This book is the final volume in a trilogy on religion in the West since the 1960s, following The death of Christian Britain (2001) and Religion and the demographic revolution (2013). It aims to show how modern societies became atheist through the oral histories recounted by eighty-five volunteers from atheist, ethical and humanist societies in Britain, the United States, Canada, France, Estonia and India. These narratives are examined in six chapters following a general introduction and a chapter which draws on over two hundred life stories in existing oral history archives in Britain, the United States and Canada to determine in what respects religion figured in the interviewees’ lives. The predictable conclusion is that religion mattered more to women than to men, more among ethnic minority groups than in the white host communities, and more in the United States than in Britain. But among all groups there has been a marked decrease in the importance of religion. The language of religion persists only as a default way of describing experiences which are not in themselves religious while atheism struggles to find its own language. It is not the primary purpose of Becoming atheist to consider the many who passed from the unconscious Christianity of former times to the unconscious secularism of the sixties generation. These people present a methodological difficulty for the oral historian who needs the unexpressed to be spoken. Brown uses his interviews with those who are now articulate about their atheism to see how they describe their earlier years of indifference. His aim is to explore the process of becoming and living as an avowed atheist in modern secular society, and to discover in the words of atheists themselves the secular language of non-belief which replaces the old discourse of belief and exposes the profound cultural shift towards secularisation which Brown argues took place in the early 1960s.

The analysis of the interviews begins with childhood. About a fifth of those interviewed experienced strict religious upbringings against which they subsequently reacted. Others, with a Marxist or socialist upbringing, were and remained atheist. But most striking is the large number of those who recalled coming to atheist conclusions for themselves in their pre-pubescent years. The usual narrative stresses the openness of young people to religious influences in adolescence. Here it would appear that, for some of the sixties generation, there was a growing conviction of atheism in childhood – but these are the retrospective views of articulate men and women. Were they typical?

The distinctive experiences of atheism are tempered by gender, race and ethnicity. Brown has long argued for the significance of the loss of belief among women as a major reason for the increasing secularisation of the 1960s. His argument is that religion, increasingly feminised since about 1800, has been peculiarly vulnerable to what was happening to female culture in the 1960s. Only twenty-eight of the eighty-five respondents were women and their experiences were markedly gendered, with female responses being anchored in the family. Changes to the structure of the family have therefore had important consequences for the religious cultural shifts of the 1960s and the onset of rapid secularisation. Sexual trauma arising from the tension between (male-dictated) religious expectations and female discovery of the autonomous and liberated self often lay behind the move to atheism. Feminism provided these women with an alternative way of thinking – one without the need for a god. Traditionally masculinity exhibits a different trajectory, associated with reason, the struggle to shed faith and adopt unbelief being an intellectual one. Books and authors such as Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer and Richard Dawkins have an important place in the development of many of the male participants’ views. This is not to say that men's perceptions were not also reactions against the irrational consequences of religion – divisions between Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Hindus, for example – and by the traumas of death and war – while radical campaigning against the Vietnam War or in CND provided a masculine equivalent to feminism for women. In African-American culture God is both liberator and enslaver and this creates a dilemma for the identity and loyalty of the African-American atheist. The Jewish position is easier, for the Jew can be defined by ethnicity or religion, and there is a long tradition of secular, scholarly Judaism on which atheists can draw without denying their culture. In contrast, the Muslim identity is defined by religion; the social and personal sanctions on nonconformity are fiercely inhibiting. Hinduism is different again, and in the four cases examined, science, rationalism and Western education played a prominent part in the rejection of a culture identified with caste and credulity. But seventy of the eighty-five respondents in this study were white: these tended to come from among those predisposed to a liberal position on a range of issues, especially in the United States.

The Churches have almost exclusively been morally conservative. In such matters as gender equality and gay rights the secular world has moved ahead of them, and where religion once set the moral standards now it plays catch-up on a secularised humanism which has emerged to dominate Western culture. The book concludes with a discussion of what Brown calls ‘the humanist condition’, defined as ‘the separation of morality from either godly authority or spirituality, with a basic tolerance towards belief and unbelief, and a receptivity to materialistic understandings of the world and of the human condition’ (p. 169). These values are deeply rooted in human experience and the passage from religion to atheism begins with a recognition of the incompatibility of these values with those of religion. The discovery of atheism is then experienced as liberation from the old religious discourse which had previously controlled ideas.

This is a carefully researched and closely argued study, written from an atheist point of view. It should provoke religious historians to re-examine their assumptions about how the process of secularisation should be understood in the contemporary world.