David Nash criticises the application of secularisation theory to twentieth-century Britain, arguing that it is guilty of teleology in predicting the relentless decline of Christian institutions and evaporation of religious beliefs. Nash is more interested in circumventing than challenging that narrative. Rather than measuring sinking levels of belief, he asks what twentieth-century Britons ‘did with their beliefs’ (p. 8). Beliefs here mean not doctrines but ‘central Christian stories’ or ‘widespread idioms’, through which individuals – and not merely churchgoers – organise their lives. In identifying religion's life signs with the circulation of stories, Nash is indebted to Callum Brown's ‘discursive Christianity’. Yet whereas discursive Christianity collapsed in the sixties, Nash claims that because Christian narratives were always more heterogeneous and malleable than Brown envisages, they have survived into the present. For Brown, Christian idioms today are residues of secularisation; for Nash, they are stuff for a new religious history. In seven thematic chapters, he demonstrates what such a history looks like, showing how Britons have employed narratives of pilgrimage, conversion, war, remembrance, sickness and healing, crisis and finally decline. They present a variety of interesting material, while leaving it unclear how wide the purchase of such idioms has been and how closely they relate to organised Christianity. The chapters on pilgrimage and conversion cite numerous individuals who patterned their experiences on the Bible and on Bunyan's The pilgrim's progress. Yet many of these life stories come from the world of Evangelical publishing – just where we would expect to find them – and are compatible with the argument that in wider British society the decay of ecclesiastical institutions entailed a steep decline in biblical literacy and therefore in the currency of recognisably Christian ‘stories of belief’. Indeed, in chronicling attempts by Evangelical subculture to respond to the secularisation of society through the modernisation of their argot, these chapters indirectly confirm that it has taken place. Outside that subculture, his evidence is more impressionistic than conclusive: that Slimmer's World ‘for a period labelled the food allowances given to its followers as “syns” (sic)’ hardly establishes that dieting literature was haunted by ‘orthodox Protestant ideas of conversion and confrontation with an unsatisfactory self’ (p. 71). In other chapters, the argument works better: Nash reveals the Church of England's success in coining a durable rhetoric of just war and its close grip on post-war rituals of remembrance. The Church also infiltrated the expanding medical sector and colonised palliative care, where its modernised conception of the ‘good death’ played well with clients. Nash usefully notes that such winning strategies were the product of arguments within Churches as well as between them and modernity: thus if some Christians developed palliative care as an alternative to the prospect of euthanasia, others found the latter quite compatible with faith. This is then a suggestive book, although one unlikely to trigger many defections from the secularisation camp. It is a shame to have to note in closing that it is not well proofed: we read of ‘the Annalles School’ (p. 127), ‘Philippe Aries’ (p. 127) and ‘Jowett's Essays and Reviews in the 1850s’ (p. 181).