I suspect that we will not see too many more of these: an enterprise that began with a conference and ended with a very large – almost 500 pages – and handsomely produced volume. We should note with appreciation the financial assistance of the Canadian government, the Canadian Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council because without such help even university presses seem unable now to produce big books. The central topic is the role of the 1960s in the decline of religion in the West. Sociologists tend to see secularisation as a long and gradual process with its roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Callum Brown's The death of Christian Britain (2001) proposed a radical alternative: that in the UK the Churches were doing pretty well until ‘a catastrophic and abrupt cultural revolution starting in the 1960s’ (cover blurb). The permissive society presented a dramatic challenge to the values of the Christian Churches, especially in their attitudes to women, at the same time as changes in the economy were offering women far more rewarding and fulfilling things to do with their time and energy. Hugh McLeod's The religious crisis of the 1960s (2007) offered a more nuanced and moderate argument along the same lines. His ‘Sixties’ run from the late 1950s into the 1970s and he pays more attention to changes within the Churches but both historians are agreed that the sociological explanation in terms of such highly abstract changes as increased rationalisation of social life, the de-legitimating effect of increasing diversity, and technology's role an giving people in increasing sense of mastery over fate is inadequate.

The essays in this collection are intended to elaborate on the Brown/McLeod approach by asking more detailed questions about the effect of the permissive society and by asking them about countries other than the UK. The editors (who also contribute) are Canadian, so naturally Canada features, as does that perennial Canadian preoccupation: how does Canada differ from the USA? Germany, Spain and India also figure. In a nice piece of organisation, the collection begins with Brown re-stating his position and ends with McLeod re-stating his while attempting to summarise the other contributions.

Most of the essays are excellent. Tina Fetner is good on the role that infrastructure has played in the rise of the religious right in the USA (an example of a successful backlash against the ’60s). Melanie Heath's comparison of religiously-inspired attempts to promote the virtues of marriage in the UK and USA is interesting. Hugh McLeod's summary of the essays is, as one would expect, masterly.

That this is a collection of essays rather than a monograph means that there are often asides that cry out for more attention. Heather Laing, for example, qualifies the ‘great decline in the cultural authority of the mainstream churches’ by adding that the 1960s saw ‘the spectacular rise of others, like the Pentecostal churches’ (p. 262). Did the Pentecostal Churches grow by recruiting from the mainstream Churches? Have they retained that growth? How much of it was due to migration? How much to larger than average family size? McLeod notes that the Canadian ‘conservative Protestant denominations tended to weather the storms of the sixties better than either the Catholic Church or liberal and moderate Protestant denominations’ (p. 461). But if they are anything like their US counterparts a large part of this apparent success was not more effective socialisation or recruitment but greater family size.

Overall the collection raises some doubts about the value of detailed historical case studies for its stated purpose. DeChristianisation can refer to changes in social and political institutions but it must, independently of such changes or as a result of such changes, refer to the beliefs and behaviour of people. Such a focus is often missing and when it is present (as in Tentler's otherwise excellent discussion of US Catholic responses to the Church's fumbling attempts to come to terms with sex as a leisure activity) it is treated only in passing. There is thus a dearth of statistical information about popular religiosity. I can find only two graphs, figures or tables in eighteen essays and both are in Brown's contribution. This is not a petty disciplinary snipe. Without some evidence of how, for example, changes in religious education in the Ontario public school system affected the successful (or otherwise) transmission of the faith from one generation to the next, it is difficult to know if such changes made any difference and hence whether we should care about them in this context. Ditto Heath's account of marriage promotion. In 2013, for the first time since records began the number of children born out of wedlock in the UK exceeded those born in wedlock. And in the US marriage has steadily declined in popularity. This rather suggests that campaigns to promote marriage are neither here nor there.

But while the collection as a whole may fall short of its ambitious purpose, most of its elements are interesting and educational and its treatments of Canada in particular will be of value to a UK readership.