The debate on whether or not seventeenth-century village society was increasingly polarized between parish notables and prosperous households, who tended both to appropriate Protestant virtues of “order and godliness” to themselves and impose them on the indifferent or even hostile laboring poor, is not yet over. On one side is Tessa Watt, who has summarized the arguments against polarization that do not fit with the distribution of her “godly” woodcuts, broadsides, and chapbooks, and Martin Ingram, who says “the evidence from Wiltshire and elsewhere suggest it is a mistake to overemphasize either the presence of ‘godly’ groups, or the existence of people largely indifferent to religion.” In the village of Keevil, he found the relatively few pious villagers “quite widely scattered in the social scale, and as a group, not particularly literate…. They did not form a close-knit nexus in village society, and…did not dominate the structure of local office-holding.” He concludes that “both ecclesiastical and religious issues were of sufficient significance in parish life to serve as a focus for parish rivalries and in so far as religious and moral issues were socially divisive, the splits were as much vertical as horizontal.

The “age of religious wars” usually serves as the main interpretive framework for students of late sixteenth-century European history. This period is often conceptualized as just preceding the establishment of a secularized, politique-based state system that provided domestic tranquility as welcome relief from extended, highly partisan warfare. It is true that religious sentiments ran high among certain Protestants and Catholics who believed millions of souls were at stake, and that passionate defenses of doctrinal purity, to the point of taking up arms, characterize a good deal of the polemic of the age. Consequently, since prominent clerics were most vocal and influential in stirring up pious fervor for holy causes, many historians have focused on clerical martial rhetoric and found in it the ideological basis for the “religious wars” that ensued. Unfortunately, a hint of teleology informs much of the historical narrative that then follows, as if confessional devotion were synonymous with volatile, even bellicose calls for godly reform. A broader, more nuanced look at some of the pertinent sources, however, suggests that in many, perhaps even the majority, of cases, newly energized evangelicals found holy causes abhorrent and contrary to the gospel message.

The history of religion in Britain—as distinct from church or ecclesiastical history—is making an impressive comeback in the consciousness of historians, with important implications for British cultural and social history. Not least affected is the history of Britain in the twentieth century. Fifteen years ago, the well-known social historian Alan Gilbert published his The Making of Post-Christian Britain, which soon became the standard account of the secularization of British society since the eighteenth century. Taking off from careful statistical surveys of Christian church membership and participation that he had done in two earlier books, and looking for explanation to a very broad range of cultural, economic, and social factors, Gilbert presented an argument that has seemed so powerful as to be an almost irresistible account of the apparent fact of the secularization of Britain. More recently, however, both religious historians and sociologists of religion have begun to question not only Gilbert's premises and argument, but also the very concept of secularization. The result of this questioning, exemplified by the books here reviewed, is a major controversy concerning the recent history of religion in Britain.