Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966-1982. By David G. Reagles

The 1960s have, in recent years, become fertile ground for scholars exploring the timing and causes of religious decline. No longer wedded to analytic frameworks that assumed inextricable connections between secularization and modernization, historians have increasingly seen the decade as a period of crisis for Christianity in which religious belief, behaviour, and belonging all plummeted. David G. Reagles’s Searching for God in Britain and Beyond offers a distinctive approach to understanding the experience of those who sought to make sense of the religious tumult of the era. Where other scholars have examined the writings of intellectuals and conducted retrospective oral history interviews, Reagles seeks to recover the experience of ‘ordinary’ people by plumbing the rich trove of correspondence between a notable Christian writer and his highly engaged readers. This ‘fan mail’ (as Reagles terms it) offers a clear sense of immediacy, providing a way to witness people trying to understand a society that seemed abruptly unmoored from its traditional Christian foundations.