Sociologists and historians have vigorously debated religious decline in the West since the 1960s, but until recently, most scholars have paid little attention to the gendered dimensions of secularization. Religious decline for these scholars amounted to a waning in the beliefs and practices of men, with little consideration for women's religious experiences. Callum Brown, a social historian of religion, stands out as one of the most prominent proponents in the gendering of secularization narratives and models. In the first volume of his planned trilogy on religious decline, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2001), Brown employed discourse analysis to make sense of secularization in modern British history. He made two controversial yet compelling claims in the book: 1) secularization was not a long, drawn-out process starting with the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution that gradually picked up steam in the twentieth century; rather, it was an abrupt if not catastrophic event emerging in the 1960s; 2) the 1960s witnessed the beginning of such a marked decline in religious beliefs and practices because it was at this time that women began abandoning the church in significant numbers due to the sexual revolution and its undermining of traditional Christian constructs of femininity.

Religion and the Demographic Revolution constitutes the second volume of Brown's trilogy. This book differs in some important ways from the first volume: the methodology is now demography; the focus is not on one but four countries on both sides of the Atlantic—Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and the 1960s, the subject of one chapter in the first volume, receives Brown's full attention here. But the basic argument has not really changed. If anything, what Brown is doing in this book is elaborating and expanding upon the connection he made in the first volume between women and secularization in the 1960s.

Brown points to three major cultural and social changes affecting Western societies in the 1960s: 1) the decline in Christianity's influence in the West, particularly Europe and Canada; 2) a demographic revolution in which severe drops in the fertility and marriage rates revolutionized the family structure; 3) “the revolution in women's identities” that ushered in “a transformation in the social construction of gender involving the search for autonomy in sexual expression, education and economic life” (1).

Brown's thesis is that all three trends are interconnected. Secularization, in other words, is both a demographic and a gendered event. Demography and gender interact with religion in complex ways to determine the degree of secularization in a given context. Of the four countries studied in this volume, mainland Britain and Canada represent highly secularized nations for Brown as measured in the declining participation of women in churches as well as women increasingly rejecting a religious identity. The United States is the least secularized of the four. It, too, was caught up in the revolutionary 1960s, but the upheavals of the 1960s were met with a strong and fairly successful conservative religious response in the 1970s. The long-term impact of the 1960s on religiosity in the U.S. was not as secularizing as in the other countries, and American women maintained a stronger religious identity.

Most of the chapters are organized thematically, focusing on how changing understandings of sex and sexuality, the family structure, and economics and labor all affect the religious identities of women. Throughout these discussions, women emerge as agents of religious change, decision-makers whose choices regarding sex, reproduction, relationships, and careers lead to a reformulation of self-identity and an independence if not alienation from organized religion, particularly in Europe and Canada.

One of the more intriguing components in Brown's treatment of women and secularization is the phenomenon of what he terms “no-religionism.” No-religionism refers to the growing number of people who indicate on a census or in a poll that they belong to no religion. Brown describes the rise of no-religionism since the 1960s and how not identifying with any religion has become increasingly accepted if not the norm in much of Europe. This is the case for women as well. Prior to the 1960s, women were viewed as models of piety, hence they had difficulty embracing any ideology that rejected or significantly questioned religion. With the revolutions of the 1960s, no-religionism becomes an increasingly viable option for women, particularly in Europe and Canada. In the U.S., however, women remain less likely to choose “no religion” or “none” on a census or survey, largely because Christian constructions of femininity still carry some weight.

Brown delivers a persuasive argument for the connection between demography, gender, and secularization. The sheer range of data he draws on to make his case is impressive. The book is full of tables and graphs measuring fertility and marriage rates, church attendance, educational levels, and economic patterns, among others. Brown keeps his focus on how this data, which can be overwhelming at times, connects to secularization and changing gender identities. Of course, the classic dilemma in assessing such data—does correlation equal causation—is likely to give pause to some scholars. But Brown avoids simplistic conclusions, and unlike the transatlantic comparisons made by some scholars, he is careful not to impose European models of secularization or religious change on the U.S. and vice-versa.

Given the neglect of gender in traditional accounts of religious change and religious decline in modern Western history, Brown's book is an indispensible contribution to the field. The book will go a long way toward helping to bring gender as a crucial category of analysis from the periphery to the center of the secularization debate.