This book offers a fully up-to-date and comprehensive guide to religion in Britain since 1945. A team of leading scholars provide a fresh analysis and overview, with a particular focus on diversity and change. They examine: relations between religious and secular beliefs and institutions the evolving role and status of the churches the growth and ‘settlement’ of non-Christian religious communities the spread and diversification of alternative spiritualities religion in welfare, education, media, politics and law theoretical perspectives on religious change. The volume presents the latest research, including results from the largest-ever research initiative on religion in Britain, the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme. Survey chapters are combined with detailed case studies to give both breadth and depth of coverage. The text is accompanied by relevant photographs and a companion website.

During the twentieth century, Britain turned from one of the most deeply religious nations of the world into one of the most secularised nations. This book provides a comprehensive account of religion in British society and culture between 1900 and 2000. It traces how Christian Puritanism and respectability framed the people amidst world wars, economic depressions, and social protest, and how until the 1950s religious revivals fostered mass enthusiasm. It then examines the sudden and dramatic changes seen in the 1960’s and the appearance of religious militancy in the 1980s and 1990s. With a focus on the themes of faith cultures, secularisation, religious militancy and the spiritual revolution of the New Age, this book uses people’s own experiences and the stories of the churches to display the diversity and richness of British religion. Suitable for undergraduate students studying modern British history, church history and sociology of religion.

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This study is comprised of 20 essays which survey the state of religion in Britain. Focusing on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as on England, this text covers not only the mainstream Christian religions but also black-led churches, the folk-religionists, the minor sects and new religious movements.

This major textbook is a newly researched historical study of Evangelical religion in its British cultural setting from its inception in the time of John Wesley to charismatic renewal today. The Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the variety of Nonconformist denominations and sects in England, Scotland and Wales are discussed, but the book concentrates on the broad patterns of change affecting all the churches. It shows the great impact of the Evangelical movement on nineteenth-century Britain, accounts for its resurgence since the Second World War and argues that developments in the ideas and attitudes of the movement were shaped most by changes in British culture. The contemporary interest in the phenomenon of Fundamentalism, especially in the United States, makes the book especially timely.

The big picture is well-known: over the last century, religion in Britain has lost power, popularity, and plausibility. Here, Steve Bruce charts the quantifiable changes in religious interest and observance over the last fifty years by returning to a number of towns and villages that were the subject of detailed community studies in the 1950s and 1960s, to see how the status and nature of religion has changed. Drawing on both detailed data on baptism rates, church weddings, church attendance and the like, and on his extensive fieldwork, he considers the broader picture of religion today: the status of the clergy, the churches' attempts to find new roles, links between religion and violence, and the impact of the charismatic movement. Along the way, Bruce encounters and engages with the contemporary rise of secularism, considering our everyday secular tensions with religion: arguments over moral issues such as abortion and gay rights, the effect of social class on belief, the impact of religion on British politics, and the ways that local social structures strengthen or weaken religion. Analysing the obstacles to any religious revival, he explores how the current stock of religious knowledge is so depleted, religion so unpopular, and committed believers so scarce that any significant reversal of religion's decline in Britain is unlikely.

This volume contributes towards to developments in the study of religion that illuminate the plural nature of religious change in modern Britain. It makes a critical intervention in British studies of religion by bringing the analytical insights of material culture, to bear on religion in the British World.