Scotland's twentieth-century religious history has attracted considerable scholarship over the past thirty years, the majority focusing on the history of sectarianism. To this body of work Steve Bruce has been a major contributor, bringing from his exile in Belfast a perspective that has always insisted that modern Scotland has not been truly divided by sectarian faith, and certainly not in the decades since 1945, when religious conflict has been “much-exaggerated” (1). He returns to this familiar ground in his new book, lamenting the tendency of the press, and those it suits the most, to see sectarianism behind every street fight and murder. Here, however, Bruce focuses mainly on very recent history, and he brings his sociological expertise to bear upon a series of fascinating case studies—a few little more than vignettes, such as his chapter on the 175 residents of the Buddhist monastery at Eskdalemuir—which challenge our understanding of Scotland's place in the religious firmament.

Bruce's starting point is the profundity of secularization wrought by the twentieth century. He notes how his father was born to a Scotland deeply Presbyterian in behavior, expectation, and state conventions. That world is gone, never to return, in Bruce's view. He presents his major proposition at the outset: “Strictly speaking, Scotland is not a multi-faith or a multi-cultural society. It is a formerly Christian society with a large minority of active Christians and very small representations of other faiths” (3). Citing evidence that only 7 percent of those raised with no religion later claim a religious identity, he sees no road back. Supernaturalism is still rife, he concedes, and few have “converted” to atheism. But though religion is looked upon sympathetically in general, fewer and fewer subscribe to it. Even Scottish Jewry, numbered in tens of thousands at the start of the century, was by 2001 reduced to under seven thousand people.

What attracts Bruce's attention here are key conundrums. Why, for instance, did the religiosity of Lewis survive so much more strongly during the century than that of Orkney and Shetland? His answer to this question dwells on the cohesive religious culture of the northern Outer Hebrides and the more fragmented religious culture of the Northern Isles. More generally, he asks why Roman Catholicism has remained stronger for longer than Protestantism. Here, he returns to the argument he has presented since the 1980s—that immigrants' culture survives through the perceived need for “cultural defence” in a hostile environment. Still, the economic reality he emphasizes is the incorporation of Catholics into the prosperity (and presumably also the poverty) experienced by others. And Catholicism, like other branches of Scottish Christianity, faces unmistakable challenges. Bruce points to the decline of Catholic cultural cohesion, decreasing ghettoization, high levels of intermarriage, and sweeping Catholic absorption of Scottish identity in the last few decades of the century. All has been helped by the institutional decline of the Catholic Church—shortage of priests, declining Catholic fertility, and increased numbers of Catholic women working beyond their teens. Child abuse and “regular” sexual scandals have unleashed on the Catholic Church in Scotland a venom matched only in Ireland. Bruce cautions that it is too early to measure the long-term damage, but he sees the 2013 sacking of Cardinal Keith O'Brien on allegations of sexual molestation of young priests as a very significant turning point in fortunes.

Turning to Protestant Scotland, Bruce looks at the conundrum of the 1950s. On the one side is evidence of declining church-going and some breaching of the Sabbath. On the other is the successful evangelizing by Radio Missions and Billy Graham. Yet, Bruce emphasizes a relentless decline in attachment to the Church of Scotland, driven by youth culture and demographic change. The ranks of kirk clergy declined as did that of Catholic priests; he notes than in 2013 the kirk had no one under the age of 45 training for the ministry (111). His theme is the growing divide between the godly and the secular—how Scottish culture is no longer enamored of the faith of the fathers, let alone the faith of conservative Christians who still seek, at the margins, to suppress pleasures of one kind or another.

Bruce ends with five chapters that put various movements into context, including the Charismatics (who “did not draw the religious indifferent back into the realm of the godly” [153]), the Findhorn Community, the largely spurious “Celtic revival” of religion (each of which Bruce dismisses for lack of demographic significance), and Islam, which he sees as both less isolated than assumed and as hastening secularization. Bruce argues that all religion is being gradually marginalized in British public life and has been driven out not by atheists, militant or otherwise, but by the sweeping deep popular suspicion of all religion that is the hallmark of modern Western European societies. At the end, as at the beginning of this work, he affirms the spectacular breadth of religion's contraction as a feature of Scottish society.

At times Bruce will irritate some historians' sensibilities for precision. For example, not all will agree when he states that by the mid-nineteenth century “a large proportion” of Lowland Scots were “only nominal Protestants” (44). Yet, he has a rarely matched ability to dispatch myth and spurious argument. Secularization deniers get short shrift here; the signposts are, Bruce avers, all one way. Scotland's future offers little space for religion.