David Nash's Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century offers a way past the increasingly stale secularization debate. Though the first chapter of the book offers a relentlessly scathing critique of the secularization metanarrative (which proclaims the inevitability of Christian decline in Britain), Nash is far more concerned with looking at the ways in which religious belief survived and, in many cases, thrived in the twentieth century. He does so by emphasizing religion as a process where individual people choose what, when, and how to believe instead of focusing exclusively on spiritual authorities, denominations, or doctrines. Nash argues that individuals often made these choices on the basis of Christian narratives that provided structure and meaning in specific situations. Christian stories and narratives were creatively repurposed and refashioned in the twentieth century to meet specific needs at precise times. Looked at this way, Christianity proved to be remarkably resilient.

Each chapter is organized around a central narrative where Nash explores the continuing resonance of Christianity in British culture. Chapter 2 examines the staying power of pilgrim and “good Samaritan” narratives throughout the twentieth century. These narratives maintained a powerful hold on the popular imagination and were used in a wide array of religious and ostensibly secular locations. Chapter 3 explores the changing nature of conversion stories. Nash persuasively argues that these narratives continue into the twenty-first century but did so in a number of nontraditional ways that are not easily quantifiable. The traditional model of a brick-and-mortar church with a stable congregation no longer applies to a highly adaptable form of individualized conversion. Indeed, Christianity's surprising ability to adapt to contemporary needs, sometimes in bewildering varieties, is one of the main themes of the book.

In one way or another, chapters 4 through 7 explore key moments throughout the twentieth century when Christianity, and Anglicanism in particular, played a key role in the cultural landscape of Britain. Chapter 4 studies how Christianity justified, or opposed, total warfare. Chapter 5 surveys Christian responses to the massive wartime losses suffered in the world wars. Though Nash admits that Christianity as a whole lost ground after these conflicts (by most statistical measures of congregants and participation, at least), he argues that focusing only on decline misses an important part of the story. Christians were and continue to be heavily involved in ceremonies of remembrance, and therefore they are still relevant in British culture.

Chapter 6 uses healthcare stories to illuminate how religious and secular narratives competed in the public sphere. More than any other, this chapter moves beyond focusing on the question of decline. Instead, Nash is able to explore how, in the twentieth-century marketplace of ideas, secular and religious narratives vied for attention in public. In the face of a strong secular narrative calling for the removal of all vestiges of religious belief in national healthcare, Christian activist Cicely Saunders infused Christian ideals into her version of end-of-life care. The hospice movement she pioneered became a major success, showing that Christian values could still be important in an ostensibly secular profession. Chapter 7 looks at specific moments, including the Abdication Crisis of 1936 and the death of Princess Diana in 1997, to show how religious ideas could become spontaneously and vitally important to British culture at moments of particular stress or crisis.

By far the most interesting chapter is the last, which explores the idea of decline itself as a narrative necessitating historical investigation. Here, Nash argues that the Anglican Church perpetuated the idea of a Christian decline in Britain for its own ends. Church leaders often used the narrative of decline as a call for reform or a rallying cry for the faithful. By placing the narrative of religious decline in historical context, Nash is able to explore how this powerful story influenced religious and secular thinkers alike.

For a work that enters into the historiographical rabbit hole of the secularization debate by calling for a major reevaluation of the subject, Nash's claims, perhaps unsurprisingly, often outstrip his evidence. Although the author makes bold claims about the continuing importance of Christianity as a whole, the work is neither representative of all forms of Christianity nor does it explore Christianity throughout Britain. Nash focuses the majority of his attention on the Anglican Church in England. While there is certainly a case to be made for the importance of Anglicanism in the twentieth century, Nash simply does not have the evidence to make wider claims about the experience of Christians in Wales or Scotland, let alone Ireland. The author rightly criticizes secularization theorists for relying too heavily on so-called hard data as their source base, but it is doubtful whether an entirely new historical model attempting to reconceptualize religious belief in twentieth-century Britain can rest entirely, or even mostly, on disparate narratives alone.

Despite the problems of evidence, the narratives analyzed in this work demonstrate an intriguing way of looking at religious practice in modern Britain. Christianity did not experience revival or even maintain its strength throughout the twentieth century, but it did maintain a powerful hold at certain times, in specific places, and in precise contexts. Nash calls for a new agenda for future research, a religious history of highly contextual individual choices. It can only be hoped that historians will take up this challenge and continue to explore religious belief in twentieth-century Britain without relying on problematic metanarratives. This book will serve as a useful starting point in that endeavor.