In the main, God's Continent is an excellent survey of the recent history and current state of Christianity and Islam in Europe. Jenkins details the steady decline in power, popularity and presence of Christianity and the corresponding rise of Islam. Especially for the novice, the documentary aspects of this volume are first-rate. Without ever becoming tedious, the author packs in a huge amount of statistical and biographical detail. If you want to know about church attendance in Holland or France or the number and age distribution of Turks in Germany or Pakistani Muslims in Bradford, this is the place to look.

Jenkins is not just good at descriptive detail. His explanations and discussions of policy options are for the most part fair and sensible. He is particularly clear on the paradoxes of multiculturalism. In order to be “fair” to non-Christian religions, we accord them a degree of public space which we do not accord Christianity. To encourage “moderate” Muslim leaders we tolerate opinions (such as homophobia and male chauvinism) which we reject when they come from the post-Christian mainstream. And we deny the fundamental principles of liberal democracy by treating immigrants as if they were defined primarily by their supposedly shared religion. In some instances, European societies have come close to adopting the millet system of the old Ottoman Empire, in which minorities were dealt with as blocks and governments negotiate with their self-appointed leaders as if they represented a legitimately opted-out sub-society.

The book has only two weaknesses and neither seriously undermines the enormous value of the volume as a whole. First, although Jenkins does not deny the collapse of Christianity he tries a little too hard to find “faith among the ruins” (as he entitles one chapter). For example, he approvingly cites Davie's depiction of the British as “believing but not belonging”: a proposition that has been refuted by the only serious statistical attempt to compare trajectories of indices of belief and belonging. He also takes the British fondness for church schools as evidence of an implicit sympathy for Christianity. Were Jenkins English he would better understand that such schools are popular because they are old-fashioned and because they allow the middle-classes to protect their children from the rough working class. Parents cynically pretend to a faith in order to practice class segregation.

Second, Jenkins reads the links between faith and social functions backwards. It is demonstrably the case that where a people who share a common faith are in political conflict with those of a different faith, secularization can be retarded. In Catholic Poland and Ireland, for example, the Church retained the loyalty of its people to a much greater extent than in England and France because the Church was seen as a bastion of national integrity against, in the first case an atheistic foreign oppressor, and in the second a Protestant oppressor. Jenkins makes the unwarranted leap of supposing that confrontation with assertive Islam will cause a formerly Christian people to rediscover their commitment to Christianity. When we translate this from a societal to the individual level, this seems remarkably unlikely. It bothers me that many Muslims reject individualism and personal freedom in preference for conservative communalism and I know enough of my history to appreciate that my secular liberal democracy owes a great deal to the unintended consequences of Protestant Christian ideas but that does not make me believe that God sent his only Son to earth as an atoning sacrifice for my sins.

His conclusion — that the confrontation with Islam is likely to trigger a Christian revival — is at odds with recent evidence and with logic. What recent surveys show is that troublesome Islam is provoking, not a Christian revival but a decline in sympathy for all religions. The supposed evils of Islam are taken not as proof that Christianity is a better religion but as further evidence that all religion taken too seriously is a bad idea.

But neither of these criticisms changes my assessment. Jenkins has produced an extremely useful study of religion in Europe that also has the great merit of being immensely readable. It should be required reading on any course concerned with the political and social policy consequences of religious diversity.