A few preliminary words about the history and style of this book may help the reader make sense of it. Having spent much of my life writing rather abstractly about competing explanations of religious change, I wanted to end my career by writing something more concrete. In particular I wanted to keep in more of the observational detail from my research: the stuff that makes field research interesting but which usually gets ditched as that material gets processed into sociologese. The intention was to write a very detailed account of religion in modern Britain but, because there are so many differences in the religious cultures of Scotland, Wales and England that many points had to be made three times in slightly different ways, British Gods became too long and too complex. So I decided to take each part separately. Hence Scottish Gods.

This is not a partisan account. Whether Christianity (or any other religion for that matter) is a good thing is a race in which I have no horse. Readers of drafts of various sections have sometimes objected to my tone but, if there is still anything which offends, it is more likely a result of wishing to lighten what can be a dull subject than a subconscious expression of anti-religious animus. Probably because my day job requires me to hold the attention of large audiences of dozy undergraduates (and a few alert ones), I have developed a by-now-incurable tendency to flippancy.