Secularisation in the Christian world is an exemplary Festschrift, celebrating Hugh McLeod's oeuvre and assembling a team of scholars to expand and occasionally challenge aspects of it. The editors begin with an overview of McLeod's research on Christianity from the industrial revolution onwards. They pay generous tribute to the magnitude of his achievement, marking the turning points in his scholarship from his first detailed monograph on London, to the wider pattern of class and religion in England, then to a comparative study of English, German and American cities, as well as broader comparisons involving Europe, America and the British Empire. The editorial essay concludes with McLeod's heavy lifting as editor and contributor to volume ix of the Cambridge history of Christianity in 2006, and his 2007 monograph, The religious crisis of the 1960s, in which he dissected the variety of contributory causes in the precipitous decline of institutional religion all over the developed Christian world in that decade. The whole amounts to a meticulously grounded and imaginatively nuanced history of secularisation in the west.

The editors rightly stress the leadership that McLeod has exercised, and the debt many of the contributors owe him. His eagerness to learn from his students is legendary, as is his willingness to debate the secularisation issue with sociologists, four of whom make an appearance among the historians assembled for the feast – Jeff Cox offers an idiosyncratic update on the theoretical debate, Linda Woodhead teases out the implications of different definitions of ‘religion’, Steve Bruce restates his ‘hard’ empirical view of secularisation, and Grace Davie glosses McLeod's conclusions and her differences with him over the extent of secularisation. The obvious omission is someone to cover the rise of Third World Christianity, a subject of ongoing interest to McLeod himself – though the historian David Hempton touches on it briefly in his persuasive essay on Protestant migration, the most recent wave being transnational Pentecostalism. Sociologists may feel that Brown and Snape have been less than fair to social scientists in claiming the pre-eminence of historians in unravelling the tangled skein of evidence, theories and assumptions labelled ‘secularisation’. But Hugh McLeod has always seen the relationship of the disciplines as reciprocal and has made comparative analysis, the lifeblood of sociology, as crucial to his work as his trademark empirical precision.

The editors refrain from criticising McLeod's views in their introductory essay, though elsewhere in the volume Callum Brown, with his customary robustness, reasserts his disagreements with his erstwhile mentor over religious decline in the 1960s. Indeed, one of the great virtues of this Festschrift is that the differences between the contributors highlight areas of continuing dispute and divergent historical patterns, though, in truth, there are more challenges to Callum Brown than to McLeod. In an elegant chapter John Wolffe raises sly queries over the extent of secularisation by charting the transformations in the role of Protestantism and Monarchy in defence of Christian Britain. He concludes that Callum Brown's chronology of the ‘Death’ of Christian Britain does not match the chronology of crises for the double act of Protestantism and monarchy, and that the ‘Death’ was far from complete by the millennium when the monarchy had become the defender of a religiously plural Britain rather than a secular one. Callum Brown's own chapter repeats his claim that feminism was the engine of definitive secularisation in the sixties by dissolving the fusion of femininity and piety (though he hardly strengthens its plausibility by relying on a remarkably narrow sample of feminist autobiographies, largely written by left-leaning British celebrities). Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, by contrast, stress the close link between piety and masculinity as the guarantor of religion and family life in Canada. They place a question mark over a strong definition of secularisation, arguing that Canadian religious history oscillates between private and public imperatives, and emphasising the adaptive capacity of the Churches. They conclude that, though the structure of institutional identities and church authority was rapidly dismantled between 1960 and 1980, religion as a system of private practices and personal beliefs and values has remained remarkably unchanged.

A different demur comes from David Hilliard in his chapter on Australia. While there are close parallels with the English pattern of secularisation in McLeod's accounts, there are also divergences, including the recent expansion of the role of the Australian Churches in social welfare and education. Hilliard highlights the ongoing rediscovery of the Christian heritage of supposedly ‘secular’ Australia and the emergence of a new religious marketplace rather than the definitive evaporation of religion that was until lately predicted. In his chapter on Scandinavia Erik Sidenvall places the crucial deChristianisation just before and after the turn into the nineteenth century and sees it as an agrarian phenomenon rather than associated with the rise of cities and an urban proletariat. Sidenvall believes that the Scandinavian Churches are still operating as ‘community cults’ despite a modest weakening of religious socialisation since the sixties. Peter van Rooden, who straddles church history and sociology, accepts the consensus that the sudden collapse of Dutch Christianity in the sixties was related to the rise of the autonomous, reflexive self (though not uniquely to feminism), but sees boredom rather than ideological alienation as the operative factor. He suggests that the continuous refashioning of the self, the home and all one's relationships is sufficiently daunting to make the ready-made blueprints offered by certain Churches an attractive proposition. Lucian Hölscher discusses the German case by examining the theological response of progressive and conservative groups to assumptions about secularisation in the 1960s and 1970s, reminding us that there is no final agreement on the usage of the term either in academic analysis or among the religious and secular actors. Michael Snape's richly documented chapter on religion among the armed forces in the two world wars reveals a well resourced and effective religious life among all ranks, and might support Simon Green's recent argument, which echoes Hugh McLeod, that the fifties were more a period of stabilisation than of revival in religion.

All the chapters have something pertinent to say about the secularisation debate and the continuing controversies show that not even such a wide-ranging and judicious analysis as that of Hugh McLeod can be the final word.