Scholarly work on postwar British Christianity often fails to satisfy. Most studies, often projecting self-congratulation or gloomy prognostications, only see print through the relatively lax standards of the Christian vanity presses. In this environment, Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives, edited by Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte, and Sarah Williams, stands as a welcome change. It argues for the cultural endurance of Christianity in the United Kingdom through essays, using lenses of literature, theology, education, philosophy, and sociology.

For a book with no less than five editors and eighteen case studies, Redefining Christian Britain achieves a strong degree of thematic consistency throughout its leaves. In the aggregate, the collection demonstrates that, contrary to much recent scholarship, British Christianity is not in its death throes. Rather, it has changed with respect to its culture, while still exerting a subtle but substantial influence on British society. Previous scholars, it maintains, have erred in imposing a monolithic Victorian schema of Christianity onto the postwar world, replete with its standards of evaluation: church membership and attendance. Deviation from these norms, as this argument goes, be it in the form of declining church attendance or changing gender practices, signals the rejection of Christianity by the British people. In challenging this perspective, the authors of Redefining Christian Britain often fashion their arguments with respect to one of the most influential recent books in this field, Callum Brown's The Death of Christian Britain. Most of the essayists laud Brown for privileging the study of British culture over staid institutional statistics. Yet they also, quite rightly, take exception to his argument that the 1960s witnessed a seismic societal shift that found Christian ethos losing a zero-sum struggle with secular culture.

Redefining Christian Britain refutes this “secularization thesis” put forth by Brown and others by demonstrating how postwar culture required Christian practices to change rather than expire. Chief among these changes was the shifting locus of Christian practice from church membership to finding personal meaning. In making these arguments, the authors often invoke Charles Taylor, whose work posits the primacy of authenticity in postwar life. However, as Alana Harris's case study on the Book of Common Prayer in this volume reminds us, tradition and authenticity often reinforce each other, especially in Britain's more vibrant liturgical churches.

Other standout essays in this collection include William Whyte's essay, “The Architecture of Belief,” which calls into question the maxim that low church attendance and redundant church buildings auger the decline of Christianity in British society. He aptly demonstrates that these underused Victorian churches were often built to make theological statements rather than to house large congregations. Bernice Martin's timely essay on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series exhibits similar incisiveness, convincingly arguing that Christian values pervade Pullman's series. The themes of love overcoming death and its condemnation of arbitrary religious authority suggest that even Pullman's patently secular work cannot avoid deeply ingrained Christian motifs.

While the ideas contained here are important contributions to this field, it is also worth noting the manner in which they are expressed. The tone of the book improves upon the modus operandi for scholarly works on British Christianity. Although one strongly suspects the authors are sympathetic toward Christianity, and even eager to find lingering traces in British culture, their expectations do not influence their findings. This book should do much to eradicate doubt that Christians, publishing in a religious press like SCM, can write objectively about Christianity.

These contributors deserve praise not only for the objectivity with which they discuss British Christianity, but also for the multitude of new directions it suggests for this field. In particular, Rufus Black's study of Christianity and economics uses the Jubilee 2000 campaigns to demonstrate the fruit that future collaborations between economists and theologians might yield. The book's ambitious breadth, though, occasionally leads to poor organization (case studies on Christian philosophy and education are awkwardly placed under the overhead of “The Good Life”). Nonetheless, it generally displays an array of topics rarely considered when evaluating and analyzing the role of Christianity in contemporary England.

Even still, some puzzling gaps remain. While Catholics, often marginalized in earlier work on British Christianity, are well represented with essays on Ireland, the funeral of Pope John II, and the liturgy, the contributors rarely discuss Evangelicals. John Stott, the former rector of All Soul's Church in London's West End and arguably Britain's most influential Christian, garners nary a mention in 300 pages. On a similar note, the authors do not address one of the most critical topics in this field, the degree of connectivity between British and American Christians. One suspects that rising church membership and active political Christianity in the United States would sit uncomfortably with the authors’ arguments of Christianity surviving best in subterranean cultural milieus.

Although these small quibbles remain, Redefining Christian Britain promises to be a worthy and influential contribution to its field. It has reoriented its study away from unhelpful metaphors of its “life” or “death” and has offered authentic experience and cultural adaptation as better foci for its role in society. Just as important, the ideas it generates and the interdisciplinary collaborations it suggests will, in all likelihood, inspire much future scholarship. Alongside the book's self-appointed sparring partner, The Death of Christian Britain, it pushes the study of British Christianity away from statistics and the institutional church and into the cultural penumbras of education, philosophy, economics, and the media. By these means, it makes a strong case for the endurance and continued relevance of Christianity in a United Kingdom that is only superficially secular.