Book Review [ The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920-1960 by S. J. D. Green]

Abstract

Very possibly what has brought many historians to consider seriously twentieth century religion is not its significance in politics, intellectual and cultural life or social existence, but the idea of its decline and even extinction. At all events, secularisation has by now become an academic realm in its own right, with its prophetic presences, its own points of reference, its particular questions (and answers) and its earnest debates about conceptual approaches and forms of analysis. Every scholar of contemporary society knows that in a western European country the statistics of adherence have crumbled, values and attitudes have altered and church buildings have emptied, shut and disappeared. Something vast has occurred—and we remain caught up in it. Whatever it may be, the term ‘secularisation’ still does very adequately in framing it.