Scholars of eighteenth-century religion will not be surprised by what this book has to say about Daniel Defoe, 30 January sermons, or the place of Methodism. Rather, the significance of this study is that it shows how a distinguished and leading literature specialist, who as recently as 2005 had accepted the traditional secularising narrative of the period, now wants to put religion centre-stage as a key context and shaper of the literature and culture of the age. Weinbrot is certainly well-read in a vast range of much of the primary and secondary source material and his footnotes are an impressive testimony to his knowledge of a very large field. His general argument is that religion and literature moved away from the divisive hatred of the Restoration period (where he talks of people wanting to exterminate their rivals and of genocide) to a place where moderation and acceptance became the goal and norm. For example, where early Methodists had often seemed subversive of the state and disruptive of social relations, Smollett's Humphry Clinker, as is well known, presented a Methodism which was both socially accepted and supportive of the establishment. Instead of compulsion, exclusion, confrontation and persecution, the move was, in all the topics and issues that Weinbrot studies, to persuasion, inclusion, amelioration and moderation. Weinbrot's final case study is of the Gordon Riots, which he sees as (temporarily) reversing the eighteenth-century consensus (he characterises this as ‘two steps forward and one step back’), although it is not clear whether Weinbrot sees this as a momentary aberration or rather as a manifestation of an underlying and deep-rooted recognition that religion continued to be divisive. Neither is it really clear why Weinbrot needed to include the coda on Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. For readers interested in the relationship between ‘religion’, ‘politics' and ‘culture’, Weinbrot raises the intriguing question of whether politics changed theology or whether theology changed politics. I would suggest that to find the answer he goes even further in his acceptance of the centrality of religion in the period to recognise that ‘literature’, ‘politics' and ‘theology’ were in fact inseparable, so that the religion and culture of his title were of a piece. More debatable is whether the book needed the conceptual framework of a Darwinian understanding of ‘evolution’ to make its points, and in places, particularly in the conclusion, some of the generalisations are rather sweeping. Nevertheless, as a recognition that students of literature need to take religion more seriously than they do, this is a salient reminder that the eighteenth century was a religious and not a secular age.