Few amongst the Protestant mainline denominations rival the United Church of Christ in terms of a compelling historical narrative that predates the American Revolution. What is in many ways remarkable is the uneasiness of the relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Congregationalists (in New England and elsewhere) and the historical mythos of New England Puritanism from which they sought to fashion a relevant ecclesial tradition. Margaret Bendroth has performed a singular service in analysing that relationship. Despite the roster of prominent Congregationalists – including Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, Washington Gladden, Francis Clark (of Christian Endeavour fame) and even Charles Sheldon – listed in her introduction, she devotes little space to personalities and powers in the body of her narrative, her concern being much more with the Congregationalist search for a ‘usable past’. For all their early ambivalence to ecclesiastical structures above the level of the individual congregation, Congregationalist struggles with nascent Unitarianism and with the more hierarchical Presbyterians helped to initiate a process that would lead to the Albany Convention (1852), the Boston Council (1865) and ultimately the Oberlin Council (1871), following which the denomination established its first national structures. The turn of the century marked the beginning of an ecumenical journey that would see mergers first with the Christian Church in 1931 and then the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1957 to ultimately form the UCC. The tensions that accompanied this transition are strikingly demonstrated in chapter v (‘Scribes and scholars’), where the historiography of the Boston clergyman Henry Martyn Dexter, who argued for the enduring relevance of the seventeenth-century Congregational experiment, is contrasted with that of the Yale professor Williston Walker, who emphasised the adaptability of Congregationalism to the demands of the secular world (pp. 87–107). At times the struggle between tradition and comprehensiveness took on a public dimension, whether in the proposed move to the campus of Harvard University (a Unitarian stronghold since 1805) of Andover Seminary in 1908 (pp. 104–6), the interwar controversy over the Council for Social Action (pp. 139–44), or the merger negotiations with the Evangelical and Reformed Church in the 1940s and 1950s (pp. 161–74). Bendroth also devotes significant space to the ways in which individual congregations engaged with – and sometimes repudiated – a Puritan past that was increasingly connected to a more developed sense of American national identity. Peculiarly ironic was a growing Congregationalist willingness to follow the example of other Protestant denominations in commissioning church buildings in the Gothic style. Where for most Protestants such architecture symbolised ‘the permanence of Christianity in a world gone astray’, for Congregationalists it ‘demonstrated to the world their modern freedom from old restrictions’ (p. 129). While the volume might have benefitted from greater discussion of ecumenical interactions with other mainline Protestant denominations, not least the Consultation on Church Union, it throws a nuanced and intriguing light on the heirs of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards and serves as a helpful corrective to portrayals of the United Church of Christ as a uniformly liberal Protestant denomination.