THIS book is accessible, interesting, well-priced, and puzzling. As Professor Alec Ryrie acknowledges frankly, both in the book itself and in an excellent Church Times podcast (4 July 2025), he is straying well outside his specialist area of Reformation history by offering a unique take on post-war British culture.
His central thesis is that a previous generation in Britain, whether religious or not, looked to Jesus as its moral exemplar. Even atheists might admire Jesus while rejecting his divinity. Both the Second World War and the secularisation that, Ryrie thinks, peaked in the 1960s changed that, and now the British increasingly declare that they have “no religion”.
Ryrie argues that, for a while after the war, the British retained a common moral framework, but it was no longer focused positively on Jesus, but negatively on Hitler. The war was seen less as a defence of “Christian civilisation” and more as a defeat of the evil personified in Hitler and especially in the Holocaust. But memories of the war and Hitler are now fading fast, and any common morality, even a negative one, is also fading. We no longer have exemplars of good or evil which most people can accept. Instead, we have a cancel culture of competing claims about such issues as gender rights without any common moral (as distinct from legal) framework to resolve them. Thoughtful moral deliberation has been replaced by moralised shouting.
This is a bold and interesting thesis, and it is presented with a wealth of comments on contentious topics confronting politicians and church leaders alike. It also sketches a vision of how secularists and religious traditionalists might learn from one another and together shape a less divided society. As it happens, this is a vision that I deeply share and have tried to explore as editor for the past four decades of the ongoing Cambridge University Press interdisciplinary series New Studies in Christian Ethics. Yet, in the form in which Ryrie presents it, it is profoundly puzzling.
The problem is that, as in the recent book that he edited, Christianity: A historical atlas (Harvard University Press) (Books, 27 November 2020), while repeatedly emphasising that he is a historian, he provides very sketchy endnotes about a few of the sources for his many claims. And this in an area such as academic debates about secularisation, where there is already a rich sociological and philosophical literature.
For example, he rightly mentions the seminal works of Owen Chadwick and Hugh McLeod on secularisation (both historians), but nothing on the long debate of sociologists inspired by either Bryan Wilson or David Martin, or the ongoing influential work of Charles Taylor and Hans Joas. Likewise, on the moral clashes between secularists and religious traditionalists, astonishingly, there is no mention of Alasdair MacIntyre (who died just weeks ago, aged 96) and his seismic 1981 book After Virtue. Instead, Ryrie depends on Callum Brown’s discredited thesis about British secularisation starting in the 1960s — discredited, particularly, by the careful statistical work of Clive Field identifying the 1870s as a more likely starting point.
This is a pity, because it makes Ryrie’s “straying” too easy to refute. The demise of Jesus as a moral exemplar, especially among the young, might, instead, be seen as a product of the collapse of both the Sunday-school movement and religious education in schools rather than of a negative shift to Hitler. And the ongoing increase of undifferentiated “no religion” responses (even in the United States) is by no means easy to explain. The links that he makes, although engaging, need to be more solid to merit serious attention. And his voice is sometimes that of an “impartial” historian and, at other times, particularly in the later chapters, that of a moralist . . . and perhaps even (God forbid) of a would-be theologian!
Canon Robin Gill, now retired, edited Theology for the past 12 years and was Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent 1992-2011.
The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It
Alec Ryrie
Reaktion Books £15.95
(978-1-83639-082-4)
Church Times Bookshop £14.36
