Almost by default, and for all the wrong reasons, the religious beliefs and behaviour of individuals and groups have in recent years become the focus of government attention and policy. The focus is directed towards security matters and social cohesion, and the emergence of more politicised and muscular forms of religion-inspired activity have produced wider discourses about national and individual identity, cohesion, social values, human progress and science. We spend fortunes on studies which seek to understand religious fanaticism. Meanwhile in the United Kingdom, research on religion and spirituality as resources for health, coping and life satisfaction is close to non-existent. This void may have arisen because religion and spirituality are not deemed appropriate things for empirical scrutiny, or because in our secularised society, de-politicised religion itself simply doesn't matter. Where is the pay-off? Fortunately, the American grant-funding bodies and academic institutions tend to see things rather differently. The book In The Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice and Change is based on a major longitudinal study of religious belief and practice in the United States. It has gathered powerful and sometimes painful narratives and reflections of people throughout the lifecourse. Starting in adolescence in the 1920s and taking us through the 1950s to the 1990s, one can only envy the dogged determination of the researchers and the richness of the presented data. For those with a more quantitative inclination, diverse data on physical and psychological health and life satisfaction are reported.

Erik Erikson suggested that the acceptance of one's life trajectory at old age girds ‘positive ageing’. The findings presented in Chapter 10, ‘The buffering role of religion in late adulthood’, suggest that religion may be influential in this process. However, one of the intriguing findings from this work is that the data fail to support the hefty body of evidence accumulated by Harold Koenig, David Larson and others that religion and spirituality are protective against physical ill-health. That is not to say that religion is not beneficial in other ways. Rather, Dillon and Wink argue that the data support the sort of buffering effect that has long been the received wisdom of those with an interest in spirituality and health. Thus, using ill-health as a proxy for adversity, older people with strong religious beliefs and poor health were able to maintain the same level of optimism and coping as those who were free from ill-health – even accounting for the usual confounders of gender and social support. Moreover, this protective effect could be predicted from religiousness in middle age; in other words, it wasn't simply that these people gravitated, pre-emptively, towards religion as a counter-adversity measure. The chapter also covers complex gender differences and nuanced contrasts between the more settled religious individuals and the ‘spiritual seekers’.

The results of the quantitative analysis are carefully described but never intrude with heavy statistical output; instead, the strength of the narrative is maintained throughout the book in an extremely erudite but accessible manner. Thus, the ways in which the informants use their religious beliefs and behaviour to provide meaning to their illness are sensitively described with narratives that display the sheer, messy complexity of life and the events that seem to arise from nowhere – challenging our assumptions and our taken-for-granted worlds. Elsewhere in the book the authors provide a finely-grained account of the waxing and waning of religious belief and behaviour, from adolescence to adulthood, engaging with the individuals as they journey through the turbulent cultural, social and political events and processes of the last century. While the seemingly monolithic and politically-active evangelical Christianity of the ‘neocon’ generation grabs the headlines, the book helps to reassure that the landscape of religious belief in the USA is considerably more textured.

Older age is a time when people tend to face mounting concerns, particularly those regarding loss of health and eventual death. However, religious belief has undergone considerable change in terms of greater pluralism and growing secularism. There is a need to understand the impact of such changes on older people's health, wellbeing, meaning and identity. This book, authored by two eminent scholars of sociology and psychology and funded by The Templeton Foundation, is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of religion and spirituality over the lifecourse. It is both insightful and skilfully written, and backed by a deep knowledge of the literature. It will be of considerable use and interest to academics from a very wide range of disciplines.