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The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800-2000. Second Edition. By Callum G. Brown. (New York: Roudedge, 2009, Pp. xiv, 304. $35.95, paper.)
The first edition of Brown's groundbreaking book, published in 2001, concluded with the words, "The culture of Christianity has gone in the Britain of the new millennium. Britain is showing the world how religion as we have known it can the." The second edition, to which a thirty-fivepage Postscript is the sole (and important) addition, clarifies this conclusion: "The emphasis here is upon 'religion as we have known it,' and should not be taken as a statement that the rest of the world will follow Britain or that religion itself is ending . . . [rather] mutation is precisely the best the Christian faith can hope for in the circumstances of British secularization" (232-3).
His motivation for writing the book came from the coincidence of three new streams of thought, which together added up to a revolutionary way of understanding...