As anyone familiar with twentieth-century British history will know, James Hinton is the author of the celebrated Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (2010), and Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century (2016). In this short volume, Mass Observers Making Meaning: Religion, Spirituality and Atheism in Late 20th-Century Britain, Hinton stays with Britain, Mass Observation, and the late twentieth century, but turns his focus to religion. As he disarmingly confesses in his preface, he is “a lifelong atheist” who has “never previously… shown the slightest interest in religion,” but felt driven to write this book as part of a longer process of “settling accounts” with his fiercely anti-religious father (ix, xi). Readers of Hinton's earlier works will recognize the richness with which he evokes individual beliefs and feelings, and the sophistication of his theoretical reflection. In this case, he acknowledges theoretical debts to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor; most unusually among writers about modern British “religion,” he has not only read Max Weber and Clifford Geertz but also understood them.

Hinton's core source material is 279 responses to a 1996 Mass Observation directive titled “The Supernatural: What do you believe?” As he quickly reminds us, however, there are considerable difficulties with using this material to generalize about the wider British population: his sample is disproportionately “female, elderly, and well educated,” and includes neither ethnic minorities nor lifelong members of non-Christian “religions” (11). In practice, therefore, Hinton is writing about three main groups of people: white Christians; white spiritual-but-not-religious; and white atheists and agnostics. He has cross-referenced the 1996 data with two directives from 1990 to gain additional context about respondents’ lives. Fundamentally, however, the book offers us a snapshot in time, not a detailed account of change over time. As his source material demands, Hinton's discussion is specifically about beliefs concerning “the supernatural,” by which MO (and by extension Hinton) seems to mean “the paranormal,” to the possibility of which many of MO's respondents were remarkably open. This is a book with ghosts, poltergeists, Ouija boards, out-of-body experiences, and encounters with dead people. A fascinating seventh chapter examines two British women who self-consciously converted to paganism.

Hinton uses this material to argue against what we might call the culture war interpretation of late twentieth-century British spirituality. Between conservative Christians on one side and dogmatic atheists on the other, he suggests, there was a large majority in the middle that was open to spirituality and the transcendent without being conventionally Christian. In this center-ground, disagreements about the existence of God were actually secondary to the commonality of the shared experience of “making meaning.” On the one hand, therefore, many of his Christians were increasingly abandoning what their parents would have identified as Christian orthodoxy; of his fifty-eight Christian respondents who discussed the subject, forty-one subscribed to paranormal and occult beliefs, and almost none believed in hell (73). Conversely, many of his atheists were open to the possibility of the supernatural and were happy to claim the term “spirituality” for themselves. Consequently, he argues, “theists and atheists, convinced materialists and spiritual searchers, often have a good deal more in common than the familiar entrenched battle lines would have us suppose” (xi). As this slippage into the present tense suggests, Hinton wishes to use his historical material from the 1990s to make a moral argument for today, namely that members of a pluralist society should respect each other's beliefs (139).

As Hinton is keenly aware, it would be a controversial task to situate his material within the wider picture of British secularization: an entertaining footnote records how one of the book's initial referees upbraided him for taking secularization theory too seriously, while another condemned him for not taking it seriously enough (173). From one perspective, one could read his 1990s respondents as evidence of a distinctly spiritual secularity: from another, one could read them as evidence of supernaturalism's dead-cat bounce on the path to total secularity. Characteristically, Hinton lands in the middle: since “we do not actually know where history is going,” he concludes, it is best to stick with “Charles Taylor's picture of an open-ended pluralist society in which the future of supernatural beliefs remains unknown” (139).

This is a valuable book: while this subfield spends much of its time arguing about collective shifts, Hinton helpfully reminds us to think about personalities, and about the myriad individual emotions, nuances, and idiosyncrasies that sit underneath wider trends. He is undoubtedly right to argue that everyone is engaged in a project of constructing meaning. As a great man nearly said, however, people do not do this in circumstances of their choosing, but rather by assembling collages of cultural materials close at hand. Hinton does not devote much time to the specific popular culture of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s as it relates to his themes: while he is clearly aware of the influence of films and television, it would have been interesting to read his reflections on the extent to which—to name some examples at random—Ghostbusters, The X-Files, Casper, or even Mystic Meg impacted MO's respondents’ willingness to entertain the paranormal. Probably as a consequence of his source material, Hinton does not reflect at length on 1990s debates about morality, especially about gender and sexuality, and so it remains to be seen how far consideration of these debates would complicate his common ground thesis. Additionally, this reviewer would have welcomed more examination of many of the book's foundational concepts, including religion (Hinton ignores the postcolonial critique of this category), the supernatural, belief, and transcendence, not least because these terms contain a great deal of ideological baggage and Hinton's reflections them would undoubtedly have been rewarding.

Hinton, in short, has done it: he has written a successful book about “religion.” Mass Observers Making Meaning can be recommended to anyone interested in Christianity, spirituality, and secularization in 1990s Britain.