Alec Ryrie's latest book is a tour de force of the history of Protestants, appropriately published in the year commemorating half a millennium since Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Its strengths lie in Ryrie's comprehensive knowledge of his subject combined with his skills in making the history eminently readable. It is not often that one finds a history book that holds attention from beginning to end, even for a person who is very familiar with that history. Episodes and characters well known to historians are presented in new light, with some unexpected nuances and twists. Recurring themes run through the entire study from sixteenth-century Luther to twenty-first-century Pentecostals and Protestants throughout the globe. Ryrie's book is not about Protestantism as a movement per se but about the people who made up this movement. Protestants are both ‘quarrelsome and fervent’. But for all their disagreements and schisms, they are a group of Christians intent on a spiritual experience or, as the author has it, having ‘a love affair with God’ (p. 1) that transforms them as individuals and profoundly affects the world around them. But not only are they lovers, says Ryrie (quoting Erasmus), but they are also fighters, those who defend their particular beliefs with a passion and fortitude that stands against the world. They use the Bible in doing so and often, they also stand against each other. Protestants have been on both sides of the arguments that have characterised modernity, and in the process have been agents of change, perhaps the most significant ones. This fascinating book recounts the stories of those individuals, communities and movements of people that made such a lasting contribution to the shape of modernity today.

Primarily, this is about the people who can be defined as Protestants. For Ryrie, this is an extremely broad term that follows a genealogical diachronic path from Luther's revolt against the Roman Catholic Church and includes all the branches, deviations and schisms that have arisen ever since. As he puts it in his epilogue, the diversity of Protestantism should not mask the fact that Protestants share certain characteristics that ‘are hard to pin down, but you know them when you see them’ (pp. 455–6). These characteristics are repeated throughout the book and cover all kinds of Protestants, not only the more conventional Reformed, Lutherans and Anglicans (the ‘Protestant’ nature of Anglicanism), but even those heterodox groups that arose within American Protestantism like Jehovah's Witnesses and Latter Day Saints or Mormons. At the beginning of the book Ryrie contends that three ingredients of the modern world have their origins in Protestantism: free inquiry, democracy and apoliticism. These ingredients repeat themselves time and again through the narratives of events and the people who make them happen. The book falls naturally into its three parts. The first part of the book deals with the foundations of Protestantism in Luther and Calvin, the ‘Reformation Age’, and from these founders to their countless descendants and offshoots, those tolerated and those fiercely persecuted, and the eventual migrations to the New World in the seventeenth century. The second part, the ‘Modern Age’, deals with the challenges of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Protestants were now reaching beyond their traditional boundaries into a new global world, particularly in their role in both confronting and defending slavery, and the sectarian schisms in American Protestantism that have continued to the present day are discussed here. This section includes a chapter on the so-called ‘liberal’ Protestants and one on the two sides of Protestants in Nazi Germany. The third and last part of the book, the ‘Global Age’, in consecutive chapters takes the three countries that probably have the most successful Protestant Churches in the world today: South Africa, South Korea and China. Following this is a chapter on the most amazing story of the growth of Pentecostalism worldwide (and how this fits the characteristics of Protestantism), and the book ends with an epilogue that suggests some future scenarios.

There are occasional slips, but these are very few and in the minutiae of the book. Referring to the hippie Jesus Movement or Jesus People of the late 1960s as ‘Jesus Freaks’ is a derogatory term not used in the movement itself. The not infrequent intercourse (including cohabitation) between early Dutch settlers, Africans and East Indian slaves in the Cape of Good Hope is also overlooked, as is the development of the Afrikaans language by the descendants of these unions, the mixed race ‘Cape Coloureds’. John Nevius was a missionary in China, not Korea, although his method was indeed adopted there. There are other surprising omissions, especially that the massive influence of the World Council of Churches in post-World War II Protestantism is almost incidental to the story, perhaps because it has ‘run its course’ (p. 425) in Ryrie's view. His observation of Pentecostalism's tendency to support right-wing politics is true, but does not account for the numerous exceptions of Pentecostals who actively resisted dictatorships and oppressive regimes, and in some case were imprisoned for doing so. But these are small matters in a book with such a grand sweep. I find the overall narrative true to the history that I am most familiar with, and retold in a way that is faithful to the established facts. Anyone looking for a fresh perspective on a vast subject will find this essential reading. I cannot commend this book highly enough for understanding the world in which we live and the role that Protestants continue to play here.