This book aims to make an original contribution to the social history of religion in modern Britain. It offers no a priori definition of religious phenomena. Rather, it conceives of its subject as including all (anyway, most) of those characteristic ideas about, and institutions dedicated to, explicit and significant notions of the sacred that have flourished in these islands during the last century or so. Mutatis mutandis it presumes the widest possible remit for a comprehensive study of an ever-changing thing. This presumes the ‘social history’ not merely of ecclesiastical institutions, but also of quasi-religious organisations; similarly, of arcane doctrine and unsophisticated attitudes about God, His Church and our immortal ends. Yet what follows is, for the most part, an unashamedly specific account of the fate of Christian, denominational, practice and popular, protestant, belief in Britain from the end of the First World War down to the dawn of the 1960s. Indeed, its real concerns are in some respects narrower still. That is because it concentrates overwhelmingly (though not entirely) on English experience in these respects. This study sheds little direct light on Scottish and Welsh religious history, and even less on the very different dynamic of contemporary Irish Christianity. To the extent that its English interests are multi-denominational, they are devoted largely to the fortunes of the protestant churches. According to these terms, Roman Catholicism stands at the farthest shores of indigenous biblical faith.