Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 
3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 
Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library

Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the 
copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research 
and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright 
laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. 

Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 
License

Citation: Faught, C. Brad. Review of Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 
Perspectives, edited by Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William 
Whyte and Sarah Williams. London: SCM Press, 2007. Anglican and Episcopal 
History 77, no. 2 (2008): 214-215.

***** Begin Content ******

TYNDALE
UNIVERSITY
3377 Bayview Avenue
Toronto, ON
M2M 3S4
TEL: 416.226.6620
www.tyndale.ca

Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely
for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced
except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from
the copyright owner.

Faught, C. Brad. Review of Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives, edited
by Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Harris, William Whyte and Sarah Williams.
London: SCM Press, 2007. Anglican and Episcopal History 77, no. 2 (2008): 214-215.



214

ANGLICAN AND EPISCOPAL HISTORY

Redefining Christian Britain: Post 1945 Perspectives. Edited by Jane Garnett
et al. (London: SCM Press, 2007, Pp. xii, 308. $35.95.)

	This book is a pointed and timely rebuttal of the rhetoric of decline
that pervades the scholarship of the state of the contemporary Christian
church in Britain. The Death of Christian Britain (2001) by Callum Brown,
for example, is one such title that does more to obscure than to illu-
mine, maintain the editors and authors of Redefining Christian Britain.
And in a tightly argued and variegated volume of eighteen essays—"case
studies" they are called in a nod to the pronounced analytical nature of
the book—they make a compelling case for "transformation" rather
than decline as the essential feature of the modern British church.

	At base, Jane Garnett and her colleagues find the secularization the-
sis, which emerged in the 1960s as a means to explain the rapid decline
of religion as a significant force in public life, as shopworn and an
unsatisfactory way in which to explain contemporary British religiosity
and the church. Such a "master narrative" is rejected for a number of
reasons, the most convincing of which is the authors' mistrust of the
simple numbers game, or "the persuasive power of the metaphor of the
downward slope" (33). They contend that even though church atten-
dance has fallen significantly across the denominational spectrum in
Britain, such institutional falling away is not restricted to the church
alone and therefore cannot be seen necessarily as proof of seculariza-
tion. Instead, what is required, and what the authors propose in order to
understand more accurately the phenomenon of the contemporary



215

BOOK REVIEWS

church, is a new research agenda comprised of three key concepts:
authenticity, generation, and virtue. Employing the instructive work on
modem identity formation of Charles Taylor, among others, they argue
that there are various ways to get at the state of contemporary Chris-
tianity that go far beyond numbers alone. They also make the point that
modernization is not necessarily generative of secularization. In other
words, the secularization thesis may be useful in a European context, but
given prevailing social trends in Africa, Asia, South America, and else-
where, its universal explanatory power diminishes markedly.

	The essays are grouped according to how they relate to one of au-
thenticity, generation, and virtue. They are written by many of the
brightest scholars currently working on the contemporary British
church and cover a range of topics including homosexuality, the Inter-
net, and the controversial children’s literature of Philip Pullman, best
known for his book The Golden Compass, made recently into a film. The
only serious omission in what is otherwise a constellation of the most
noteworthy issues in contemporary British Christianity is a sustained
examination of the impact of post-Second World War immigration.

	The summative effect of these essays pushes hard at the intellectual
hegemony of the secularization thesis and is epitomized by the book’s
compelling conclusion that “the cultural strength of religion must be
separated from its institutional strength” (290). Far from the death of
Christianity being at hand, the only thing that looks to be dead is an
outmoded thesis that for over forty years has been predicting the immi-
nent demise of what appears to be a most uncooperative patient.

C. Brad Faught

Tyndale University College

***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was
brought to you by Tyndale University, 
J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****