The debate about the origins, causes, and extent of the secularization of British society rages on. Most notably of late, among historians the 1960s has become the decade of significance in the narrative of decline, if not in providing the cultural conditions in which secularization was seeded—particularly the changing role of women (Callum G. Brown, Death of Christian Britain [London, 2001])—then certainly in being “a hinge decade,” the long-term apotheosis of a range of factors (Hugh McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s [Oxford, 2007], 258). To this debate, Simon Green’s volume brings both a specificity of focus, his attention being entirely on Protestant England (rather than Brown’s Christian Britain and McLeod’s commentary on North America and wider Europe), as well as an additional longer-term perspective, his diagnosis being that the death throes of institutional decline were more prolonged— “roughly” from the 1920s onward. It is not that the 1960s were not significant—Green concedes this much—but that by then the destination of travel was already fixed due to a range of factors (not least greater overall affluence, the alternatives to Sabbath observance, the demise of Sunday schooling, and other forms of induction into the Christian way of life). By the 1960s, he argues, contemporary observers had already resigned themselves to the reality of secularization and the futility of resistance against it. Thus, Green is able to conclude that “England is no longer a Protestant country” (309).

Green takes the reader on a journey that begins with present-day scholarship—sociological and historical—on secularization (including theories of antisecularization and postsecularization). It is not his style to dismiss these alternatives out of hand (he is too subtle an author to do this). Rather, as part of his eclectic approach, he sets out to show that the “social determinism” of these theories belies the historical complexities of the situation, that not only was Christianity denominationally in decline, but this decline was also resisted—not least by women, the elderly, and those in regional and ethnic minorities—before being finally succumbed to (25). The Passing is a combination of previously published work (five of its eight chapters), as well as new material, specifically on Dean Inge (chap. 3) and on the 1960s (chap. 8). It draws from sources ecclesiastical, political, and cultural with methodological intent: for the author, religious history is not independent of political and social history. These are intertwined and interdependent and need to be written as one. Although disparate in theme, taken together these chapters stand as illustrative moments in the history of secularization as both an idea and as a reality, a selection of perspectives on the matter and manner of the gradual erosion of the cultural identification of the English with Christianity in its Protestant and institutional form. However, this is more than a study in the particularities of religious decline (which surely it is); it is also one that demonstrates how the mind-set of a people, successfully forged by the values of Protestantism over centuries, was weakened beyond repair across the twentieth century. Such is the historian’s impartiality here, it is hard to tell whether Green grieves this loss.

Having asserted that England was still a Christian country in circa1920 but had ceased to be by 1960 in his opening chapters (32), subsequently Green teases out the threads—political, ecclesiastical, and social—that evidence this decline and the reasons for it. In chapter 3, Green lauds William Ralph Inge’s (dean of St. Paul’s, 1911–34—and described as “the gloomy Dean” by his contemporaries) prescience as one who recognized the “age of disintegration” he was living within and its symptoms. Among these were a loss in the connections between individual piety and traditional Christian belief and religious observance, a lessening belief in the miraculous, and increasing belief in superstition. According to Inge, people were praying less than in previous generations and had a less well-developed moral sense. Indeed, Inge was not alone in his pessimism of this generation. It had been the estimate of the Army and Religion Report (1919) that “the Soldier has got Religion, I am not sure that he had got Christianity” (see Snape and Parker, “Keeping Faith and Coping,” in The Great World War, ed. John Bourne, Peter Liddle, and Ian Whitehead [London, 2001], 2:399). However, perhaps clerics of every time devalue the currency of their people’s faith.

The moral and spiritual decline of the English is further charted by Green in the two following chapters, focusing on the battles over the cinema-going, the erosion of Sabbath-day observance, and the Sunday Cinema Bill (1932). Green imbues this debacle with great significance as a measure of the diminishing extent to which self-denial and abstinence, the normal markers of Puritanism, were being abided by politically and culturally. Green’s chapter on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and his (with G. R. Lavers) study English Life and Leisure (1951)—as much as anything else—is a marvelous account of an early sociology of religion and of the sociologist behind it. Here, Green systematically recounts the construction of the study’s commentary on the lifestyle and religiosity of Attlee’s Britain, and it makes for sobering reading. Not only are the usual causes of secularization identified (especially ones that do injury to the Protestant Christian denominations in particular), there are also levels of anticlericalism and a general disdain for churchgoing, which justify the privatization of popular piety (perhaps aided by television religious broadcasts).

Green returns to the events of the Second World War in the next chapter, to detail the negotiations that took place surrounding the 1944 Education Act, especially the roles of William Temple and R. A. Butler. Although Green’s chronology seems awry, the placement of this chapter is justified, given the overwhelming evidence that the religious clauses of the 1944 Act were seen as an assertion of Christian national identity amid war and effectively represented and promoted state-funded Christian religious education. But even the nationalization of Christian education in schools was not enough to revive the fortunes of Protestant England, according to Green. What with the changes in parenting habits and the demise of Sunday schooling, the young had been effectively lost to the churches by the beginning of the 1960s. No, the 1950s did not revive the fortunes of Protestant England, as Callum Brown would have it, and attempts to do so, not least in initiatives such as the postwar Towards the Conversion of England (1945), came to nothing. By the time of Billy Graham’s return visit, the “crusade” of 1966, he could only preach to those already converted; the majority of the rest of the formerly Protestant people were otherwise occupied.

Green has produced a rich and detailed work, which, in the sum of its parts, adds significantly to the historiography of secularization. This is a book that shows the importance of the political in shaping and effecting religious change and that the religious changes that occurred across the twentieth century avoid easy explanation.