Eastern European Christians and their Churches experienced hard times under socialism. Western scholars, for their part, had a hard time working out what was really going on, leaving the field open to partisan simplifications and Cold War journalism. Two decades after the collapse, a new generation of historians, both foreign and native, is able to access previously inaccessible archives, interview witnesses openly, and pose new questions that take us beyond the old “communism versus religion” clichés. The studies collected here show that the entanglement of political and religious spheres was often more complex than previously supposed. They contribute usefully to the Area Studies literature, while also shedding light on global explorations of the changing meanings of “modernity,” “the religious” and “the secular.”

Following an introduction by Porter-Szűcs in which he elaborates these general goals, the first three chapters explore diverse topics in the pre-socialist era. Andreas Kossert challenges received notions of the links between industrialization and faith by looking comparatively at the vitality of religious life in Manchester and Łódź in their nineteenth-century heydays. A “civic gospel” contributed to the genesis of a modern welfare state in the English case, but due to the general repression of civil society this was impossible in the Russian segment of partitioned Poland. Paul Hanebrink tells the story of how Roman Catholic and Calvinist denominations vied to be the more truly Magyar in the nationally-charged politics of the inter-war decades in Hungary, leading in both cases to a moral abdication as far as the Jewish minority was concerned. Martin C. Putna documents the dilemmas of Czech Roman Catholic writers in the same period, searching for a non-existent fourth path “between liberalism, communism and Nazism.”

James Ramon Felak analyses the contrasting strategies of influential Roman Catholic actors in Slovak politics in the years immediately prior to communist takeover in 1948, all played out in the shadow of their Church's shameful role under Nazi domination during the Second World War. In one of the finest chapters of the collection, James Bjork demolishes clichés of a monolithic Roman Catholic Church in Poland by showing how regional differences dating back to the partition era were compounded by the violence and forced migrations of the 1940s. Bjork's self-consciously revisionist account emphasizes an erroneous convergence between Catholic sociologists of religion and their Marxist opponents concerning the basic contours of secularization. In fact, as the author shows in detail with reference to industrial Silesia, drawing on recent German scholarship as well as Polish sources, the picture was far more complex. Poland did not become clearly distinct from Catholic countries of the West until quite recently: the solid foundations of Karol Wojtyła's united Catholic nation were laid above all by Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński's “ideological project” of the Great Novena (1957–1966).

But communist power was less than classically totalitarian even in those Orthodox countries where it was never contested so explicitly. In fascinating consecutive chapters, Natalia Shlikhta and Anca Şincan explore the “reunification” of Greek Catholics with Orthodox Churches in Western Ukraine and Tranyslvania, respectively. The former case was more problematic, in the sense that here “orthodoxization” was tainted not only by its links to a socialist state but also by virtue of being Russian (i.e., foreign). Shlikhta goes a long way toward rehabilitating Havryil Kostelnyk, previously often dismissed as a stooge of the Soviets, arguing that his “compromise” was in fact just as much a variant of resistance as that practised by others in the “catacomb churches.” This “false compliance” (a concept derived from James Scott) secured the preservation of a “church within a church,” the long-term success of which was proven by the reemergence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the 1990s. (In comparison, its counterpart in Romania has had much greater difficulty in recovering the ground lost to Orthodoxy.) Unfortunately these “thick” case studies of Eastern Christian adaptations in the Uniate borderlands, combining oral testimony with archival research, are as fareast as we get in this volume. Perhaps it is significant that, together with Galia Valtchinova's study of how socialist power holders in Bulgaria created an “Institute of Suggestology” at the Academy of Sciences in an effort to impose their worldview on that of the traditional Orthodox seer Vanga, the chapters which probe these “other” Christians are all the work of scholars based in the countries concerned.

According to David Doellinger, the setting up in 1964 of an alternative form of conscription for Christian conscientious objectors in the German Democratic Republic was also evidence of regime weakness, even of a “national social movement” (although the authorities did not hesitate to exploit this concession to their advantage when it suited them). In a more ambitious longue durée argument, Katharina Kunter outlines the ambivalence of German Lutherans toward Western liberal concepts of human rights, which in her opinion only changed significantly in the final decades of socialist rule. By contrast, Protestants were prominent among the early signatories of Charta 77 (thereby denting another stereotype, that of overwhelmingly secularized Bohemia) because they were able to draw on a collective memory that stretched from Jan Hus to Tomáš Masaryk.

The inclusion of a penultimate chapter dealing in a rather superficial way with the “challenge of Islam in the New West” is a puzzle, especially as numerous chapters make reference to pertinent simultaneously presented conference papers, which the editors were apparently obliged to exclude from this volume for reasons of space. In their separate contributions, which form the first and last chapters, Porter-Szűcs and Berglund refrain from presenting their own research in any detail in favor of wide-ranging reflections on themes such as the “religious turn” in recent historical scholarship, secularism as the self-fulfilling prophecy of modernity, sacred sites, chosen peoples, “spiritual cartographies,” and the implications of arrival in the New West for the historiography of Eastern Europe as an interstitial region. These American historians are supremely conscious of their moment in history (“we historians of the early twenty-first century”) and of all the perils with which their “new scholarship” has to contend: not just the legacies of Nazism and communism but also the poisonous academic chalices of Orientalism and methodological nationalism. Yet awareness of a problem is no guarantee of success in overcoming it. It is hard to fathom what Berglund means by “decentering” the nation without diminishing its role, and no surprise that national identities and “ecclesiastical nationalism” remain dominant themes in these chapters (though not all authors pay as much attention to the national scholarship as they should). Despite the mantras of agency, hermeneutics and practice (with all the appropriate supporting names) and the laudable goal of engaging with “people” rather than “the people”, it is hard for contributors in a short chapter to explore individual subjectivities in satisfying depth while retaining the attention of readers interested in the big picture. Felak, for example, provides thumb-nail sketches of several interesting individuals but “Slovak bishops” remain anonymous and inscrutable in the background of his chapter. Even Valtchinova's chapter sheds no new light on Vanga as a personality. Still, the editors' framing chapters will help future generations of readers to understand the particular milieu of post-socialist Anglophone scholarship of this region, of which this book is an impressive celebration.