For many scholars of religious history, John Wolffe is perhaps best known for his God and Greater Britain (1994). In offering an overview of the intersection of national and religious life from 1843 to 1945, Wolffe sought to break out from the common understanding of religious history as meaning only church history and to offer a counterweight to the tendency for religious history to be marginalized, the influence of faith and religious practice being ignored by too many historians. As both aims were achieved, God and Greater Britain now has an established place in the historiography of British religion—in the broader sense—of that period. Sacred and Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland since 1914 is similarly ambitious, examining British Christian, Muslim, and secular understandings of martyrdom over a tumultuous century.

It is perhaps inevitable that in a book that starts with World War I, the first person named is Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the bishop of London. While he was undoubtedly the highest-profile and most fervent proponent of the martyrdom trope, he has been subjected to repeated misquotation and maligning by shocked historians. Wolffe avoids those pitfalls, presenting a nuanced and perceptive analysis of the spectrum of responses to death on an unprecedented scale. Given the scope of the volume, he might have added that even during that conflict, promotion of the idea of martyrdom led to concern that “the religion of the trenches has rather a Moslem than a Christian colour” (D. S. Cairns, ed., The Army and Religion: [1919], 19).

Attention then turns to the manner in which the wartime language of martyrdom influenced the interwar period. There was a renewed interest in and commemoration of the martyrs of the reformation and counterreformation alongside those who had died in the missionary movements of the nineteenth century. Most significantly, the term martyr was applied to the men from Tolpuddle transported to Australia a century earlier, a phenomenon identified by Wolffe as the most prominent example of the appropriation of such language by secular labor movements (50–51).

The chapter on martyrdom in Ireland reminds us that contemporaneous to Winnington-Ingram's equating of soldiers’ deaths with that of Christ, the same association was being made with regard to the executions that followed the Easter Rising in Ireland. A striking description of public support for three hunger strikers in 1920 epitomizes that conflation of nationalist and religious martyrdom that was so prevalent on both sides of the Irish Sea, the crowd appropriating Frederick William Faber's hymn (“Faith of our fathers! Living still / in spite of dungeon, fire and sword”) for the cause of Irish nationalism (60–61). Wolffe illustrates the divergence of Catholic and republican constructions of martyrdom over that period by contrasting the responses to the beatification of the seventeenth-century Catholic Irish martyr Oliver Plunkett in 1920 with the celebrations of his canonization in 1975. The former saw “religious and patriotic enthusiasm that were to increase from day to day” (59) whereas the latter was described as ecumenical and conciliatory.

When Wolffe turns to World War II and the postwar period, he contrasts the bellicosity of Winnington-Ingram with the far more temperate and nuanced leadership of William Temple and Cosmo Lang. While the comparatively brief treatment of this conflict can, to some extent, be justified by the far greater reluctance to use the language of martyrdom, this brevity leaves scope for further study. The Church of England was broader than the views of its archbishops and the prayers and services that they approved, and this section has the feel of traditional ecclesiastical history in comparison with the much more thorough examination of the earlier war. A discussion of the hugely controversial Falkland Islands service completes this chapter.

In his penultimate chapter, Wolffe examines public responses to post-Falkland military engagements—including the “Wootton Bassett rituals”—alongside a consideration of the significance of the National Memorial Arboretum. The huge range of memorials in the arboretum represents the much more diverse response to conflict and death in conflict in the closing years of the twentieth century than that of eighty years earlier. It fulfills a similar function to that of the tomb of the unknown warrior, but in a secular rather than religious setting. Similarly, the decline and then unanticipated rise in remembrance rituals on 11 November, (rather than on the nearest Sunday) is seen, rightly in my view, as tracking the increasing secularization of memorialization in Britain. A summary of a series of forty-six interviews with people in four UK cities who identify as Christian, Muslim, and atheist about their attitudes to martyrdom completes the chapter.

The inevitable conclusion is that as memorialization has become increasingly secularized, so the language of martyrdom has become far less prominent in public discourse and private thought. While the churches have distanced themselves from strident nationalism by stressing a desire that the stories of Christian martyrdom may promote peace and unity, the rise of self-identified martyrs in the cause of militant Islam has supported a view of martyrdom as being violent and aggressive, supplanting the conventional understanding of passive self-sacrifice. Victimhood is identified as a more inclusive and less divisive concept than martyrdom and, suggests Wolffe, is a likely direction for the further reshaping of memory.

It is now recognized that no global narratives of the first decades of the current century can credibly ignore the influence of religion. Yet at the same time as religion has become more influential on the world stage—witness the massive conservative evangelical support for President Trump or the involvement of conservative Islamists in numerous national governments—Britain has continued along a clear path of secularization and the marginalization of religion. Consequently, in British society, expressions of martyrdom have become less explicit but far more varied and nuanced.

Sacred and Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland since 1914 is somewhat uneven in the depth and methodology of its examination of the different periods discussed. However, in offering an overview of martyrdom from Winnington-Ingram onwards, and in teasing out its increasingly subtle manifestations, it constitutes a worthwhile addition to the historiography of memorialization in Britain.