Katherine Carté examines the transformation of a loose, informal structure constructed upon the shared religious beliefs of Britain's protestants as a result of the separation of North America. The deliberate use of the lower-case ‘protestant’ is emblematic of her desire to present religion in a generic institutional context rather than the more customary approach that connects specific ideas and arguments to a yearning for independence. Although she asserts that she wants to avoid the use of ‘politics’ or ‘political’, her purpose is to determine how this informal, but substantive, religious structure – essentially the empire's public religion – interacted with political institutions (pp. 7, 171 n. 3) and led to the divergence of protestantism on both sides of the post-revolutionary Atlantic.

During the eighteenth century, Carté argues that British protestantism had developed into a loosely organised, umbrella-like structure that she characterises as a scaffold. This scaffolding defined the parameters of discourse and action and provided a rough synthesis for what functioned as public religion on the eve of the crisis of the first British Empire. Within this structure, a shared consensus existed that generally supported government, advocated for a rightly ordered constitution protecting religious liberty and tolerated dissent when seen as clearly loyal. Although not an actual structure, the scaffold effectively incorporated Britain's three diverse, major protestant groups – English and North American Anglicanism, New England and English congregationalist dissent and Scottish presbyterianism – collectively into a more generic, substantive institution that was generally tolerant and sufficiently flexible to enable all three to prosper.

The dissolution of this operating consensus trailed patriotic fervour among protestants in North America. Like the recent work of Peter Messer and Mary Beth Norton, Carté emphasises the importance of events occurring late in the imperial crisis in precipitating the alignment of allegiance by the clergy. As the crisis deepened in late 1773 and early 1774, clerical opinions on both sides of the Atlantic, she argues, were not terribly far apart – Peter Oliver's assessment of the existence of the nefarious ‘black coated regiment’ she considers a clear outlier. Rather, the Coercive Acts bent dissenting congregationalist and local North American Anglican clergy towards the patriot cause almost by happenstance; when, in a relatively innocuous request, the Continental Congress asked American clergy to pray for the peaceful resolution of the political dispute, it was a position to which virtually all subscribed; however, despite their generally mixed support for the protests at this point, participating clergy came to be seen as implicitly endorsing and legitimising the congress and the most radical of patriot positions.

By the end of the war, Americans, assuming that things would go on much as they had before the revolution, did not see the disruption of the scaffold's transatlantic lines of communication and collaboration or the institutional and structural consequences that flowed from it. The revolution ‘destroyed habits and mechanisms of connection, competition, and legitimation between protestant institutions’ (p. 24) and released schismatic tendencies held in check by the former imperial consensus. Carté presumes an institutional substance that was sundered by the imperial crisis, attributing an initial structural weakening that evolved to the point where the ‘scaffolding of imperial protestantism no longer circled the empire in a meaningful way by 1775 . . . [and was] bent, repurposed, and ragged – no longer welded together’ (pp. 167–8). The need to reorient religious structures to the fact of independence led to divergent trajectories that created new denominational definitions and structures in the United States and, ironically, more Anglican conformity throughout the rest of the empire. In the United States, the inability to establish a national state Church led to concern for guarantees of religious freedom rather than for demands for government favouritism or support. In contrast, the loss of America meant fewer political incentives in Britain to accommodate dissenting religious institutions from the established Anglican Church. Where, for example, American independence led to weaning established Churches from state support and separated awakened, Evangelical beliefs into separate, distinctive denominations like the Methodists, in Britain, it helped sustain support for the Test Act.

In 1968 Michael Kammen in Rope of sand: the colonial agents, British politics, and the American Revolution examined the roles of colonial agents and found that an apparently vital imperial connection was, as his title indicates, without substance. Nearly sixty years later, Carté demonstrates Kammen's prescience with her examination of another less structured, less formal imperial connection but intimates that the imperial scaffold was far more robust than Kammen's colonial agents. ‘It is tempting to imagine’, she writes, ‘what might have happened if the radical voices in the Anglican and dissenting networks, each working to halt the political rupture, had found a common strategy or a common language based in shared protestantism that would have smoothed over the political crisis’ (p. 167). Whether the glass is half empty or full remains a question illustrating the unappreciated complexities of what John Fisk called the Critical Period and the importance of this book. This is a careful, nuanced study that balances subtle generalisations with rich descriptive detail and sheds light on the messiness on both sides of the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and during the early republic. Finally, the footnotes reflect Carté's immersion in the sources and the depth of her historiographic reflections. Scholars will find her discursive footnotes well worth the diversion.