The nationalization of religion and the nation as a sacred cause in eastern Europe is the striking title to fourteen essays addressing religion in volume twenty-seven of the Leipzig University series on the history and culture of the successor states to the Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov and Soviet Russian empires. Michael Burleigh's two current paperbacks, Earthly powers: the conflict between religion and politics from the French Revolution to the Great War, and its sequel, Sacred causes: religion and politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda (2007) spring to mind as a western European comparison. Schulze Wessel, the editor here, a specialist on Czechoslovakia and south-eastern Europe, and a scholar closely linked to Leipzig's centre for East European Studies, holds the chair of east European history at Munich University. Since the late 1990s, in several essay collections, particularly as the editor of Religion im Nationalstaat zwischen den Weltkriegen, 1918–1939: Polen–Tschechoslowakei–Ungarn–Rumanien (2002; volume sixteen of this series) Schulze Wessel, returning to Weberian religious sociology, has challenged late twentieth-century ‘modernisation’ theory's nostrum, that religion in eastern Europe since 1917–18 and 1989–91 is essentially a relic from Europe before the Enlightenment. The connection between religion and the shaping of new eastern European nations has not been taken seriously. There is in actual fact a much closer connection than hitherto assumed, to borrow the late Pope John Paul ii's argument in his memoirs, between these national identities and their ‘spiritual maturation’. This is what marks off the ‘lands between’ from their secular western neighbours. Their historically multiform religious and ethnic subcultures, previously held together by the old empires, and latterly by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, remain an extremely complex legacy shaping an undeniable modern market push today for homogeneous national citizenship.

Teamwork is thus of the essence in a burgeoning cooperation between a younger generation of western and eastern European historians, church historians, theologians and religious sociologists debating and writing on the contemporary church history of eastern Europe.

It is, therefore, a pity that this elegantly produced collection of papers, given at a Leipzig conference held in December 2000, and divided here into six sections – national and religious cults, religion and national movements, religion and national festivals, religion and war, religion in cultural models – covering 1700–2000, omits any biographical data on the contributors. Secondly, though Schulze Wessel and Thomas Bremer (professor of theology in the Catholic ecumenical institute at Münster University and author of the succinct survey, Kleine Geschichte der Religionen in Jugoslawien [2003]), in their respective introductions provide brief bibliographies of similar scholarship in their footnotes, notably, the late Adrian Hastings, The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism (1997), and Schulze Wessels's own programmatic introduction to essays on the Baltic States (Nordost-Archiv, Neue Folge vii/2 [1998], 351–779), they omit any reference to similar projects and their publications. For example, the four-volume Danish–German project edited by Jens Holger Schjørring with Peter Maser, Zwischen den Mühlsteinen, i (Munich 2002), and Wie die Träumenden?, iii (Munich 2003); Hartmut Lehmann, Im Räderwerk des ‘real existierenden Sozialismus’, ii (Göttingen 2003), and Katharina Kunter, Die Kirchen und das Erbe des Kommunismus, iv (Munich 2007). Comparable is the European Commission-sponsored project, ‘Churches and European Integration’ (2001–4), uniting young scholars from the universities of Helsinki, Tartu, Lund, Münster (led by Bremer above) and Glasgow, with several publications, some listed in the short survey, North European Churches from the Cold War to globalization (Jyväskylä 2006), written by Hugh McLeod, Risto Saarinen and Aila Lauha, the project leader. As a separate monograph providing an up-to-date Anglo-American bibliography there is Philip M. Coupland, Britannia, Europa and Christendom: British Christians and European integration (Palgrave 2006). Needless to say, the reader of this Leipzig collection will find contributors like Bremer, or Klaus Buchenau writing on the anti-modern Sava cult (‘Svetosavlje’) promoted by interwar Belgrade's Serbian Orthodox theology faculty and its evident appeal in mobilising Serbs after 1989 (pp. 203f), the author of the most informative Orthodoxie und Katholizismus in Jugoslawien, 1945–1991: ein serbisch-kroatischer Vergleich (Wiesbaden 2004) in the collections mentioned above. Bremer flags too, in his introductory essay on religious conflict as seen by theologians, the more open scholarly environment since the declaration on religious freedom by Vatican II, Dignitatis humanae (p. 1), which makes a franker exchange possible today between young Roman Catholic scholars and their Uniate, Protestant, Russian and Greek Orthodox counterparts.

This said, there is much to be distilled – here only the briefest sketch – from the detail in this collection. A unifying theme in its Christian denominational variations in each of the five sections immediately springs to view: namely devotion to the saints, and how this could be exploited as a sacred cause by both Church and State. Two fascinating papers by Stefan Laube, comparing the cult of national saints in nineteenth-century Catholic Poland and Germany (the expression of new Catholic middle-class wealth?), and Frithjof Benjamin Schenk on the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky cult (official canonisation 1547), open the collection. In Poland, it seems, the partitions, and fragmentation occasioned a resurgence of the Catholic Church as national unifier through veneration of the saints, particularly Stanislaw at Cracow (p. 38f); in Germany, on the other hand, Boniface at Fulda came to represent a resurgent Catholic minority call to unity against Bismarck's Protestant Prusso-German nation. Alexander Nevsky's saintly progress, here made visible in three attractively reproduced portrait icons, moved from representation as a seventeenth-century monk, to an eighteenth-century Petrine prince in St Petersburg's Peter and Paul Cathedral, and Slavophile warrior-hero depicted by the artist Viktor Vasnecov (1884–5). This reviewer cannot help taking this iconography a step further to Eisenstein's film, with arresting Prokofiefian music score, which opens with the defeat of the Teutonic knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. It is said of Eisenstein that he knew that his fiction would not be interfered with by the little we know as fact. Further along, Harald Binder on the Catholic Church and national festivals at Cracow c. 1861–1910, and Joachim von Puttkamer, on the Church and national school festivals in Hungary 1867–1914, demonstrate the close approximation of national and saintly veneration with the 1883 bicentenary of Sobieski's defeat of the Turks at Vienna (p. 129f), or the 1893 centenary of the birth of Byronic Adam Mickiewicz (p. 132f), or Hungary's new national school festival canon opened by the solemn 1896 millennium celebrations but shortly to be replaced by three holidays commemorating the union of dynasty and national-liberal 1848–9 revolution: 15 March, 11 April and 8 October (p. 145f). However, Puttkamer insists that we should remain sceptical. Schoolchildren then and now are quick to grasp what is artificial and what might serve as an opportunity for time off. War sermons or speeches could be used either in 1914 by Hungarian Protestant church leaders (Juliane Brandt) as a means to show their support for the national-liberal ideals of 1848 – to be expected in a ratio of Reformed 2/3 to Lutheran 1/3 in a Protestant fifth of the Hungarian population (p. 163), or in the 1990s, as Buchenau demonstrates, the union of Christ as martyr, Saint Sava and the Serbian nation in a flood of tracts and extensive media coverage to sanction very recent Serbian militancy. Perhaps this and the other new essay collections show once again the primacy of the political over the religious, and what Hartmut Lehmann in his introduction to Schulze Wessel's edited Religion im Nationalstaat, thinking of possible gravitation towards contemporary western European secularism, paired as ‘retarded nation-building’ and ‘retarded secularization’ in these post-Communist nations. But these are early days in a Europe where the devotional and liturgical still sanction everyday life. And this despite the deliberate destruction of synagogues, churches and mosques as another aspect of modern ethnic and cultural cleansing described in Robert Bevan's provocative The destruction of memory: architecture at war (London 2006).