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The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750-2000. Edited by Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x + 234 pp. $60.00 cloth.
In The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Owen Chadwick writes: "It is often easier to be sure that a process is happening than to define precisely what the process contains and how it happens" (Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975], 2: quoted by Jeffrey Cox, "Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change," in The Decline of Christendom, 207). The authors of the essays contained in this volume, edited by Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf, realize the truth of Chadwick's statement and endeavor to address it in relationship to the decline of Christendom in Western Europe. The essays arise from a 1997 Paris conference, the third of a chronological series whose theme suggest the volume's title. In his introduction, McLeod explains that Christendom existed in "a society where there were close ties between the leaders of the church and those in positions of secular power, where the laws purported to be based on Christian principles, and where, apart from certain clearly defined outsider communities, every member of the society was assumed to be a Christian" (1). McLeod reminds us that the separation of church and state in Europe has assumed and continues to assume a variety of forms, from the extremely violent (such as what occurred in the French Revolution with its radical dechristianization policies and in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 with the murder of clergy and religious) to the "gradual loosening of the ties between church and society" (11). These patterns are more difficult to gauge and often include the...