God's Irishmen is an impressive book that makes an important contribution to both Irish and religious studies. Most significantly, Crawford Gribben's work should put to rest the notion of a monolithic Cromwellian piety imposing its will on a largely resistant population. Additionally, God's Irishmen lays a firm foundation for work that needs to be done on this period of Irish history from a variety of perspectives. Before looking at the key strengths of the book, it is perhaps helpful to clarify what the book is not: as the title implies, Gribben's work does not consider the Catholic response, either material or theoretical, to the Cromwellian authorities in Ireland; nor does Gribben examine the response of the still-evolving Anglican Church of Ireland to the arrival of a more zealously Protestant Irish administration.

That said, there is more than enough in the book to justify both reading and re-reading the work. The title is perhaps misleading in one other respect, for the book is less about God's Irishmen than about God's agents (as they saw themselves) in Ireland from 1649–1660, with the emphasis on the early and middle years of the 1650s, focusing on the lord deputyships of Charles Fleetwood (1654–1657) and Henry Cromwell (1657–1659). Perhaps surprisingly, it was Cromwell, fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, who was the more tolerant of the two governors, and the less subservient to Westminster, being, as Gribben makes clear, more interested in establishing a workable civic structure than was his brother-in-law Fleetwood, who sought to hew more closely to the charge provided the parliamentary commissioners for Ireland, which stressed the need to “ensure ‘the advancement of religion and propagation of the gospel … the suppression of idolatry, popery, superstition, and profaneness’” (27).

In a country with no settled secular government, with a majority-Catholic population, and with various embedded local approaches to Protestant religious practice, this charge of the commissioners offered an opportunity for numerous sects and individual charismatic leaders to turn their attention to a country reasonably close to England, within sight of Scotland, and conveniently located between London and the New England colonies. Indeed, as Gribben details, “Irish Cromwellians [were able] to participate in networks of friendship and clerical association that stretched across the Atlantic” (37). The opening of Ireland to Puritan activity was “propitious for … New England Puritanism [which] was beginning to lose some of its earlier momentum” (37). It was the call from Ireland that arguably kept alive the flame that would later reappear in the colonies in the life and works of Jonathan Edwards, whose Treatise on Religious Affections (1746) drew heavily upon the theology of conversionism that had been at the heart of many of the debates in Cromwellian Ireland.

God's Irishmen focuses on five areas of internecine Protestant strife: conversion, baptism, church-state relations (especially as related to controlling social behavior), “the possibility of the extraordinary” (53), and the role of women in the church. Gribben explores the fundamental tensions between the various sects and reminds us that all these tensions were as nothing compared to the need of the state to attract settlers to Ireland, a need that meant “mass conversions … would have irreversibly frustrated the colonial goals of the Parliamentarian and Cromwellian administrations” because such conversions would have rendered impossible policies designed to deprive Catholics of land and rights in order to foster Protestant immigration into Ireland. “The Cromwellian reformation,” in other words, “was underwritten by the expectation of its failure” (10–11) and, ironically, it was that expectation of failure that permitted in Ireland a remarkable flourishing of the full range of contemporary Protestant ideologies.

Herein lies the real strength of God's Irishmen: dealing with a nation whose religious activity can be studied reasonably comprehensively in a relatively short space, Gribben can illuminate nuances that have escaped both the commentators who look at broader sweeps of religious history and those who focus only on one specific incident or person. By looking at the debates within Ireland—debates that can largely be examined by focusing on the activities and attitudes of three geographic congregational groupings, those in Ulster (Scots Presbyterians more committed to the Westminster Confession of Faith than their counterparts elsewhere in Ireland, but also Royalist and so suspect), those in Munster (where adherents to more conservative Episcopalian practices allied in the interests of local self-reliance with Independent congregations), and those in Dublin (where two groups emerged, split particularly around the questions of child baptism and conversion testimony)—Gribben is able to illuminate the various stresses and strains within “Puritan” Ireland, strains that mirror broader tensions associated with that term but too often overlooked by modern historians. The debate over conversion narratives as prerequisites for admission to a congregation, Gribben notes, “illustrates the contingency of … ‘Puritanism,’ the extent to which the reforming agenda shared by radical protestants could incorporate mutually incompatible goals” (77–78). Here, as throughout his work, Gribben makes the point that discussions of Puritanism as monolithic are inevitably reductive.

Such was the opportunity for theological exploration in Puritan Ireland that it did not take long for as many opinions to present themselves as there were divines. And yet all opinions drew from the same wellsprings of inspiration, addressed the same audiences, and strove mightily to define a social system that was both Protestant and reformed. In the debates of Puritan Ireland, we see how local context almost always trumped the desire of central authority, but Gribben shows, too, how the local informed the broader context. God's Irishmen is an invaluable demonstration of how we might best approach trying to understand that past which is at once both deceptively familiar and unalterably distant.