Ronald Reagan once thanked the conservative commentator, William F. Buckley, for exposing ‘the naked desert that is statism’ and showing ‘the world something different … the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom’. This is not far from Frank Prochaska's project in the pithy and passionate Christianity and social service in modern Britain – where the contrast between greyness of welfarism and the greenness of voluntarism is consistently stark. This is a powerful critique of the modern welfare state, a lament for a lost world of independent, faith-inspired voluntarism. Somehow it comes best from an American. Prochaska explains that the context for the book was the breakdown of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the re-ignition of debates about how democracies function and how societies cohere. Far from some neo-con ‘told-you-so’, siding with the market against the state, however, this is a call to arms for the ‘third sector’ of voluntary activism and (that most abused term) ‘charity’. Indeed, the fortunes of the word ‘charity’ represent Prochaska's thesis writ large: a Victorian virtue that soured into a symbol of amateur do-goodery in the age of big government, before staging a late but partial recovery in the age of Thatcher, Blair, and Brown. The book aims to exploit the glimmer of opportunity for faith-based activism in a political culture that now talks much of ‘social capital’ and ‘civil society’, though the author is not sanguine. New Labour may have revolutionized its rhetoric in relation to the ‘third sector’, it may have softened the edges of Thatcherism, but Prochaska is too good a historian to confuse the halting gestures of modern government with the vigorous symbiosis of the Victorian era. Part elegy, part manifesto, therefore, Christianity and social service in modern Britain is very much the tale of where it all went wrong – the story of how a culture of charity and virtue gave way to ‘a politics of dutiless right’ (p. 154). As the author summarizes the developments described in the book: ‘the ministries of state gradually displaced the ministries of religion as founts of hope and charity’.

The structure of the book reflects a profound dichotomy between the green uplands of Victorian charity and the disempowering wastelands of on-demand welfare. Chapters on schooling, visiting, mothering, and nursing each reflect a pattern of voluntary enterprise first regulated and then smothered by the state. In the 1980s, bishops lined up to defend the universalism of unemployment benefits as an expression of unconditional love, but Prochaska takes the opposite view that there was more sensitivity, discretion and real engagement with social problems under the voluntarism of the nineteenth century. He goes as far as to argue that Victoria's subjects experienced a truer form of democracy, even though many still lacked the vote, than the recipients of modern statecraft. Architects of the welfare state such as Nye Bevan ‘felt a shudder of repulsion’ at the sight of volunteer nurses scrounging money on the streets, others expressed their disgust at the churchy amateurism of the Victorian model and its unfortunate mingling of the moral and the medical, but Prochaska maintains that the care provided under the old system was often superior and that the social benefits were enormous. The ‘omnicompetent state’ is, for Prochaska, always something vaguely sinister. Furthermore, and this is the boldest aspect of the thesis, Prochaska argues that when Christian organizations such as the Ranyard Nurses were swallowed up by health authorities, Christianity itself was effectively disenfranchised. This is a book about secularization as much as a commentary on charity and political economy; the ‘disinheritance’ referred to in the subtitle refers to the whole Christian presence in modern society, not merely the stripping of charitable responsibilities. When successions of twentieth-century governments appropriated the clusters of Victorian agencies that emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival, or created secular alternatives of their own, Christianity lost its footing in modern Britain. There was a secular ideology at work, most notably with the intellectual contribution of the Webbs, but Prochaska's long process of disinheritance was mainly the result of tactical and operational decisions in which Christian leaders were often deeply embroiled. If nonconformists were partly to blame for handing over education to the state by fanning the flames of denominational rivalry, leading twentieth-century Anglicans such as William Temple were perhaps more culpable, Prochaska contends, for greeting the welfare state in some sort of haze of idealism, signing away whole territories of Christian influence on the vaguely Hegelian grounds that modern government was ‘under the moral law of God, and is intended by Him to be an instrument of human welfare’. Such was the Anglican orthodoxy until the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, and Prochaska considers it a disastrous position. Occasionally, sarcasm gets the better of indignation as he exposes the consequences of clerical naivety in relation to a power-hungry state: ‘What was the point of worshipping in Westminster Abbey’, Prochaska protests, ‘when Jesus, now a socialist, had departed for Whitehall?’ (p. 96).

The book is excellent in rendering the contrast between two eras and in exploding any enduring myths that voluntarism equals dilettantism. Rather, it is the mantras of the Keynesian era that appear brittle. Readers will be astonished to hear Gordon Brown in ‘old Labour’ mode in 1988 belittling charity as ‘a sad and seedy competition for public pity’. It is less convincing in positing the state's takeover of Christian charity as the greater part of secularization. Christianity was always more than charity and activism in the nineteenth century and to hand over some of the more Martha-like duties to the state was less of a crisis than Prochaska contends. Some have seen it as a liberation, enabling a renewal of the missionary task. Nevertheless, it is hard not to applaud a history book that is so bold in engaging with the present.