Sociologists and historians agree in identifying the 1960s as a watershed in western religious history. Prior to that decade one could, without irony, speak of ‘Christendom’ – a socio-religious situation in which not only were the vast majority of people Christians, but even the few who were not accepted that theirs was a Christian society. In the sixties, however, everything changed: religious belief fell, the Churches haemorrhaged members, and the rhetoric of a Christian society rapidly transmuted into talk of a ‘civilised’, ‘post-Christian’ or ‘secular’ one. As McLeod points out, explanations of this have tended to fall into three main categories. Sociologists like Steve Bruce, for example, emphasise the gradual, long-term processes of modernisation and secularisation. For social historians such as Callum Brown a more immediate, short-term factor is held to be responsible (in Brown's case, the sexual revolution). Still others focus on specific movements, events or individuals as the decisive element. Very sensibly, McLeod rejects such a methodological trichotomy. Seeking better to explain so dramatic and complex a phenomenon, he offers instead a balanced, ‘three level’ account, integrating a wealth of evidence from the different perspectives.

Needless to say, religious crises do not arise ex nihilo, least of all those that arguably ‘may come to be seen as marking a rupture as profound as that brought by the Reformation’ (p. 1). As such, McLeod devotes the book's longest chapter to the forties and fifties. These decades of ‘late Christendom’ serve as a sharp contrast to what follows. In the United States, for example, Cold War oppositions between ‘Christian America’ and ‘godless Russia’ helped to galvanise an already burgeoning religious revival. In Britain, following a post-war lull, the Churches enjoyed wide popularity in the fifties, especially among the young and educated. The moral authority of church leaders, meanwhile, was well-respected. (Indeed, campaigners for the legalisation of homosexuality were quick to cite widespread ecclesiastical support as one of the key arguments in their favour.) Nevertheless, as McLeod demonstrates, ‘the foundations on which the edifice of Christendom was built were far from solid’ (p. 29). The fact that significant sections of the population (especially among the working classes) were already alienated from organised religion, coupled with increasing prosperity, the erosion of religious subcultures and changing sexual mores, ensured that by the end of the 1950s ‘The ground was already well prepared for the crisis of Christendom in the 1960s’ (p. 29).

McLeod divides the ‘long sixties’ into two: a period of ‘ferment’ between 1958 and 1966, and the ‘crisis’ proper from 1967 to 1972. In the former, most interesting is his discussion of Vatican II. Depending on which scholars one reads, either the council's reforms caused a catastrophe for the Church, or they averted an even greater one. The analysis here leans towards the second of these options. As comparisons with Anglicanism also show, by the early 1960s the signs of the times were already highlighting a need for changes in ecclesial style and expression (at least). On the other hand, the divisively ideological nature of much Catholic scholarship concerning Vatican II's legacy testifies to a deeper issue that takes centre-stage in McLeod's discussion. The polarisation of ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’, which has parallels in other denominations too, has not only brought tension (and in some extreme cases, schism), but has contributed significantly to the weakening of Catholic identity. Elsewhere, declines in religious socialisation (fewer babies being baptised, fewer children attending Sunday schools, etc.), the growth of ‘alternative’ spiritual and/or political worldviews and a new willingness within the media to question or satirise the establishment, all contributed to the swiftly shifting Zeitgeist.

Vatican II also looms large in discussing the crisis ‘point of extreme intensity between about 1967 and 1972’ (p. 214). Specifically, hopes for radical change which the council had raised in certain quarters, most notably on the issues of contraception and clerical celibacy, were quickly disappointed by Paul vi's encyclicals Sacerdotalis caelibatus (1967) and Humanae vitae (1968), causing much disillusionment. The latter encyclical was especially significant, as McLeod rightly details (citing here, as he does throughout the volume, a wealth of illuminating oral sources). For many in the Church, clergy and laity alike, it reinforced their suspicions that the pope was fallible after all. Married Catholics continued using contraception, but ceased go to confession – thus further undermining what many priests had regarded as their most important function. Furthermore, the fact that Humanae vitae was promulgated in 1968 lends it further significance for McLeod, who devotes a pivotal chapter to that turbulent year. Among other things, the political radicalism of many Christian ‘sixty-eighters’ brought them into conflict both with their more conservative coreligionists, and with increasingly secular, and often outrightly anti-religious, fellow activists. Forced to choose between the new and exciting Marxist, feminist and ecological movements, and the faltering Churches of the late 1960s, the decision was not always a difficult one.

Worthy of particular mention here is the book's short subsection entitled ‘Atheists “come out”’. The issue of atheism is generally ignored by sociologists and social historians, and has been mentioned only briefly in earlier treatments of the religious crisis. Nevertheless, why and how the social stigmas associated with non-belief disappeared with such apparent swiftness in most of Europe, but have yet to do so in the United States (changing this situation is, of course, a stated objective of many recent atheist writers), is an interesting and important question – and one about which, as is by now to be expected, McLeod has several interesting comments to make.

Religious crisis is detailed and comprehensive, yet is also engagingly written. Moreover, a great deal of important new source material, especially from unpublished personal testimonies, is incorporated into the text. McLeod might, arguably, have appealed more to sociological theory in order to explain the changes that he narrates so well. However, that is only a minor point, and by no means prevents this from being a very valuable book indeed.