Kentucky has long intrigued students of America's sectional crisis and Civil War. A slave state that chose to remain in the Union, Kentucky straddled the divides that characterised the antebellum United States: North/South, free/slave, unionist/secessionist. Luke Harlow's fine book joins a growing literature that examines Kentucky's movement from that ‘middle ground’ before and during the Civil War to full membership in the postwar ‘solid South’. Harlow contributes to that literature by arguing that religion proved central to ‘the making of Confederate Kentucky’. He persuasively claims that Kentucky's ‘antebellum religious past [is] the key to unlocking its postwar future’ (p. 223). Although antebellum and wartime white Kentuckians differed regarding the wisdom of slavery and emancipation, Harlow demonstrates that those differences mattered less for Kentucky's postbellum history than did white Kentuckians’ shared convictions that the Bible sanctioned both slavery and white supremacy. Even those white Kentuckians who opposed slavery, such as Robert J. Breckinridge, opposed abolitionism even more strongly, seeing its liberal reading of the Bible as a threat to theological orthodoxy. Most white Kentuckians opposed secession not because they favoured emancipation but because they believed in the Union. For many of these pro-Union whites, however, the Emancipation Proclamation ushered in a broad ‘cultural and political transformation’ that signalled to them ‘that the United States had become a different country form the one they knew in 1860’. Most important, for Harlow, is how these white Kentuckians interpreted emancipation through a religious lens; ‘the specter of emancipation’ convinced ‘Kentucky's white religious conservatives that abolitionist heterodoxy had triumphed at the highest levels of American public office’ (p. 159). In Harlow's convincing analysis, postbellum Kentucky politics, characterised by white supremacy, Democratic Party dominance and ‘Confederate memory’, resulted in large part from antebellum religious convictions that persisted and even grew stronger in the wake of war. Nothing demonstrates the postwar victory of proslavery religion in Kentucky more than the efforts of its major Protestant denominations, led by the Presbyterians on whom Harlow rightly focuses most of his attention, to denounce ‘northern religiosity’ as heresy and align themselves with southern white religious organisations that refused to acknowledge that slaveholding violated the Bible. Harlow concentrates throughout his book on religious leaders, a practice that proves both engaging and illustrative. Breckinridge, not surprisingly, plays a leading role. Harlow shows that Breckinridge's combination of emancipation, colonisation, white supremacy, unionism and theological conservatism, which gained him considerable cultural and political authority prior to and into the early years of the War, proved untenable after the war. Breckinridge's fellow Presbyterian Stuart Robinson provides Harlow with a vivid embodiment of his primary argument. A proslavery critic of Breckinridge, Robinson went into exile in Canada during the War because of his denunciations of northern efforts – shared by Breckinridge – to make loyalty to the Union a test of religious orthodoxy. By the 1870s, however, ‘Robinson was the most politically and culturally influential white minister in Kentucky’ (p. 219), one who passionately defended the biblical sanction of slaveholding and pronounced abolition ‘one of the most pernicious heresies of modern times’ (p. 196). That this exile attained such authority testifies to the strength of conservative, proslavery theology's ability to survive ‘and indeed gain new life’ in the aftermath of war and emancipation. Harlow's book reminds us that only by understanding the theology of white southerners can we begin to understand their politics.