In his introduction to this collection of essays John Carter Wood states that ‘far from seeking to answer the question of what Christianity's stance towards the nation “is” or “should be”, this collection considers the answers of specific historical protagonists and the contexts in which they reached them, mindful that not all religious arguments are strictly speaking “religious”’. Major changes in these contexts included, he suggests, the onset after World War I of an ‘intense period of nation-building accompanied by strongly religious inflections of national belonging’; the widespread belief among those fighting in World War II that God was on their side; the renewed reference to ‘Europe’ after the war; the secularising trends; and the revival of religiously-based nationalisms in the countries of eastern and east central Europe.

Two essays offer a transnational perspective. Patrick Pasture provides an overview of Catholic ideas of Europe and European unity from the French Revolution to the present day. He notes a continuing strain of nostalgia for Christendom and interest in projects for greater European integration – albeit from very different perspectives. He suggests that the papacy has generally been sympathetic to such ideas – even to the extent of proposals for the beatification of the Christian Democratic pioneers of European unification, Schuman and De Gasperi. Lazaros Miliopoulos, discussing ‘The Christian Churches between European and national identities’, notes that the Churches have been active in lobbying at the European level, and that Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox have been concerned to assert the Christian basis of European identity, while the Protestants have been more accepting of pluralism. While the Churches have successfully defended the specific Church-State arrangements in the various countries of Europe, the courts have ‘contributed to a levelling of national and cultural-religious differences’ in upholding complaints against long-standing traditions alleged to violate the rights of non-believers or religious minorities. The remaining chapters offer case studies of particular countries or regions during much shorter periods of time. Jorge Luengo looks at the conflicts between Spanish and Catalan nationalism in the years around 1900. For those on both sides language was a crucial component of national identity. For many of the clergy the key issues were pastoral, including the need to preach to Catalan-speaking congregations in their own language. But they were bitterly criticised both by fellow-Catholics and by anti-clericals who accused them of undermining Spanish national unity. John Wolffe focuses on the work of the Imperial War Graves Committee after World War I, and especially on the controversies surrounding the place of Christian symbolism and language whether at central points in the cemeteries or on individual gravestones. He contrasts Churchill, for whom distinctive religious traditions were subsumed within a shared national community, and those (especially High Anglicans) who wanted to give the memorialisation of the dead a more overtly Christian character. Matthew Hockenos analyses the sermons of Martin Niemöller in the years 1933–7, when he was gradually moving from an enthusiastic welcoming of the Nazi regime to the criticisms that eventually took him to Dachau. The young and indeed the middle-aged Niemöller fused Lutheranism and German nationalism, including anti-semitism. Only in prison did his ideas evolve in radically new directions. A rather less dramatic evolution is traced by Wood in his chapter on the influential group of British Christian intellectuals, led by the missionary leader, J.H.Oldham, editor of the Christian Newsletter. In the years 1937–40 they distinguished between ‘patriotism’ (natural and healthy) and ‘nationalism’ (destructive and dangerous), but in the years 1940–2, when the fate of the United Kingdom hung in the balance, they were open to ideas of national mission and to an idealised view of British culture and institutions. Gregor Feindt, drawing especially on samizdat literature, shows how in the later 1970s there was considerable debate between those representing different strands of oppositionist thought, as to the relationship between Catholicism and the Polish nation. There were revisionist Communists, distanced from the Church, but recognising its necessary role in any meaningful opposition to the regime; liberals, both Catholic and secular, who wanted a pluralist conception of the nation and a willingness to confront the darker pages of Polish history; and conservatives, who affirmed the integral connection between Catholicism and the nation. These groups could work together, but the situation was fundamentally changed by the rise of Solidarity, which found that Catholic symbols had a unique mobilising power. In the longer term this prepared the ground for the recent revival of conservative forms of Catholic nationalism. Gladys Ganiel examines suggestions that either ecumenism or secularisation might hold the key to peace in Northern Ireland. She reaches the very interesting conclusion that more important than either may be the adoption of more tolerant attitudes among those whose personal religious convictions remain fairly conservative. Unfortunately, though she refers the reader to other studies, too little of the evidence for this conclusion is presented here. Mihai-D. Grigore examines the continuing conflict between the Romanian and Russian Orthodox patriarchs, both of whom claim jurisdiction over the Orthodox Church in Moldavia.

The only overall conclusion to be drawn from these essays is that no overall conclusion about the relationship between Christianity and national identity is possible. Wood quotes, without comment, John Connelly's reference to ‘the Churches’ chronic inability to resist the demands of the respective national state, especially in issues of nationalist legitimation’. The chapter that comes nearest to supporting such claims would be that on Moldavia. But so close both in Romania and Russia are the identification between Church and Nation and the alliance between Church and State, that it would be hard to say which partner is using the other. The other chapters, even that on Martin Niemöller, who up to 1933 might have seemed to exemplify Connelly's strictures, suggest more nuanced relationships between Church and Nation, changes over time as the context changed, and considerable debate within the Church. After all, Niemöller's militant nationalism was founded on what he believed to be Christian premises, and could change when these premises no longer seemed to be justified.