In 2004 a government minister claimed that the ‘single most decisive feature’ in shaping the Australian nation was ‘the Judeo-Christian-Western traditon’. This prompted a Sydney academic to declare that these claims were offensive and that Australia's heritage was secular. That is the setting for this well-researched and powerfully argued book, which aims to show why both were right, and both were in some respects wrong. The authors provide a history of Church-State relations in Australia from 1788 to the present day and a polemical contribution to contemporary debates, while also pleading for a broad conception of the ‘religious’, going well beyond institutions and doctrines to include wider manifestations of the sacred, such as Anzac Day rituals. Theories of secularisation, they argue, often rest on narrow definitions of both the religious and the secular. The first rulers of the Australian colonies privileged and provided financial support for the Church of England. However, the presence of large numbers of Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists led first to attempts to provide state support for several denominations and then to the withdrawal of any financial support. The main remaining problem was the place of religion in government schools. These were said to be ‘secular’, but, as the authors demonstrate at length, ‘secular’ meant not ‘non-religious’ but ‘non-denominational’. This did not preclude Bible-reading and the teaching of a generalised form of Protestantism. The underlying assumption was that, although sects might disagree on points of doctrine, all were agreed on the essentials of morality and citizenship. Religion provided the surest foundations for a good society. These views were shared by most of those who founded the federal Australian state in 1901, and Christian social thought, both Catholic and Protestant, was a key influence on the social reforms of the early twentieth century. Secularism in the sense of militant opposition to any kind of religion gained a small following in the nineteenth century and a somewhat larger presence from the 1930s, spearheaded by the Sydney Professor of Philosophy, John Anderson. But only in the 1960s and ’70s, they argue, did secularism in the contemporary sense become widely influential. Their principal point is that belief in the social utility of religion then began to crumble as the emphasis on the perceived needs of the community gave way to increasingly influential ideas of individual rights. From this point of view, religions were complicit in the oppression of minorities (including indigenous peoples) and in the imposition of common moral rules on an intrinsically diverse population. Here the authors’ polemical agenda comes into play: they claim that seeing Australian history through the lens of contemporary forms of secularism has led both to misunderstanding of the past and to a concept of human rights which has no coherent philosophical basis. This is a controversial book but, in my opinion, largely persuasive.