A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present

The religious beliefs and practices of the peoples of Britain have played a central role in the island's culture, history and destiny, and have done so from the earliest times to the present. Different gods, rituals and churches have struggled for pre-eminence. They have been changed and shifted by conquests, wars, missions, leaders, rulers, ideas, immigrants, tolerance and bigotry.

This book is the first one-volume history of religious belief and practice in England, Wales and Scotland. It covers the period from Roman times to the present. Its focus is on the worship and the beliefs of the British peoples, the questions which exercised them, and the degree to which belief and practice were changed by institutional reforms and upheavals in church or state. Christianity occupies the greater part of the book, but considerable space is devoted to pre-Christian and non- Christian beliefs, in particular Judaism and Islam.

The history is divided into four parts. Part I covers Roman Britain, the conversion of Britain and the middle ages. Part II describes the Reformation and its effects in the sixteenth century, radicalism, dissent and war in the seventeenth century, and the influence of evangelicalism and rationality in the eighteenth. Part III discusses the impact of industrialization, the mission to the Empire, and the revival of Roman Catholicism. Part IV is devoted to the twentieth century – to the plurality of religious experience, the loss of belief and the forms in which it has been regained, and to the possible nature of religious practice in the future. What emerges from the volume as a whole is the diversity of religious experience in the past and the great variety of approaches that can be adopted to understand that diversity.

The book concludes with a chronology, an annotated guide to further reading by subject, and a comprehensive index.