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CALLUM G. BROWN. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding secularisation, 1800-2000. London and New York, New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xi + 257, sources, index. $20.95 (paper).
In focusing his work on the death of Christian Britain, Callum Brown has sought to direct our attention away from the traditional concerns of studies of secularization and towards something that he considers to be more important, "the end of Christianity as a means by which men and women as individuals construct their identities and sense of 'self'"(2). This shift of focus allows Brown to challenge the traditional narrative of secularization on a number of fronts. For Brown, secularization in Britain has not been a long and gradual process, but recent and rapid-something that happened "really quite suddenly in 1963" (1). Its causes are to be found not in the traditional processes associated with the theory of modernization-urbanization, industrialization, and the rise of societies fractured along the lines of social class. Instead, they are to be found in changes in the construction of gender identities in general and female ones in particular. For Brown, viewing religion as discourse, its primary function lay in its power to shape the construction of such identities, and the dominant form of discursive Christianity between 1800 and 1950 was the "evangelical narrative." This narrative was ubiquitous-circulated not just or even primarily by the churches, but by mass circulation...