Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s . By Callum G. Brown. Studies in Modern British Religious History 29. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2012. xiv + 305 pp. $95.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s . By Callum G. Brown . Studies in Modern British Religious History 29. Woodbridge, U.K. : Boydell , 2012. xiv + 305 pp. $95.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesSociologists and historians have vigorously debated religious decline in the West since the 1960s, but until recently, most scholars have paid little attention to the gendered dimensions of secularization. Religious decline for these scholars amounted to a waning in the beliefs and practices of men, with little consideration for women's religious experiences. Callum Brown, a social historian of religion, stands out as one of the most prominent proponents in the gendering of secularization narratives and models. In the first volume of his planned trilogy on religious decline, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (New York: Routledge, 2001), Brown employed discourse analysis to make sense of secularization in modern British history. He made two controversial yet compelling claims in the book: 1) secularization was not a long, drawn-out process starting with the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution that gradually picked up steam in the twentieth century; rather, it was an abrupt if not catastrophic event emerging in the 1960s; 2) the 1960s witnessed the beginning of such a marked decline in religious beliefs and practices because it was at this time that women began abandoning the church in significant numbers due to the sexual revolution and its undermining of traditional Christian constructs of femininity.Religion and the Demographic Revolution constitutes the second volume of Brown's trilogy. This book differs in some important ways from the first volume: the methodology is now demography; the focus is not on one but four countries on both sides of the Atlantic--Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States; and the 1960s, the subject of one chapter in the first volume, receives Brown's full attention here. But the basic argument has not really changed. If anything, what Brown is doing in this book is elaborating and expanding upon the connection he made in the first volume between women and secularization in the 1960s.Brown points to three major cultural and social changes affecting Western societies in the 1960s: 1) the decline in Christianity's influence in the West, particularly Europe and Canada; 2) a demographic revolution in which severe drops in the fertility and marriage rates revolutionized the family structure; 3) "the revolution in women's identities" that ushered in "a transformation in the social construction of gender involving the search for autonomy in sexual expression, education and economic life" (1).Brown's thesis is that all three trends are interconnected. Secularization, in other words, is both a demographic and a gendered event. Demography and gender interact with religion in complex ways to determine the degree of secularization in a given context. Of the four countries studied in this volume, mainland Britain and Canada represent highly secularized nations for Brown as measured in the declining participation of women in churches as well as women increasingly rejecting a religious identity. …