Georgina Byrne’s analysis of the relationship between the Church of England and the spiritualist movement from the Victorian period to the eve of the Second World War addresses the question of how popular movements influence established religious institutions and enters the debate over the decline of religion. This work is, therefore, as important for the approaches to the study of religiosity that it suggests as it is for its argument that Anglican understandings of heaven evolved partly in response to spiritualism’s images of the afterlife.

After an introductory chapter that lays out her argument and situates her work historiographically, Byrne builds her argument in three parts. The first part of her argument is that after its origin in New York in 1848 and its introduction to England in 1852, spiritualism quickly entered the “common culture,” by which she means that even those who were skeptical about or uninterested in spiritualism knew its basic tenets and practices. Byrne documents spiritualism’s establishment as a popular phenomenon complete with journals and alternative Sunday schools that appealed to ordinary and notable Victorians. While acknowledging that there was no organized movement and that spiritualists’ ideas could differ, Byrne gives the broad outlines of spiritualist beliefs and assumptions. These included the belief that the dead could communicate with the living; that the middle stage of heaven was much like earth, although better; and that some sort of place of punishment did exist, but progress in the afterlife was possible and even expected.

Having established the place of spiritualism in the common culture, Byrne proceeds to show that Anglican clergymen, on the personal as well as the institutional level, were aware of and felt the need to respond to spiritualism. While most clergymen rejected spiritualism as fraudulent, some were intrigued by it, and a small number even found it plausible enough to become practitioners. Spiritualism’s appeal was based in large part on its positing a kinder and gentler version of the afterlife than did orthodox Anglican teaching, which tended to emphasize sinfulness and punishment. The rise of spiritualism coincided with clerical criticisms of Anglican teaching on the afterlife. Byrne discusses at length Frederic Denison Maurice’s Theological Essays (London, 1853)—one of the three texts that set the chronological boundaries of her analysis—as well as texts by other clergymen that suggested that people could continue to develop spiritually after death. However, the Church of England was slow to respond officially to the movement. It was not until 1881 that the Church Congress discussed spiritualism, and the topic was not raised officially again until 1920, when the Lambeth Conference briefly discussed it, along with Christian Science and Theosophy. The most sustained response, the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s committee on spiritualism, was completed in 1939 but suppressed for decades.

The third part of Byrne’s argument is that Anglican teaching and practice—if not doctrine—about the afterlife evolved in response to spiritualism. Using sources such as sermons, hymns, and the Prayer Book, Byrne demonstrates the evolution of Anglican ideas about the afterlife over almost a century, from an emphasis on sin and punishment to a greater confidence that most if not all people could reach heaven, which was a dynamic place where people could become better and achieve greater happiness. This evolution was, she argues, partly driven by the spiritualist view of heaven, although she acknowledges that it is difficult to ascertain private beliefs and that there was no direct correlation between spiritualism’s views of the afterlife and a change in Anglican views. She also notes where spiritualist beliefs about the afterlife diverged from Anglican beliefs; for example, when Jesus appears in accounts from the afterlife, it is as a model human being. Finally, she considers other historical events, including the very high number of deaths in World War I, that encouraged Anglicans to believe in a heaven that was more accessible and more like earth.

Byrne is principally concerned with how religious belief is negotiated between official and popular sources. By demonstrating how Anglican beliefs about the afterlife evolved, she joins the ranks of those who have contested the “decline of religion” thesis advanced (and then modified) by Callum Brown. She has produced a very readable, engaging study on a phenomenon that is generally thought to be opposed to organized religion. In examining how Anglicans responded to spiritualism, Byrne tells one part of the story about how they engaged with the modern world.

Recognizing the limitations of a single monograph, I would nevertheless have liked Byrne to provide a broader context for the evolution of Anglican ideas about the afterlife. For example, she notes that Anglo-Catholics promoted praying for the dead, but she suggests that this was a twentieth-century phenomenon when in fact it was promoted by some Tractarians and Ritualists even before spiritualism emerged. Looked at in the context of the Anglo-Catholic movement, prayers for the dead were one expression of the desire to recapture the Catholic identity of the Church of England, and the decision to allow them was one of the many ways in which Anglo-Catholic beliefs and practices gradually became accepted by the end of the nineteenth century. Likewise, while Byrne acknowledges the impact of World War I on orthodox views of heaven, she does not discuss other cultural forces that might also have encouraged people to envision a more welcoming version of heaven. These might include a growing materialism, which promised immediate satisfaction, as well as the slow growth of secularism, which might have encouraged clergymen to think that a more inviting view of heaven might encourage people to remain in the church. These questions, however, merely show the richness of the material Byrne discusses in her work, which should be read by those interested in modern British culture generally as well as in Anglicanism specifically.