Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870-1920 by S. J. D. Green (review)

566book reviews Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870-1920. By S.J. D. Green. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1996. Pp. xv, 426.) This is a fascinating work in which, despite the case-study subtitle, the author takes on the troubles of secularization theory. In a well-written and very helpful introduction, Green casts doubt on both classic secularization theory and its major schools of criticism. The crisis of secularization theory is itselfsomewhat aging and sufficiently familiar to most students of religious history as not to require detailed explanation. Secularization theory has encountered many historical contradictions. On the other hand, as Green aptly warns his readers,various revisionist schemes (which he simplifies to four categories: transformation, relocation , divergence, and spontaneous renewal) themselves fail to supplant the older thesis. Where then does all this leave an author presenting his readers with new research into "decline"? Green proposes a provocative route out of the secularization morass. Quite unabashedly he advocates a return to the institutions. Once upon a time not long ago, it was the basic consensus that the study of religion , at least of Christianity in the West, ought to divest itself of institutional bias and immerse itself instead in the techniques and assumptions of social history . To stay with the institutional perspective smacked of elitism, sectarianism, hierarchalism, etc., all deemed to be very bad things indeed.Yet in the midst of liberation one problem remained intractable: how to dump an institutional perspective from the study of a movement which from the very beginning has portrayed its own mission as the setting apart, initiating, and instructing people, all with authority and discipline? Green answers that one cannot and ought not to forgo institutional history for one simple reason: historical Christianity is what it says it is and therefore the institutional perspective forms the base which grounds other historical analyses. He writes,". . . a description and analysis of the ends, activities and fate of religious institutions . . . necessarily comprehends the social history of religion, the history of the churches and the history of religious (and other) ideas" (my emphasis). Through all this and through his detailed evidence, Green settles on some rather interesting conclusions. Primarily, the notion of "decline" applied to British Christianity is very accurate and very real. Green finds no support for the idea that Yorkshire religiosity re-located or re-defined itself once the traditional churches began to decline. If in fact it did transform, he says, it was no longer identifiably Christian. No churches, no faith. Second, historians ought to link, not oppose, the buoyant spirit, competitive vigor, and pure ambition of the Yorkshire churches circa 1870 with the gloom and exhaustion of the 1920's. Why? Because, claims Green, it was the very ambition of the late Victorian churches seeking to expand, to grow with the general population, to identify with all sections of society all the time, in short to cater and to pander which led to the virtual identification of these churches with all the secular forms (and less stuffy alternatives) of associationalism. The Gospel was lost amidst all the BOOK REVIEWS567 newfound "relevance" of the churches and people stayed away in droves. They are still staying away from all the "relevant" churches and seminaries in Britain and America to this day. Ken Hendrickson Sam Houston State University Huntsville, Texas Louis Massignon. The Crucible of Compassion. By Mary Louise Gude. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 283. $34.95.) Mary Louise Gude's admirable biography ofMassignon is the only one in English (a French life appeared in 1994) despite his international reputation as an Oriental scholar, a religious mystic, and a social and political activist who devoted much ofhis life (1883-1962) to promoting understanding between Islam and Christianity and, in a larger context, between the Arab world and the West. The work appears at a sadly opportune moment, when with increasing violence and fanaticism the need to achieve such understanding becomes even greater than in the past. Gude records in detail Massignon's career as one ofthe greatest Arab scholars of his time, dwells on the profundity of his religiosity which co-existed with social...