Drawing on material from military, ecclesiastical and secular civilian archives, Michael Snape argues that religion provided a key component of military morale and national identity in the two world wars and demonstrates that Britain's popular religious culture emerged intact as a result of the army's war experiences.

America's armed forces played a critical part in the defeat of Hitler's Germany and made by far the biggest contribution to the Allied defeat of Japan. In the US, military veterans of World War II are widely revered as the foremost representatives of 'the greatest generation', a generation that vanquished fascism in Europe and the Far East, faced down the threat of communism during the Cold War, and achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and social mobility in their own society. Elsewhere, America's service men and women are often remembered more ambivalently for their material...

The power of modernity to secularise has been a foundational idea of the western world. Both social science and church history understood that the Christian religion from 1750 was deeply vulnerable to industrial urbanisation and the Enlightenment. But as evidence mounts that countries of the European world experienced secularising forces in different ways at different periods, the timing and causes of de-Christianisation are now widely seen as far from straightforward. Secularisation in the Christian World brings together leading scholars in the social history of religion and the sociology of...