For the first fifteen hundred years or so of its existence, the Christian Church in Wales was a unified entity. The Welsh Church, initially Celtic, but then Roman Catholic, held a virtual monopoly over religious life and belief in the country. The sixteenth century Reformation ended the notion of a monolithic Christendom; the proliferation of Protestant sects guaranteed that competition and variety would be the norm.
By charting the gradual proliferation of religious communities in Wales from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, this volume seeks to dispel many of the myths of a monochrome Christian, Protestant or even Nonconformist Wales. Each chapter also uniquely examines the persistence of faith, often in surprising places, in post-Christian Wales.