Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives. Edited by Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte, and Sarah Williams. London: SCM, 2007. xii + 308. $34.99 paper.

摘要

This collection is likely to be an essential marker in the historiography ofnmodern British religious history. It challenges the secularization paradigmnput forth in works such as Callum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britainn(New York: Routledge, 2002) and Steve Bruce’s God is Dead:nSecularization in the West (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). Instead ofnexploring the accepted narrative of the decline of Christianity in the modernnperiod and the acceleration of this process in the 1960s and 1970s, thenessays in this volume seek to study its transformation. The authors have setnout a new research agenda that focuses on the key concepts of authenticity,ngeneration, and virtue. Their conclusions provide a rich and nuancednexplanation of the place of Christianity in British national life and shouldnlead other scholars to reconsider a simple narrative of secularization in thenmodern period.