In what may be properly described as a present renaissance of early modern British sermon studies, Warren Johnston contributes an examination of the specific genre of thanksgiving-day sermons emerging from a variety of royally ordered national thanksgivings. His analysis is based on 587 published sermons representing forty commemorations of national thanksgivings spanning nearly 130 years. To produce reliable generalizations of the socio-rhetorical role these sermons achieved, Johnston's parameters are broadly set to British sermons across the long eighteenth century, over a large geographical area, representing both Established church and dissenting pulpits, and published for more popular consumption. Chapters represent the most basic motifs: war, Providence, political theory and principles, commerce, and ecclesial differences.

Analysis carefully extracts from these representative sermons a nexus of cultural, social, religious, and political ideas (and ideals) that thanksgiving-day sermons both echoed and promulgated to their listening and reading audiences. The emerging picture is one of greater comparison than contrast among clergy in their ultimate hopes and visions for king and country. In general, Johnston discovers such sermons served to legitimize and bolster both the monarchy and the church, had a socially unifying effect, and thus became patriotic occasions for the masses and sermon material fitting for the presses. It is in this sense that Johnson posits the sermons as sources of “British identity.” But these sermons were also opportunities for the more specific core values within particular clerical groups to be reinforced, and from these tailored agendas are obvious variants in what constitutes the listeners’ proper “thanksgiving” responses. The continuum of expected responses stretches from celebratory and congratulatory to corrective and condemning.

The author serves well a number of academic readers’ concerns. Historians are not surprised by any of the “ideas of Britain” in Johnston's survey but must consider a reappreciation of the monarchy's continued reliance on ecclesial influence in British society—and, more specifically, the power of the pulpit. Church historians already subscribe to this, but Johnston supplies greater evidence for the erosion of the secularization theory. The homilist finds in this survey worthy examples of sermon contextualization and moral discourse, and for political scientists chapter 4 offers yet more texture to the church-state dynamics of this era than more secular descriptions give access to. However, the reader anticipating rhetorical analysis must be satisfied with the author's thematic approach rather than expect structure-level details. Johnston openly admits this level of description to be beyond his scope, but, since he undergirds his analysis with copious sermon quotations and supplies descriptive categories, this book paves the way for more nuanced future analyses of the internal neoclassical form and homiletic features that make these sermons effective.

This is a descriptive endeavor, and, other than supplying supra-adequate proof of those recurring “ideas of Britain” threaded throughout thanksgiving-day sermons, there is no intention to forward an overarching argument. Stylistically, the author chooses clarity of categorization rather than creativity, a methodical approach that lends a predictability to paragraphs but produces a robust scholarly thoroughness, as displayed in appendices of charts listing each sermon analyzed. The lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources is itself abundantly helpful groundwork for future inquiry.