According to Paul T. Phillips, debates between Christian and atheist public moralists during the mid-twentieth century gave rise to our contemporary intellectual landscape, so that the seeming similarities between the ideological scene in the 1960s and 2000s are no mere coincidence. In order to trace the influence of midcentury public moralists to our own day, Phillips singles out four major British schools of moral thought and, for each, provides a case study of a representative public intellectual: Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Barbara Ward. Huxley and Russell serve as representative atheist or humanist moralists, while Muggeridge and Ward act as representative Christian “public moralists,” a term taken from Stefan Collini's Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991). Each of Phillips's “public moralists” was a popular figure and something of a transnational celebrity out of necessity, because the advent of mass culture and mass politics necessitated appealing to the general population in order to achieve influence.

Chapter 1 sets the stage by rehearsing the standard historiography of British secularization in order to lay out the context within which Huxley, Russell, Muggeridge, and Ward developed their worldviews. Phillips especially highlights the rise of “social Christianity” and the debate over whether Christian reformers were simply aping secular socialism or genuinely developing a Christian response to the problems of industrialism. He ably summarizes the main entries in the debate surrounding the sociological secularization thesis and frames his discussion within Charles Taylor's modes of secularity. He goes on to note that unbelievers were every bit as much of a diverse group as believers. Finally, Phillips addresses the argument of Callum Brown and others that secularization occurred rather suddenly in the 1960s as a result of changing sexual morals among women. Phillips argues that the development of the welfare state in the mid-twentieth century rendered social Christianity—and perhaps Christianity itself, given the dominance of social Christianity—largely redundant (41). Some public intellectuals during this period sought to craft secular moral systems such as socialist or ethical humanism to replace receding Judeo-Christianity morality. Nevertheless, Christian intellectuals stood their ground and sought to revitalize Christian moral teachings in an age of secularization. Contrary to Callum Brown, who has questioned the influence of intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century, Phillips forcefully argues for their continued relevance. This relevance was maintained through use of new media outlets such as the radio and television.

Phillips's original work begins with chapter 2, which discusses Julian Huxley. Huxley developed a new secular scientific religion and moral system called evolutionary humanism to replace Christianity. Phillips argues that a desire to achieve unity lay at the center of Huxley's vision. Huxley's monistic worldview drew together science and religion, the individual and the cosmos, and all human societies into one united whole. In this view, science, and eugenics in particular, would enable humans to direct evolution toward the progress of the species. In the next chapter, Phillips describes Bertrand Russell's efforts to use reason to replace fear with love. Although Russell himself would have denied it, nevertheless, his liberal rationalism did function as a surrogate religion and system of morality to replace Christianity (91). Like evolutionary humanism, liberal rationalism was a monistic ideology that sought to achieve progress, unity, and universal compassion. Phillips attributes Russell's popularity in the 1960s to the fact that his ideas struck a chord with young people living in fear of seemingly irrational nuclear war.

In chapter 4, Phillips examines Malcolm Muggeridge, who seems to be his least favorite protagonist. Muggeridge was the most skilled at using the new broadcast media for self-promotion. Although he associated himself with a variety of causes, Phillips argues that the common thread through Muggeridge's life was his search for an authentic Gemeinschaft similar to the socialist community he had experienced as a child. Using Frank Turner's biography of John Henry Newman, Phillips draws a comparison between Newman and Muggeridge, both of whom fashioned themselves as cultural apostates. Muggeridge, especially as he aged, had no use for what he saw as a morally decadent post-Christian civilization. He reserved special scorn for social Christians (like Ward), whom he believed had succumbed to the spirit of the age. Muggeridge's negative anthropology led him to deny the possibility of human progress or the prospect of creating a social utopia on earth. Instead, Muggeridge saw a supernatural Kingdom of God in the afterlife as the primary hope of humanity. He championed traditional Christian morality and toward the end of his life joined the Gemeinschaft of the Catholic Church.

Finally, Phillips discusses Barbara Ward's liberal social Catholicism. Despite being co-religionists, Muggeridge and Ward held opposing anthropologies. Whereas Muggeridge saw humans as essentially depraved, Ward believed in the basic goodness of humanity because human beings were made for brotherhood in the image of God and redeemed through the Incarnation. Like Huxley and Russell, Ward campaigned for a better life here on earth and became a forerunner of Christian environmentalism. Her interest in building the Kingdom of God on earth made conservatives like Muggeridge fear that Ward was smuggling secular humanism into the Church. In fact, of the four public moralists surveyed by Phillips, Muggeridge is the outsider by virtue of his supernatural ethic. Nevertheless, each of these schools of morality helped create the framework that still guides debates today among Christians (right and left), the New Atheists, and environmentalists. Given that Phillips chose his four public moralists on the basis of the way their concerns are currently represented in contemporary intellectual life, a better choice than Muggeridge may have been C. S. Lewis. Lewis can equally claim to be a progenitor of the Christian right and is certainly more influential among this group today. In any case, Phillips's brief book supplies a welcome overview to the moral debates of mid-twentieth-century Britain.