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Religious thought and practice in Britain is of perennial interest to Americans. Many of us have been influenced by the Anglo-American evangelical movement with its roots in the transatlantic activity of George Whitefield and the Wesleys. Some of us go down the Canterbury trail, and with the expatriate American T. S. Eliot, we sense we have come home—and know the place for the first time—when we go to England. Other Americans are struck by the undiluted charm of an English parish church; we who hail from places with mundane names (Park Street Church, Twelfth Reformed, Central Avenue Baptist, First Methodist) can be swept away with delight and nostalgia by, say, the parish church of Saint Catherine, Chiselhampton, Oxfordshire, as the poet John Betjeman once was:

Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

Other Americans, with theological and historical interests, wonder about the state of religion in the mother country. One often hears that the churches are empty and that religion in the land of Wesley and Knox, of Cardinal Newman and Archbishop Temple, of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott, is in parlous condition. And if we actually visit a British church, we may wonder, with poet Philip Larkin,

When churches fall completely out of
use, what
we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
a few
cathedrals chronically on show, their
parchment,
place and pyx in locked cases, and let
the rest
rent-free to rain and sheep, shall we
avoid them
as unlucky places?

The books under review here help us to sort out several important questions: If Britain is more "secular" than America, what would that amount to? If there is a religious crisis in Britain, can we detect the antecedents of that crisis? And if there is a diminishment of religion, what in the cultural history of the islands can explain it?

David Hempton is professor of modern history at Queens University, Belfast. His prior work on Methodism and revivalism may be known to some readers of Books & Culture. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland sets the tone for our consideration in this essay in two respects: it avoids the mistake of assuming that Britain is England writ large in that Hempton unapologetically spends a great deal of time with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (the "Celtic fringe"); and it avoids sealing off religion into some entity called "historical theology," in that Hempton contextualizes religion by asking the questions we expect from scholars in social history and the sociology of religion.

Hempton's historical tour uses the various regions of the British Isles to emphasize the intersection of religion and national identity. In England, the established church was to be universal and unitary; it was meant to be everywhere and unchallenged. The church was to be not only "the religious arm of the state, but a framework of loyalty and allegiance within which other activities had their meaning." It was a powerful social vision, but one that could not tolerate pluralism or religious loyalties based on class and region. In the four or five decades following the French Revolutionary era, this Anglican consensus was destabilized by the rise of Methodism, which challenged established religion in the name of religion.

Wales and Scotland are contrasting cases. The Welsh reply to the English conjunction of Conservative party and Anglican church was a Welsh identity based on the Liberal party and Nonconformist religion. In Scotland, on the other hand, a non-Anglican communion enjoyed established status. But the Scottish ideal of a "godly commonwealth" could not be realized, despite the considerable efforts of the Scots, most notably the redoubtable preacher, theologian, and savant Thomas Chalmers. In 1843, Chalmers led dissident Presbyterians out of the Established Kirk to form the Free Church of Scotland—an action that led in time to a much-altered financial situation for the established church. For these reasons and more, the Scots had even greater cause to value their own "national identity" and to resent their forced association with England.

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