This book is the rare festschrift where the quality of the chapters comes close to matching the distinction of the one who is honored. Hugh McLeod has been tireless in portraying the Big Picture for religious history in the modern West. His books include the best general surveys (Religion and the People of Western Europe, 1789–1969 [2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]; and Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914 [New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000]), the best comparative studies of religion in cities (Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1870–1914 [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996]); and as editor (European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930 [London: Routledge, 1995]), and one of the clearest argued volumes on the rapid religious changes of the recent past (The Religious Crisis of the 1960s [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]). Moreover, he was also co-editor of one of the two best collections that have explored whether secularization is the best way to describe the West's recent history (with Werner Urstorf, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). For the other best collection (Steve Bruce's Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992]), McLeod contributed his own careful research on cities to make a critical theoretical point: in speaking of “secularization,” it matters greatly the specific sphere of life in view. He showed in that essay that if political influence is the subject, Berlin in 1900 was far less secular than New York or London, but if church attendance is the subject, Berlin was far more secular. To honor McLeod's signal contributions, Brown and Snape have assembled a set of sparkling essays that may be divided into three categories: historical monographs, national case studies, and sociological fisticuffs.

The historical monographs explore wide-ranging themes. By featuring Puritans (seventeenth century), Methodists (nineteenth century), and African Americans (twentieth century), David Hempton suggests that large-scale migrations have worked to promote both religious decline and religious revival. John Wolffe examines the evolution of public religion for the British monarchy, including the oaths sworn by incoming kings and queens, to define a process of secularization by pluralization. Moving the other direction, Michael Snape concludes that despite the brutality and immorality of war conditions, Canadian, American, and British soldiers in World War II do not seem to have been secularized by their military experience.

The book's five national case studies are particularly helpful for expanding upon what scholars have concluded about secularization in the United States and the United Kingdom. David Hillard shows that although Australia's origins were not religious and the nation's recent past has witnessed a fall-off in church attendance similar to Britain's, still there have been more schools recently organized by religious groups and more politicians who talk openly about the religious grounds of their public positions. Michael Gauvreau and Nancy Christie's capsule survey pictures Canada's nineteenth-century history as not witnessing the class-religion divisions that McLeod has found in Europe and portrays Canada in the twentieth century as experiencing declining church participation but not necessarily a huge retreat in religious concern. Chapters on Scandinavia (Erik Sidenvall), Holland (Peter van Rooden), and Germany (Lucian Hölscher) add further nuance, amendment, and exception to the stereotypical picture of a Europe that once was uniformly religious but now predominately secular.

The chapters that address grand theories of secularization include especially spirited work. The introduction by editors Brown and Snape details Hugh McLeod's many contributions to contemporary debates, including his emphasis on women as key to tracking rises and declines of religious practice, his distinction between “Christianity” or “religion” versus “Christendom,” and his depiction of the period 1958 to 1974 as creating a rupture in western religious life as deep as that caused by the Reformation. Linda Woodhead's essay goes further in defining McLeod's contribution as his laudatory effort to pay simultaneous attention to beliefs, boundary formation, values, and power relationships. But she also wonders if McLeod has gone far enough in considering “God or, more broadly, . . . the divine, the super-sensible, the supra-empirical” (35) that define religion from the perspective of so many practitioners. Grace Davie draws on her work with Peter Berger that has described a particular kind of European exceptionalism (while the rest of the world experiences religious renewal of various kinds, most of Europe stagnates) to argue against McLeod's interpretation of recent American–European differences; he views these differences as a product of the recent past, and she sees them as the outcome of much longer histories. In his essay, Callum Brown offers the testimony of British women about their experiences in the 1960s to expand the conclusion of his book The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), which argued that British life retained a broadly religious foundation until women abandoned the churches in droves during that crucial decade.

Jeffrey Cox and Steve Bruce provide the book's most ambitious essays as they advance with panache stances they have articulated before. Cox contends again for the elimination of the concept of secularization because he thinks it has been fatally damaged by ideology masquerading as empiricism, teleology overriding inquiry, and myopic Eurocentricism crowding out the world. Most of Cox's essay addresses seven questions about the function of religion that he feels cannot be answered on the basis of factual evidence so long as scholars waste their time in debating whether secularization has occurred. By contrast, Steve Bruce explains why he continues to believe that, when used discriminatingly and with full attention to actual research, secularization is a fully justified conclusion about the course of religious life in many Western societies. His essay offers vigorous rejoinders to, among others, Grace Davie (believing without belonging), Rodney Stark (supply side), and Callum Brown (the 1960s). In a book chock full of wisdom, Bruce also has the best line when he depicts “grand narratives” as “a polite way of saying ‘big fairy tale’” (216). Read carefully; in the footsteps of Hugh McLeod, it is possible to agree with almost everything both Cox and Bruce assert. For much of the information and many of the critical moves allowing this conclusion—that secularization both does and does not characterize the West's recent religious history (depending on what you are talking about)—much of the credit belongs to the scholar whose own exemplary work is honored in this exemplary volume.