This collection arises from a conference attended mainly by historians from Germany and the United States. The aim was to examine the relationship between religion and politics in the conditions of modernity – this being defined by “shared values, practices and structures of social organization” emerging from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and directed towards “the creation of a secular and rational world” (2). However, the editors start from the recognition that nothing is as simple as the dominant historical narrative has assumed: if there has been a secularizing trend it has not been linear; religion has not only “returned” – it never entirely went away; and even where church and state were formally separated, religious issues often remained central to political debate, and religious values were widely seen as underpinning the social and political order. The book is in five sections, in each of which one author focusses on a European country or region and one or more on the United States. Part I looks at the state and at the legitimation of power in the years around 1800. Here the accent is on secularization, though a secularization that is interpreted in a very nuanced way. Michael Broers sees a “creeping secularization” under the Ancien Régime, which continued in spite of the religious revival in the years following the fall of Napoleon. Frank Kelleter highlights a process of functional differentiation in the early American Republic. Part II looks at criminal law. Here we have the clearest case of opposing perspectives. André Krischer, one of several German contributors influenced by the sociology of Niklas Luhmann, argues for a gradual separation between the spheres of law and of religion in eighteenth-century England, while Daniel Cohen stresses the continuing interaction of religious and more secular considerations in the United States and Anthony Santoro demonstrates the continuing importance of religious arguments in the American death penalty debate. Religious arguments also played a significant part in the British debates leading up to the abolition of capital punishment in 1969, and I think we have here different ways of thinking about historical change, rather than a difference between Europe and America. Part III discusses the relationship between religion and science. Monika Wohlrab-Saur and Thomas Schmidt-Lux take East Germany as an extreme case of antagonism. James Gilbert and Ronald Doel highlight the more nuanced relationship in the United States. They also show how scientific research itself, as well as its popular reception, is influenced by its cultural and religious context. In Part IV, Karl Hödl and Michelle Mart look at Jewish identities and images of Jews in, respectively, the nineteenth-century German-speaking world and 1950s America. Part V is concerned with the relationship between religion and violent conflict. Michael Hochgeschwender examines some examples of religiously motivated violence in the United States, while noting that it has been relatively uncommon. Gerlinde Groitl writes on the contemporary role of religion in international and intra-national conflict across the world. The final chapter by the editors is partly a summing up and partly an examination of the impact of 9/11.

Nearly all the contributions are well researched and well argued. A few, notably that by Michael Broers, are outstanding. But one important thing is almost missing: transatlantic comparison. Nearly everyone focusses specifically either on the United States or on a part of Europe: comparisons are very largely left to the editors in the first and last chapters. There are some interesting asides such as Cohen's comparison between the “polarized ideologues” of Europe and their more eclectic American counterparts (70). But this polarization was more typical of some European countries, such as France (or East Germany), than of others, such as Britain. The editors (and, no doubt, the other contributors) are well aware of Europe's religious and political diversity, but the structure of the volume tends to encourage binary thinking. The same comment might apply to the contrast drawn by the editors between the role of secularizing bureaucrats and strictly state-controlled churches in nineteenth-century Europe and the voluntarist development of religion in the United States. Here one might think of a spectrum with the United States at one end and the German states somewhere near the other, but with many parts of Europe lying somewhere in between. One more general European/American difference which the editors rightly emphasize is the historic weakness of American socialism. But even here one must stress that East Germany, so graphically described here, is an extreme case and that the relationship between socialism and religion has taken a variety of forms.