The centenary of the First World War has produced a welter of new studies on the conflict. Within these, the existence of a vibrant Christianity in domestic and military cultures in the Western world has been reaffirmed. The significance of the relationship between twentieth-century warfare and Christianity has been firmly established by works such as Richard Schweitzer's The cross and the trenches and Michael Snape's God and the British soldier, and God and Uncle Sam, and it has become apparent that the history of English-speaking societies in wartime cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of the religiosity which underpinned them. These two volumes give further weight to notions of vibrant religiosity, in a Congregational church in pre-war London and within the Canadian Irish Roman Catholic community.

The religious landscape of pre-First World War Britain is contested, with Keith Robbins and Hugh McLeod having declared it an era of decline and crisis, whilst Callum Brown averred it an era of flourishing faith. Clive Field's 2013 statistical examination identified the coexistence of elements of sacralisation and secularisation, with the vast majority of Britons still self-identifying as Christians, even as churchgoing was in relative decline. Political expressions of Nonconformity were at their zenith, with 180 MPs in the 1906–10 House of Commons professing adherence to the Free Churches.

Alan Argent's The Angel's Voice is a compilation of fifteen magazines produced by the Young Men's Bible Class at Trinity Congregational Church, Brixton between 1910 and 1913, publications which had remained stored in the church's vestry for decades. Argent provides an introduction which covers the social, educational, economic and cultural background from which the young men who made up the Bible class emerged, before reproducing the magazines’ contents in their entirety.

The articles covered a diverse range of topics, from sport to smoking, poetry to politics, rambling to relationships with the opposite sex. A vibrant life is presented, with the contributors exhibiting humour and serious reflection, and the impression of a youthful milieu about to embark on a lifetime of discovery and development is strong. There is a retrospective poignancy in the knowledge of how soon these vistas would end. Overall, the collection demonstrates the multiple identities that pre-First World War Christians could elide; as social commentators, sons and scholars. Almost inevitably, the war shattered the Bible class, as most of its members entered the armed forces. Argent has used his position as minister of the church to trace the subsequent fates of many of the young men and their sisters and friends mentioned in the magazines.

The world of male, lower middle-class London suburbia is charmingly depicted, and the book provides valuable primary source material for historians of lower middle-class culture and British Christianity.

For the past decade, the historiography of the Canadian Irish Catholic population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has turned from explanations of how it divested itself of Irish identity to integrate into English-Canadian society, to narratives of the continuing distinctiveness of an Irish character, most notably in their engagement in their struggle for Irish Home Rule, and then independence.

Mark McGowan's The imperial Irish commandeers an impressive array of evidence to move between the public and personal spheres to retrace the struggles of this milieu both against their nation's enemies in Europe and the domestic scepticism about their unreserved loyalty to the allied cause.

McGowan is at pains to establish that the identity of Canadian Irish Catholic soldiers did not begin in the trench or training ground, but grew from their backgrounds as worshippers, workers and members of diverse domestic communities. At the beginning of the war, Canada's Irish Roman Catholic community was in an invidious position. To demonstrate its patriotism, it needed to be seen to support the national and Empire war effort, one which ostensibly sought to protect the rights of small nations such as Ireland. Yet in its ancestral homeland there were mounting tensions over independence from Britain that would erupt during the 1916 Easter Rising and beyond.

Therefore, the anglophone Catholic bishops gave vocal support to the notion of a just war, and frequently supported recruitment drives, calls which were eagerly heeded by their young adherents. Whilst the soldiers’ religious observance remained strong through wartime, giving further confirmation that twentieth-century warfare did not act as a secularising agent within the English-speaking armies, McGowan shows how chaplains often had to struggle hard to get their men to remain morally and spiritually upright, as ‘sacramentality, yet immorality’ often went hand-in-hand.

Even though tens of thousands of young Canadian Irish Catholics enlisted in the army, their religious affiliation meant that their loyalty was questioned. The Orange Order in Canada criticised their continuing reverence for the pope. Yet their equality of service and sacrifice earned them greater acceptance in Canadian public life, without completely ending the tensions between Protestants and Catholics in that linguistically and ancestrally diverse country. Furthermore, McGowan highlights how Irish-French relations within the Canadian Catholic Church worsened during the war as English-speaking Catholic leaders found more common ground with their Protestant contemporaries than with their French-speaking co-religionists.

The work of Irish Catholic Canadian padres at the front and behind the lines is rightly given fulsome praise, although their future careers did not reach the episcopal heights of their non-serving contemporaries. McGowan speculates that the Church hierarchy had grown suspicious of the ecumenical spirit shown on the western front, with joint fundraising efforts with Protestant padres being undertaken and there being no denominational distinctions in the laying to rest of the dead.

Irish Canadian Catholic soldiers blended manifold identities, as believers, warriors, Canadians and Irish, and McGowan's work masterfully demonstrates the impact that this had on their own personal development, the execution of the Canadian war effort and tensions between different national and religious groupings within the Dominion.