On July 3, 1776, John Adams reflected on recent events with joy and trepidation: “Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom…It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities far more wasting.” For a New Englander steeped in puritan enthusiasm, the new prospect in human affairs opened by American “Independency” was, in fact, a very old one. The hearts of the British, like Pharaoh's, had been hardened; the Americans had successfully thrown off the imperial yoke. God was acting in history once more to deliver his chosen people from slavery. But as an attentive reader of Exodus, Adams knew that their trials were only beginning. One must submit to “an overruling Providence…unfashionable as the faith may be.”

John Coffey's Exodus and Liberation argues that, in the context of the Revolution, Adams's providentialism and Old Testament allusions were not “unfashionable” at all. His letter provides a consummate example of what Coffey calls “Protestant deliverance politics,” an Anglo-American tradition of political rhetoric that he traces from the Reformation to the present day. The book details how successive generations of political actors and activists have drawn on Old Testament narratives and texts – primarily Exodus, but also the Jubilee proclamations of Leviticus and Isaiah – to frame their own struggles for liberty as reenactments of the Hebrews' divine deliverance. For Coffey, an early modern historian, the English Civil War or “Puritan Revolution” provides the pattern for a “Biblical language of liberty” that politicized religious ideas of deliverance and liberation previously confined to the spiritual realm. The first of the book's three parts argues that the deliberate echoes of Jubilee and Exodus heard in revolutionary cries to “Break every yoke!” and the rhetorical contrast between liberty and slavery pioneered in 1644 profoundly shaped the revolutions of 1688 and 1776 that followed. The second shows how abolitionists in England and America later adopted and transformed this language by arguing that slavery was not simply a metaphor for the oppression of white Christians. The final section examines the continued importance of Exodus and Jubilee motifs in the 20th century, particularly in the Civil Rights movement. Coffey's narrative extends beyond the 2008 presidential election to show that deliverance politics remains alive and well in America both on the Left and the Right—especially in foreign policy, where echoes of the “missionary imperialism” of 19th century British abolitionists abound.

Coffey is not the first to notice the peculiarly Protestant tenor of American politics. Yet, his unapologetically transatlantic – and transhistorical – approach allows him to bring together political and social movements, eras, and individuals usually treated apart and thus to see Bible-intoxication as not simply an American pathology. Whereas other scholars have approached the phenomenon through the works of a few exemplary orators and statesmen, Coffey's narrative brings together characters and sources ranging from the expected to the obscure: not only sermons, speeches, and pamphlets, but also songs, paintings, and commemorative medals. A motley crew of Moses's and Pharaohs populate his pages, with several figures – including Cromwell and Lincoln – enjoying the dubious distinction of being both. The Puritan Revolution in particular produced a host of mediocre prophets, including Thomas Totney, who circumcised himself and went berserk outside of Parliament.

Given his subject, Coffey's failure to engage with the well-developed literatures on civil religion and the jeremiad in America is surprising. Instead, he positions himself within debates in the history of political thought, most notably the arguments by Quentin Skinner and others for a significant revival of “neo-Roman” or republican ideas of liberty in early modern England. Exodus and Liberation insists, however, that the imaginaries informing early modern ideas of bondage were more often biblical and Egyptian, rather than Roman, despite increasing English participation in the African slave trade at the time. Coffey relates how abolitionists and their opponents would later hotly debate the contemporary implications of the Old Testament institution of Jubilee: did Isaiah's injunction to “proclaim liberty to the captives” apply only to Hebrew bondsmen (analogized to indentured whites) or to all slaves, including blacks?

In recovering these partial and partisan uses of Scripture, Coffey's book is at its best. But his approach also has its downsides. Each chapter offers tantalizing glimpses of novel forms of political thinking and argumentation but rarely dips beneath the surface. In his haste to reach the present, Coffey does not stop to ask what his subjects were doing in appealing to Scripture or what, precisely, was at stake. His decision to frame the book as a study of political rhetoric suggests that Old Testament appeals possessed only a non-rational, emotive power inessential to the moral or political claims being made and intended to “convert” rather than persuade. He would seem to agree with John Rawls and other public reason liberals for whom the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements are favorite examples of how claims about basic justice can and should be translated from a “theological” to a “secular” key. But Coffey – like his sources – also insists that Exodus and Jubilee are doing justificatory work to “legitimate” political action. The question of whether a distinction between religious rhetoric and political argument can be maintained in the 17th century or today is pushed aside. Beyond pointing out the persistence of an inevitably “contested” deliverance politics, Coffey's narrative lacks analytical or normative purchase. Throughout, he deploys binaries between religious/political and spiritual/secular that his own narrative undermines.

Coffey has shown himself willing to engage with political theorists, including Rawls, in his earlier work on toleration; his failure to do so here feels like a missed opportunity. Still, this should not detract from his achievement. The work of deliverance is never done and in drawing our attention to this forgotten but still-living rhetorical tradition, Exodus and Liberation reminds its readers that struggles for liberation are always wars of words as well as swords. To understand them, one must also understand the complex rhetorical terrain on which they are fought.