In recent years the ‘secularisation’ thesis beloved of proponents of the privatisation of religion and reinforced by a broader narrative of a teleological process of modernisation grounded in the Enlightenment critique of religion has been increasingly recognised as a myth by historians. This volume, a collection surveying Western powers and their colonial offshoots (Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, the United States, New Zealand and Australia) between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, is a mature and confident expression of the new historiography that takes religion and the Churches seriously both on their own terms and in their relations with the State. Not only are the individual contributions strong, but collectively they also point to the conclusion that these states, even in their modern guises, are by no means strictly secular, nor do they live up to the myth of secular neutrality. That maturity is evident also in the authors' willingness to allow a variety of contrasting voices to articulate a broad spectrum of understandings of, say, English erastianism at the time of the Civil War, or Gallicanism in eighteenth-century France, or church provision of state welfare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australia. Collusion between Church and State reaches an horrific height in Wilhelmine Germany, articulated in a neo-Hegelian belief in the triumph of the state with the most vigorous culture and military might. Racism of a different kind is evident in Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's jingoistic support of empire as a means of converting the heathen but is balanced by the determination of paternalistic High Anglicans in Bishop Selwyn's Church Party in New Zealand to defend the property and political rights of the Maori against land-grabbing Nonconformist settlers. In the United States, Virginia Nonconformists supported the separation of Church and State in the eighteenth century but vigorously denounced it at the end of the twentieth. The Roman Catholic Church, which had vigorously opposed disestablishment, finally renounced the ideal of Christendom at the Second Vatican Council, only to find itself exercising considerable political influence in Eastern Europe, South America and south-east Asia. As nations under Western cultural influence pursue the goals of what Charles Taylor has called the ‘Age of Authenticity’ (characterised by the individual pursuit of personal realisation), so the Churches have turned from a focus on transnational causes and movements to issues such as gender and sexual identity. ‘Conflicts over such issues are leading to claims that separation of church and state is more and more driving religion into the private realm, leaving the public realm to be dominated not by a religiously neutral or “non-confessional” state, but one which, in effect, embraces a form of ideological post-Christian secularism’ (p. 27). This fine collection of essays could have been strengthened by the consideration of church establishment in nineteenth-century Canada with its unique combination of French Catholic and English Protestant cultures and as a contrast to disestablishment in the United States.