It's...all right. It kills me to say that because his Reformation book is my favorite of the "sweeping Reformation overview" genre. But that formula just doesn't work as well for the history of Christianity as a whole. In fact, it ends up reinforcing some fairly insidious stereotypes. :/

MacCulloch tells a similar story of Christianity that he does of the Reformation: Christianity as an intellectual history, a history of ideas, a phenomenon through which ideas drive history. I dig this thesis as a scholar--you'd probably call me an intellectual historian of sorts. I think that while you can absolutely show underlying climate/economic/etc stressors that affect people's thinking, intellectual history/history of ideas gets the closest to the way people actually experience life (history).

It also makes for a fairly readable book, because it allows MacCulloch to hit up specific points of light in the giant field of Christian history. He spends time with individual theologians and standout Christians like the martyr Perpetua (probably the earliest Christian woman whose writing survives under her name); and uses specific situations to evoke broader contemporary patterns (like "two bloodless coup d'etats" in the Australian Anglican communion...Australian Anglicans, what?). This methodology also makes the book rather enjoyable to read as far as theological history goes. And MacCulloch continues to be good at conveying complex theological ideas.

But the book's absolutely fatal flaw is its relentless centering of Western and eventually English Christianity: Europe, then adding the U.S. and other British dominions/former dominions. For example, he labels the period from 1960-2000 "Culture Wars." This hyper-Western paradigm for encapsulating the era is unthinkable in the context of global Christianity--which religious studies scholars argue is the key to Christianity's present as well as future. (Since MacCulloch's "Three Thousand Years" in the title are meant to refer to Christianity's future, this is an even bigger problem).

It means, too, that he'll rip the very, very occasional piece of African or Latin American (Asia, what Asia?) evidence out of context and homogenize it to trends in the U.S. Pulling out one occurrence at a charismatic service in Africa--how much is this connected to global Pentecostal denominations, how much of it is rooted in African independent traditions (Ogbu Kalu is very clear that African Pentecostalism is both specifically African and is very different from the AIC traditions)? There is little sense of ties to the context or parallel lines of causation besides the monolithic Western-based intellectual trend.

Besides simply skipping the global South, these omissions reinforce a really big problem in both religious studies and in Western perceptions of the Christian world: the assumption that Theology or Important Religious Ideas are the province of white westerners. MacCulloch's Christianity Of Ideas is a Christianity of almost exclusively white creators. Sometimes they might be missionaries in other regions, sure, but they always trace their heritage back to the North Atlantic. There's a long history of not taking Christianities of color seriously as theologies, and MacCulloch's book ends up reinforcing that I think by accident.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have a one-volume alternative to recommend. (That's the problem with a background in theology; we have to know more in-depth stuff, so we read more focused books, haha). The People's History of Christianity series does a better job in terms of coverage, but the writing is scholars in the traditional mode, so it is most very very dry (i.e. boring). (nb: "People's History", while obviously borrowed from Zinn, has lost its politicized connnotations and become kind of scholarly shorthand to say social history/a topic from multiple perspectives, like "what was it like to go to church in Byzantine Empire")

Justo Gonzalez's The Story of Christianity is a two-volume, semi-textbook set that I think I'd recommend first. The last section of volume 2, Christianity in the modern era, has a definite progressive, postcolonial view of the Christian Church from the global South. This reflects what I, personally understand of the state and ideal purpose of Christianity in the world today. But obviously not everyone sees revelation as the impetus to work towards a more just world on earth even though, in orthodox Christianity, humans can never get there without God. So that's something to be aware of before picking Gonzalez over MacCulloch.