The publication of this book represents the culmination of a European Union-funded survey on the role of religion in politics in five northern European countries, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. Although these countries appear some of the most secularised in Europe in statistical comparisons, the book makes a good case that Christianity has continued to influence their national identities and public policies. It also argues that the ecumenical movement played an important geopolitical role in the Cold War, for example demonstrating how Ostpolitik was pursued through discussions between the German Protestant and Russian Orthodox Churches. Most of the book consists of three introductory chapters by Hugh McLeod and Risto Saarinen, who do a very skilful job of weaving the disparate strands of the project into a coherent narrative, and presenting them in the wider context of European religious, social and political change. (A shorter section at the end offers chapter and verse on the research projects themselves.) These introductory chapters argue that different theological traditions led Churches to develop different visions of their role in the world in the period 1945–89. In general, Protestant national Churches, working through the World Council of Churches, concentrated on a global, extra-European role (particularly in the developing world), while the natural law traditions of Roman Catholics attracted them to the cause of European unity. This is an intriguing argument, though the authors are wisely careful not to overstate it, emphasising the differences in the political thought of different Protestant denominations (for example between Anglicans and Lutherans), as well as the increasing emphasis of Catholics on the extra-European world from the 1960s onwards. Understandably in what is an extremely short book, most of the emphasis is on Churches at an institutional level. There is not much investigation of how far ordinary believers endorsed the priorities of their religious leaders (though the argument that Swedish Euroscepticism is linked to Lutheranism is tentatively – and tantalisingly – advanced). A more prosaic gripe is that there are no footnotes or bibliography (or index), making it hard to know when the introductory chapters are drawing on the research project or on other sources. Nevertheless, this book contains some fascinating incidental detail, for example on the phenomenon of Marian apparitions in Protestant Finland. More important, it usefully complements recent works by (among others) Joanne Kirby and Grace Davie in opening up the Cold War and European integration as areas of study for the religious historian.