Abstract
This is Callum G. Brown’s fourth book-length intervention in the debate about secularization in modern Britain in less than two decades. The series began with his influential study The Death of Christian Britain (2001) and also includes Religion and the Demographic Revolution (2012) and Becoming Atheist (2017). Here, Brown turns his focus to the powerful revival of Christian moral conservatism in postwar Britain and its sudden collapse, from the midsixties onward, in the face of an assertive secular liberalism and shifting popular attitudes. As in his earlier work, Brown is keen to place social, cultural, and, in this treatment, political context center stage in his analysis of the ebb and flow of religious influence over national life. As he makes clear from the outset, Brown sees himself as writing against a tradition in the history of religion that focuses first and foremost on theological debate within organized religions and that, he argues, thereby overstates the importance of liberal Christianity in the defeat of conservative moralism and hence in the transformation of modern Britain.