The Passing of Protestant England

S. J. D. Green is Extraordinary Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, and Reader in Modern British History at the University of Leeds.

• Part I. Outline of the Problem: 1. Towards a social history of religion in modern Britain: secularisation theory, religious change and the fate of Protestant England; 2. Religion in the twilight zone: a narrative of religious decline and religious change in Britain, c.1920–60; Part II. Disclosures of Decline: 3. The 'soul of England' in an 'age of disintegration': Dean Inge and the 'trial of the churches' in the wake of World War I; 4. The strange death of Puritan England; 5. Social science and the discovery of a post-Protestant people: Rowntree's surveys of York and their other legacy; Part III. Resistance, Revival and Resignation: 6. The 1944 Education Act: a church-state perspective; 7. Was there an English religious revival in the 1950s?; 8. Slouching towards a secular society: expert analysis and lay opinion in the early 1960s; Conclusion: the passing of Protestant England.

Review of the hardback: 'A powerful, provocative and pessimistic account that will compel ecclesiastical historians to revisit some of their views about the viability of twentieth-century Protestantism.' Michael Bentley, Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews