ann Braude), the fostering of men's organisations (Tine van Osselaer), evangelicalism's use of print media (Heather D. Curtis), Christianity's engagement with sport (McLeod), Pentecostalism's use of popular music (Randall Stephens), Mormonism's deployment of visual culture (Colleen McDannell) and American evangelicalism's invention of the megachurch (Kip Richardson). No wonder that there were heated debates about which groups counted as ‘religions’ (David Holland).

If one were to offer criticisms, these might involve two of the book's three titular concepts. ‘Religious innovation’, it could have been more frequently acknowledged, is very much a double-edged sword, since the wrong kind of innovation can cause disaster. ‘Secularisation’, for some contributors, still seems to be a natural process to be invoked, not a cultural peculiarity to be explained (p. 2), though others expressed unease about the concept (pp. 287, 373). Yet if secularity is considered a cultural invention in its own right, with its own dynamics of growth, not directly related to those of Christian decline, then a significant dimension of the North Atlantic story may have been left untreated.

These are minor cavils, of course. This volume decisively complicates monolithic depictions of American and European Christianity, and makes great strides towards creating wider transnational frameworks. It is recommended reading for anyone interested in modern western Christianity, and highly recommended for those interested in anglophone Christianity since 1800.