This razor-sharp debut merits wide and close attention. Its interventions should lead scholars to reconsider the role of religion in the tumults and transformations of Augustan Britain and rethink the great questions of modernization and secularization that continue to animate interest in the period—all with the Church of England at the center of their attention.

Brent Sirota's The Christian Monitors manages to be so provocative because it identifies a series of false dilemmas that currently hang over scholarship on post-1688 British religion and society and then slices right through them. Was the established church entering a century of danger, decline, and spiritual death, or was it in fact resurgent and socially dominant? Was the country witnessing the birth of a secular, commercial society and a modern polity, or the last phase of a Reformation carried out within the familiar confines of an ancien regime? These questions rightly strike Sirota as ultimately mal posées: the very attempt to answer them negatively or affirmatively obscures the essence of the period and the shadow it cast over the modern era.

Sirota manages to do better by foregrounding the internal politics of post-Revolutionary Anglicanism. He shows that recent debates about decline, revival, secularity, and modernity in the Augustan age are ultimately relics of debates among the Anglicans who lived through it. The sides taken by disputants past and present, he argues, are best seen not as mutually exclusive empirical descriptions, but as competing, selective attitudes to the same phenomena. The Anglicans who could most easily reconcile themselves to (and capitalize upon) the novelties of the late seventeenth century—toleration, commercialization, global expansion, and voluntary association—were the original chroniclers of this period as one of pious revival and renewal. Those most exercised by the threat these novelties posed to the church's sacramental community were the first to discern the creeping modernity, secularity, and liberality of British Christianity and the specter of its neutralization by civil society and the state.

Most importantly, though, when these theses of revival, endangerment, continuity, and change were first articulated, they were the byproducts of positive visions of the nature and future of the Christian community in revolutionary Britain. They supported detailed plans for how Christ's servants there might bring about the “moral revolution” that would appease their divine deliverer. And in the reign of Anne, they motivated and discursively constituted a public struggle over the course of that revolution. Two schemes for how to best edify, discipline, and save the population, mirror images of one another, vied for social supremacy and political legitimacy. One of them, a largely “high church,” Tory campaign to make the church's long moribund convocation the institutional centerpiece for moral reform, was guided by sacerdotalist principles. It made quite a fuss for the duration of the reign, but it was a complete failure. Its implosion left the field open to the other form of Anglican revival, the one whose triumph and creativity, Sirota argues, did much to give rise to Britain's mid-century “age of benevolence.”

It is Sirota's detailed study of this associational style of Anglicanism that yields the book's most intriguing and important suggestion: could it be true that in this period secularization largely proceeded by means of confessionalization? This is hard to deny if we follow Sirota in strictly construing Augustan secularization as the expansion of religion beyond the bounds of traditional church institutions and the confessional state, and into civil society. The Christian Monitors is replete with lively, learned descriptions of “the established church routinely going beyond itself: cultivating institutions foreign to its constitution, mobilizing resources alien to its patrimony, and delegating aspects of its monitory or meliorative functions to personnel outside of its hierarchy” (12). These observations confirm that any successful account of late Stuart and Georgian Britain must not simply take care to responsibly register its scenes of religious vitality and duly acknowledge its signs of modernization. It must jettison the assumption that the religion of the establishment was an inherently conservative force and explain how pious energy managed to become a catalyst for secularization.

The novel forms of Anglican revival that flourished in this period were generally supported by prelates of Williamite and Whiggish persuasions, and eventually led by “low church” clergy and Whig laymen. These revivals embraced civil society and often had the blessing of the state, but their organizers did not always wait for the regime's sanction or expect its protection. Sirota's “Anglican voluntary sector” was an improvisational whirlwind that elaborated, developed, expanded, and formalized forms of activism that had first appeared during the Restoration era. Its nerve center was the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which Sirota describes as “something of a free radical within the body of the eighteenth-century Church of England, bonding with preexistent religious forms and catalyzing new modes of Anglican revivalism” (110). The SPCK and its allies reached out at home but also abroad. They followed the trails of global British commerce and dominion in an attempt to cultivate Anglicanism among far-flung Britons with better tools and resources than the Episcopal Church or the imperial state could muster alone.

As Sirota puts it in the memorable final passage of the book, The Christian Monitors narrates “a great spillage of religion” (260). This crucial moment of secularization, which has mostly gone unnoticed, may have decisively contributed to a more familiar form of secularization long deemed characteristic of modern Britain: the declining social significance of religion. For if one looks to the age of benevolence and beyond, it appears that the spilling of Anglicanism beyond its customary bounds occasioned a great deal of soaking, and more than a little evaporation. Once pious outreach began to legitimate itself not solely in terms of divine mission or state sanction but increasingly in terms of moral and national utility, it entered into competition with more worldly purveyors of the same goods, who had themselves been initially legitimated (and tutored) in the business of doing good through their association with the godly projectors who preceded them.