This is a hard book to review, for good reasons: it's dense with information, and a detailed review would be a significant proportion of length of the book itself. So what I'm going to do is to try give some idea of the flavour of the book, along with a brief general discussion.

It is a good read. Russell Blackford has an easy style that takes the reader smoothly through details of legal cases, political and religious history, and philosophical arguments. Each chapter is carefully laid out, with introduction, conclusion and notes, making the book ideal as both the plan and discussion material for a course on secularism. It's quite a bit more than a text book though, as Russell does make clear his personal political views; the book is an argument for a particular approach to secularism, one that involves considerable liberalism and tolerance, a secular state with a definite Lockian flavour.

The sheer volume of information presented and discussed with clarity and brevity means that the book is an essential read and reference for anyone at all interested in the interaction between religion and Western states. Having said that, there are many who will not be comfortable with its conclusions and the style of secularism suggested by Russell. There is no place in his secularism for the banning of religious clothing as recently instituted by the French government, for example. Also, religious groups are given freedom to make their own policies about matters such as the equality of women in their hierarchies.

Russell's version of liberal secularism has a problem, which is that few if any states have such a system in place, and there are few signs that matters are changing in his direction. Because of this, I would have liked far clearer descriptions in his book of what we actually need to do if we agree with Russell: how do we get to the version of secularism he supports, and how do we defend it? The UK had a visit from the Pope last year, and the Pontiff warned against secular values. A detailed discussion of the political implications of this kind of attack on secularism and how we challenge such attacks would have been useful. Another aspect of the defence of secularism is how states should actively promote it. Russell's approval of considerable state tolerance towards religious views, including freedom to preach, proselytise, and pass on religious views to children seems to me to allow for a slow but persistent erosion of support for liberal secularism.

I'm not a secularist. It not my view that the state should treat religions with tolerance. I believe that in order to survive a liberal state has to actively work to promote liberal views, and if that means that the state has to come into conflict with religious groups, then so be it. The state, in my view, does have to promote certain values such as fairness, and the use of reason, and when it comes to the education of children, the teaching of these values has to be compulsory to protect young minds from religious indoctrination and to help them resist cultural oppression. I would be more open to secularism if I believed it to be sustainable. So I would welcome another book from Russell which would concentrate more on how to build and defend his preferred form of secularism.

But anyway, even with this, this book is a must-have. It needs to be kept to hand in any discussion of Western secularism.