In 1927 and 1928 the House of Commons rejected a measure that would have instituted a new Book of Common Prayer (BCP) for the Church of England. Why did this happen? The additions and changes to the liturgy had been approved by all the governing bodies of the Church and the House of Lords. Furthermore, the changes, though significant in places—legalizing reservation of the sacrament under certain circumstances, for example—were not revolutionary when compared to the practices of a substantial number of Anglican churches in the preceding twenty years. Given the economic and political problems facing the country in the late 1920s, debating whether a wafer of bread should remain on view after a church service seems like an odd distraction.

In his book National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–1928, John Maiden attempts to explain why Parliament expended so much effort deciding whether the BCP of 1662 should be altered. Maiden argues that a strong desire to defend Protestantism, particularly the Reformation settlement, animated those who lobbied MPs and the MPs themselves to reject the measure. This assertion of Protestant feeling was founded on a nascent, and sometimes explicitly expressed, antipathy toward Catholicism. The Prayer Book measure was defeated by a combination of pro-Protestant and anti-Catholic sentiment.

The genius of Maiden's book is that he is not content to rest with an explanation of the reasons for Parliament taking a detour into the world of liturgical revision. By examining questions of national identity, both English and British; imperial politics; and the decline of empire, as well as developments in other churches, Maiden argues that action of the House of Commons was not an isolated incident. A catalyst for the passion displayed by MPs in the Commons' debates was the continuing debate in the country about national religion and the nature of Englishness and/or Britishness. Should Englishmen be suspicious of a country such as Italy because it was foreign, or Roman Catholic, or both? As questions of national identity and national policy were so bound up with ideas about an English/British religion, Maiden suggests it is a mistake to consider the 1920s, and the thirty years after that decade, as a time when British society was secular. Large sections of the Free churches, as well as Anglicans, believed that Britain had a national religion—Protestantism, which had been created by the sixteenth-century Reformation—and that the Church of England was the embodiment of that tradition. Thus, the House of Commons, the body that represented the people of Britain, had the right to insure that the Church of England remained true to its Protestant roots—no matter that some of the MPs doing the judging were Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist.

Maiden explicates his argument in five concise chapters covering the reasons why some Anglicans thought the Prayer Book needed revising, the reaction of the different Anglican parties to the proposed revision, the connection between Anglicanism and national identity, the reaction of the Free churches as well as Welsh and Scottish churches to the revision project, and the attitude of Parliament to the revision process and proposed Prayer Book. In each of these chapters Maiden's focus is both narrow and broad: narrow in the sense that his emphasis is on the details of the debate about the BCP; broad in that Maiden takes into account the larger context of the debate—its regional, national, and international implications.

With regard to the historiography of twentieth-century Britain, the introductory and concluding chapters of the book are more controversial. In the former, Maiden describes the character of the Church of England. He argues that the Church had a “Centre-High outlook” and that “the centre of gravity of middle-ground Anglicanism was moving upwards, in a Catholic direction” (9). In the latter, Maiden concludes that the majority of the British considered themselves Protestant and wrapped up in their sense of Britishness was a dislike and distrust of all things Catholic (whether the Roman or Anglican version). As Parliament was the final arbiter on Anglican doctrine and liturgy, a prayer book seemingly skewed toward Catholicism was “un-British” and likely to be rejected.

While Maiden's thesis and arguments are compelling, several caveats must be added to this commendation. First, Maiden's estimation of the Catholicization of the Church of England is slightly overstated. To suggest, for example, that Arthur Winnington-Ingram and William Temple were part of a Catholic consensus in the Church is inaccurate. Winnington-Ingram was a bishop of London not able, or willing, to discipline the Anglo-Catholic excesses in his diocese; Temple is better characterized as a liberal Anglican with broad-church sympathies. (Maiden's definition of Catholic is somewhat confusing—using “English Catholic” to describe certain Anglicans, for example.) Second, because Maiden did not consult the debates in the Church Assembly, he has missed part of the cut and thrust of debate between the various parties in the Church. The revised BCP was a document produced by consensus, not just the creation of the bishops or the Church hierarchy, and that is why its rejection was a major surprise to some—the work of the “Protestant underworld,” as Hensley Henson, the bishop of Durham, described it.

These problems aside, Maiden's book is the first full-length scholarly treatment of the so-called Prayer Book controversy since the 1930s—not an immediate reaction to a crisis but a measured analysis—and so he is breaking new ground. His book is an important contribution to growing revisionist historiography of British religion in the early twentieth century in the style of Callum Brown, John Wolffe, and Matthew Grimley. As Maiden notes in his conclusion (186), the idea of Protestant Britain was still a formidable ideological rival to the concept of a broad Christian society; equally important, the secularization thesis has a historiographical alternative: Britain as a nation that cared passionately about (Protestant) Christianity.