Why did a handful of conservative congregations and dioceses leave the Episcopal Church in 2008 and create an Anglican offshoot, when the national and international Church's long historic tradition boasted an amazing ability to hold together amid centuries of internal diversity? Christopher Brittain plunged deep into the painful divorce within the diocese of Pittsburgh to reveal that such wrenching splits involve far more than debates over liberal and conservative positions on socio-political issues, which scholars over-emphasise. Brittain argues that framing church divisions simply as battlegrounds for modern culture wars obfuscates the predominant emotional, local, resource-based, personality-based, media-stirred, structural power struggles that promote diocesan divisions at the grassroots. Such obfuscation of root causes, combined with defaulting one's emphasis to the usual hot button issues, not only fuels organised polarisation, it also removes from sight commonalties that could help religious communities to remain tolerantly together. More specifically, his well-organised, thoroughly researched, engaging case study convincingly illustrates that congregations with very similar theological and cultural views nevertheless felt reluctantly compelled to pick a side when their bishop forced a vote. Though the side-picking rhetoric highlighted the supposed apostasies of the American Church and its presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the positions of congregants with respect to women and homosexuals, for example, did not map easily into liberal and conservative camps; in addition, local congregants ultimately preferenced more practical concerns about the impact of divorce upon their communities, relationships, resources and image. Brittain also highlights the regional role that Trinity School for Ministry played in moving the diocese to the right, as well as that of Bishop Robert Duncan in forcing people to draw lines in the sand when most of them might have preferred a muddier united existence if left unprodded. Polemical bloggers further dug those lines into trenches by shoveling up piles of ‘truthiness’ that abandoned facts for emotion-based exaggerations. And legal wars over church property turned those trenches into shooting positions for custody battles that left throbbing scars. Brittain's main point seems to be that divorces might be avoided if Christians can maintain a nuanced, compassionate, realistic view of those involved, recognise that a lived diversity exists within grassroots congregations that defies so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ binaries, and that pettier local matters might be holding more sway than people want to admit. Churches on both sides of divorcing camps can also benefit from remembering that they share concerns about how individualism has adversely affected intra-church relationships. Though this volume might have benefitted from more thorough historical ties to the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, and though it perhaps over-stresses the divorce phenomenon, given that the vast majority of Episcopal congregations remained within the national fold, it provides an enlightening, riveting, useful case study that sharpens our diagnostic abilities when faced with the fractures rippling across many Protestant communions, while offering a way to re-vision and better understand what may actually be going on.