Systematic Anglican thinking about religious expansion has its roots in the early eighteenth century with the founding in 1701 of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), and developed with the growth of empire in North America, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Rowan Strong's book contends that as with the eighteenth-century growth of English nationalism, religious thought in the Church of England was inextricably intertwined with empire, and church leaders, channeling a more generalized European revival of Protestant pietism, publicly framed “an official and conscious Anglican concern for empire, and for missions by the Church of England” (6). This is not a common view, as the enormous literature on English missions tends to focus on the final decades of the century and the British evangelical missionary enterprise that, in association with abolition and other humanitarian movements, grew so vigorously over the next half-century. This emphasis, Strong rightly notes, has too often left the higher reaches of the Church of England (with their emphasis on order, social hierarchy, and patrician leadership) unexamined as part of a Protestant missionary movement that became progressively more important to the diverse, energetic, and competitive world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British religious life.

By the mid-eighteenth century, in response to the North American colonial experience, Anglican leaders had constructed a surprisingly stable public discourse containing a clear understanding of empire and “an authentic missionary culture toward the English-British Empire” (15). The elements of this discourse were discreet and lasting: the national state and church had a responsibility for the spiritual welfare of colonists and “colonial heathens,” particularly in the face of competition from Catholicism and Dissent; this debt of responsibility was owed as return on the commerce and wealth proceeding from the providential gift of empire, and as obligation to God who might otherwise withdraw the blessing; and the most enduring bonds that could ensure the preservation of the empire—by generating fellow feeling and colonial morality—were produced by the faithful extension of the best form of Protestant religion, the Church of England.

In the case of North America, however, these arguments did not move the British state, which never made provision for extending episcopal government under properly consecrated bishops. Anglican commentators ultimately ascribed the loss of the American colonies to the loosening of colonial bonds that resulted. Consequently, in the Canada and India of the “second British empire,” the Anglican pattern of empire prevailed with the creation of bishoprics first in Canada (beginning in 1787), later (in 1814) in Calcutta. This pattern persisted until the 1830s, when in England Anglican exclusivity and the close relationship of church and state ended with Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and church reform that followed the Reform Act of 1832. As the Bishop of Australia watched the dismantling of exclusively Anglican state-sponsored religion under Whig leadership, metropolitan Anglicans generated a “new imperial paradigm,” (218) accepting voluntary religion as the status quo. The Colonial Bishoprics Fund, created in 1841 to replace the impending end of government support, was one response; another was a new determination, led in part by George Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand, to cast off the state connection and demand an independent, international church.

Throughout Strong is at pains to demonstrate that religion—as a clearly bounded, consciously constructed system of beliefs and commitments—must be taken seriously if we are not to distort and reduce Anglican motivations to some hypocritical veil for another, more real, set of worldly agendas. He gets at these beliefs primarily by analyzing the annual sermons of SPG preachers and the reports of bishops and missionaries published by the SPG, and, after its founding in 1799, the evangelical Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). What they show is an ideology of polarities, dividing Christian and non-Christian worlds fundamentally into light and darkness, virtue and sin, civilization and Satanic heathenism. Strong understands the limitations of this approach: that public, published sermons and reports in a clerically dominated church silence the voices of indigenous peoples and women in favor of religious elites. He nevertheless argues convincingly that these voices formed a persistent “orthodox” Anglican outlook that reigned from the 1730s to the 1830s and had importance both in setting the elements of later missionary discourse and in shaping colonial policy.

The Church of England, however, remained a broad, comprehensive, national church throughout this period, and Strong's emphasis on hegemonic discourses causes him consistently to downplay diversity and division within it. Leaders might construct an imperial discourse, but how far did it resonate within the church's many subcultures? Furthermore, like many other analyses of religion and empire, Strong's tends to conflate the empire and the larger world into a single construct. While Strong argues that prior to the 1830s there was far more unity in an “orthodox” Anglican middle ground than later in the century when battles between high and low churchmen raged, it is unclear how far this extended and to what degree empire mattered outside the SPG fold. So at what point did nation, empire, and world divide in importance in the minds of Anglicans? What were their relative weights? And with the rise of critical Anglican evangelicalism, to what degree can we speak of “Anglican paradigms” of empire?

Ultimately, Strong's insistence on a large measure of Anglican unity on these matters feels forced, particularly given that evangelical Anglicans founded the CMS precisely to transcend the bounds of empire and the constraints of episcopal control, deploring that despite the over 600 clergymen the SPG sent to serve North American colonists, the talk of missions to “heathen” peoples had materialized into only limited, largely failed efforts. Most evangelical missions, of course, also collaborated with imperial power in many ways, but they had a distinctly different ethos. The fact that evangelical support for missions rapidly dwarfed that of the SPG (which had an income in 1839–40 only one-third as large as the CMS alone) suggests both a variant discourse and that the driving force of voluntary religion that necessitated changes by the Anglican leadership and the SPG came as much from within the Anglican fold as from outside of it.

Strong has assembled a valuable analysis of mainstream Anglican thinking on religion, the state, empire, and missions, but, as he himself acknowledges, this represents at best a minority view. How large a minority, and among what groups it prevailed and grew, it is difficult to tell. Only a muted sense of the diversity within the Church of England comes through here, particularly reflections of those who leaned toward evangelistic voluntary activism, increasingly feminized humanitarianism, and populist emotional religious culture. Undoubtedly virtually all Anglicans, and most all Dissenters as well, viewed the empire as providential. But to what ends? This book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on religion, nation, and empire. However it represents only one strand of a much larger movement that by 1840 was dominated not by higher churchmen, but by their Dissenting competitors whose impulses were anything but patrician.