After the controversy provoked by Callum Brown's radical recasting of modern British religious history in The death of Christian Britain: understanding secularisation, 1800–2000 (2001), his new book is mellower in tone and broader in scope. It shares the same underlying concerns as the earlier book, but weaves them into what Brown claims is ‘the first comprehensive narrative of religion in British society and culture throughout the twentieth century’ (p. xvi). Here, then, one encounters the same basic convictions that British religious experience in the early twentieth century was fundamentally gendered, that Christianity was a defining characteristic of British society, and that the ground shifted spectacularly in the 1960s, with the ‘permissive society’ and the withdrawal of women in particular from active participation in churches and religious organizations. But the argument is more nuanced here. Brown's aim of providing a comprehensive view enables him to draw in a wider range of evidence, placing much more emphasis in particular on oral material and autobiography, all of which he uses with commendable subtlety. The richness of this material in itself somewhat softens the sharpness of his earlier polemic against secularization theorists, and in particular suggests that more complicated readings of personal religious experience are possible than his description, in the earlier book, of the discourse of the ‘salvation economy’.

The book follows a narrative format, from the ‘faith society’ of 1900–14, up to the present. Some scholars may still feel, overall, that there is too sharp a delineation of the rapid effects of secularization in the last three decades of the century. Brown can still write, for example, of the ‘shaping of secular society, 1974–2000’ and of ‘adapting to de-Christianisation’ (p. 278). But, providing a broad narrative of religious change through the whole century, he is also obliged, for example, to pay much more attention to the mixed effects of the First World War on the churches, and to the character of religion during the years of austerity after the Second World War. This valuably qualifies the impression his earlier book gave that his view was ‘no change before the 1960s, then catastrophic change’.

Again, there is still a certain homogeneity about the very concept of ‘religion’ that is put in the foreground of Brown's account. To write an account of ‘religion in society’ is, almost inevitably, to make some assumptions that what one is writing about is a shared, clearly identifiable, and uniform social experience, and whilst that is surely required as methodological shorthand, it does require some qualification. Brown uses, for example, the term ‘evangelical’ with a surprising lack of flexibility, as if what he is describing is instantly obvious. Little space is given to the discussion of theology, though there is some reference to John Robinson, Honest to God, and the ‘death of God’ theology of the 1960s. His understandable interest in the illustrative material with which his book is peppered at times gives the impression that exotic or exceptional features of British religion were less marginal than they really were – there are no less than six pages, for example, on the remarkable Harold Davidson, rector of Stiffkey in Norfolk, who was de-frocked in 1932 for causing ‘grave scandal’, a case that is enlightening in all sorts of ways, but also raises the suspicion that Brown includes it largely for spice and colour. Other judgements are also questionable. He seems to accept at face value, for example, the Times's surely mischievous suggestion, in 1900, that the country clergy only worked three hours a day during the week (p. 44).

Nevertheless, what is obviously intended to be above all an introductory survey does succeed very well in giving a clear, concise, and considered view of the changing role and character of religion in British society. As always, Brown's writing is very readable, and the referencing and the bibliographical material is second to none. This book will undoubtedly trouble some readers, and provoke many to disagreement. But, along with The death of Christian Britain, it will mark Brown's view of religion in modern Britain as an unavoidable feature of the historiographical landscape.