Ebook: Britain's Last Religious Revival? Quantifying Belonging, Behaving, and Believing in the Long 1950s

Combining historical and social scientific insights and approaches, this is a major contribution to the literature of British secularization, particularly its chronology. The book examines the claims by Callum Brown that the late 1940s and early 1950s in Britain were a period of religious resurgence prior to the onset of revolutionary secularization in the 1960s. These claims are substantially rejected on the basis of the first systematic analysis of a balanced portfolio of quantitative performance measures, published and unpublished, for all faith traditions. They subsume the three dimensions of belonging, behaving, and believing – the typology increasingly applied to the study of religiosity. It is concluded that the long 1950s accord better with a gradualist interpretation of religious change in modern Britain. An up-to-date historiographical and bibliographical review is also offered. The volume will appeal to social historians of modern Britain, sociologists of religion, clergy, and church growth practitioners.