This collection of thirteen essays began as papers given at a conference in Hanover in June 2009. The actual venue was the Hanns Lilje Haus, named after the former bishop of Hanover and deputy Chairman of the Council of the Federation of Protestant Churches, who, after giving his support to the project of rearming West Germans, became infamous for suggesting in 1961 that East Germans might wish to take up arms against their government. Such political statements are, of course, not surprising in the light of the immense subsidies paid every year by the central and state governments to the Churches. This volume deals not so much with the political involvement of individual church members, but with the politicisation of Christianity itself, its transformation and redefinition as a leftist programme of social and political action – the new understanding of ‘mission’ as developed within and inculcated by the World Council of Churches. Themes discussed include the Württemberg synod as a forum for politicisation, linkages between the radical left and Student Fellowships, the teaching of religion in schools, the Christian-Marxist dialogue, the various liberation ‘theologies’ and the response of two prominent publicists to the new politicised religion. One essay deals with debates within Catholicism and the final section includes three essays that look beyond the borders of the Federal Republic by considering events in Britain (Keith Robbins), Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia. The latter is one of the most interesting, though least carefully proof-read, of the essays and focuses on the Czech theologian Josef Hromádka and his ideas on the Church in a post-Constantinian age. Each of the four main sections of the book is sandwiched between introductory remarks and a conclusion in which the results of the open discussion are summarised. With forty years’ hindsight it is easy to see that German Protestants in the period under consideration were not so much prophetic as pathetic, revealing a servile and uncritical acceptance of secular values and political concepts to an astonishing degree. Kurt Tucholsky's critique of the German Churches in 1930 was just as applicable in the 1960s and 1970s. He compared Churches with yapping dogs, tagging along with the Zeitgeist, regurgitating its ideas in the hope of holding on to members. Churches created nothing original, he argued, but were content to coat secular concepts with an obnoxious religious gloss. As is usual in the German context Protestantism is taken to mean the main provincial Churches; Free Churches do not enter the discussion. The question is asked, though not answered, whether the politicisation of Protestantism contributed in some ways to the alienation of hundreds of thousands of church members. This reviewer was left wondering whether the adoption of historical-critical theology by the academic community – the abandonment of concepts like immortality, the resurrection of the body, sin, judgement and hell – was responsible in some way for the various vain attempts to establish heaven on earth. Did the serious and probably irreversible loss of confidence in the truth claims of the Bible leave a vacuum that was filled with hostile alternative ideologies?