The study of religion in colonial North America has come a long way since the heyday of denominational studies, the heavy emphasis on Puritans and on the Great Awakening and the assumption that in other respects colonial religious life had little wider significance. In this study, Carla Pestana insists that ‘Religious faith – both individual belief and its collective expression – are key to understanding the history of the British Atlantic world.’ Drawing on a wealth of more narrowly focused histories, she succeeds in drawing together a coherent overview of the complex landscape of faiths. Pestana sets out to be rigorously even-handed in her treatment of the variety of religious experience in the British Atlantic world and succeeds admirably. Not only does she set the religious life of Puritans, Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Moravians, Roman Catholics and Jews (among others) in a broad cultural and political context, she also explores the influence of the indigenous beliefs of black Africans and native American Indians on their interactions with Europeans. Acutely sensitive to the variety of influences at work in the different parts of the British Isles, continental Europe and North America, Pestana illuminates the intimate connections between political ideas and religious movements, showing, for example, how and why Wesleyan Methodism was received in different ways in various regions. Her lack of familiarity with the particularities of some religious traditions is often evident (the mystic St Teresa of Avila did not die a martyr [p. 68]; in the cover illustration, King Charles i receives not a halo [p. 125] but a crown of thorns; the east-west orientation of the burials in the African Burial Ground in New York more likely indicates Christian than Islamic [p. 176] influence), but these errors have no impact on the wider argument. This work stands as a valuably objective summary of an historic field undergoing rapid development.