Recent debate on religion during the ‘long eighteenth century’ in England has centred on national identity. Scholars have taken different views of the role of Protestantism and Anglicanism in creating a sense of ‘Englishness’, and have discussed whether and when an essentially confessional sense of nationality may have been replaced by a more modern ‘nationalism’ based on secular defences of English culture, commerce and people. In this massive and scholarly work, Pasi Ihalainen intervenes in these arguments by analysing sermons on ‘state occasions’ (i.e. those to parliament or to the monarch on key political anniversaries) between 1685 and 1772 and arguing that these provide an important insight into contemporary mentalities. They were, he claims, given by established clerics who were close to the political elite, but who ‘wished to fulfil the expectations of the audience as to the collective definition of the national community, its values and official political ideology’. Far more important and impressive, however, he sets the sermons in context by examining performances on analogous occasions in the Netherlands (for instance, sermons to provincial states on national prayer days) and in Sweden (for instance, preaching to the Riksdag and on days of public celebration). He can therefore demonstrate not only what was going on in the English material, but also point out how far this followed wider European trends, and show that the conception of nationality and faith prevalent at Westminster was not the only possible configuration of understanding and imagery in a Protestant society.

The strongest lesson of Ihalainen's reading is that secularisation occurred in all three countries: but that the crucial decades were between 1740 and 1770 and not between 1670 and 1700 as some commentators on late Stuart England such as Steven Pincus have claimed. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Protestant preachers right across northern Europe began to abandon an ‘Israelite’ worldview in which nations existed principally as the objects of God's judgement and were asked to achieve a uniform faith and holy conversation in obedience to the deity. In its place came a more positive view of the nation, based on adaptations of classical patriotism, on pride in the country's political liberty, on commitment to commerce as the source of the community's welfare and on ‘enlightenment’ belief in the ‘natural’ loyalty of people to larger groups. In this emerging mentality the nation could be conceived as a political agent (rather than merely the passive recipient of providential action), ideas of popular sovereignty might germinate and people who were not members of the official Church might nevertheless be seen as full participants in the national community. In the case of England/Great Britain, this argument is backed by a statistical analysis of the use of the word ‘national’ in sermons. As demonstrated in a fascinating appendix, the word gradually ceased to be associated with rhetorics of sin, repentance and judgement, and came to be used in a wide variety of new ways, including in such phrases as national happiness, honour, prosperity, character and glory. A further parallel across the societies examined is that the new ideas caused little tension as they took over. Far from opposing older providential and Protestant discourses, they everywhere emerged within them. For example, liberty was first associated with Protestantism as freedom meant the ability to follow true religion without popish persecution. Over time, however, the concept evolved so that religious toleration was seen as characteristic of the Protestant faith, then Protestantism was seen as supporting wider political liberties as well, and finally liberty could be celebrated as a divine blessing on the nation with little reference back to its narrowly-confessional origins. Similarly, prosperity was gradually foregrounded among the rewards God gave to well-behaved communities, and whilst the reward remained divine, it came to be seen as natural rather than providential. This interpretation supports those such as Roy Porter who have argued that whilst the eighteenth century certainly became more secular, it may be sterile to debate exactly when and how new ideals elbowed out religion. Faith in the Netherlands and Sweden, as much as in England, was not so much displaced, as transformed into a different version of itself.

As interesting as the parallels, are the distinctions between the societies Ihalainen observes. For example, whilst English awareness that there were reformed Christians in other countries led to some sense of a Protestant International as an identity beyond mere nationality, this loyalty to a transcontinental community of the faithful was much stronger in the Netherlands (which relied on confessional alliances to defend it from Catholic France), but almost non-existent in Sweden (where an almost totally homogenous Lutheran society felt little need to define true faith any wider than its own official Church, and so was less likely to see non-Swedish Protestants as brethren). In fact the peculiarity of Sweden is a major theme of the book, and provides plenty of exceptions to warn against any generalised model of Protestant-national relations. For example, having almost no heterodox citizens to assimilate, Swedish preachers were slow to admit non-Lutherans to the national community and retained far longer than their Dutch or English counterparts the conception that liberty was about freedom to practise true religion, rather than any religion. Protestantism could, therefore, encourage pluralism, but only in the particular circumstances more characterisitic of England and Holland than of Scandinavia. Other generalisations fall under Ihalainen's analysis. There were real national differences in how anti-popery worked to create ‘others’, how Protestantism impacted on foreign policy, how it related to classical and commercial discourses, and in many other areas.

As with any book of this length, there will be criticisms. After a while, the structure (each chapter dealing with a theme in England, then the Netherlands, then Sweden) becomes a bit tiresome, and one longs for more substantial passages of synthetic and comparative reflection. More seriously, for all Ihalianen's defence of state sermons as insights into contemporary psyches, they are a limited source and are made all the more so by the author's (albeit necessary) decision to sample. This can lead to questions. For example, Ihalainen dates wide acceptance that Protestantism was inherently opposed to persecution to his vital mid eighteenth-century decades. Yet, as Alex Walsham and others have shown after reading a much wider variety of material, the emergence of toleration – in England and other countries – was a fearsomely complex phenomenon, which in certain arenas (such as acceptance of actual heterodox individuals in local communities) was common from the sixteenth century, but in others made little progress until the nineteenth. Again, Ihalainen suggests that the 1740s saw the replacement of preached defences of European Protestantism with concern for a wider European liberty. Yet, as I will soon show from a reading of war propaganda broader than sermons, European liberty formed a vital part of a rhetoric of Christendom, which was fully ready to be deployed by Hapsburg and Dutch as well as English commentators by the 1680s. Overall, however, these criticisms must pale before the scale of this achievement. Concentrating on sermons, Ihalainen has given us a tool with which to compare three very different societies over a period nearly a hundred years long. This work suggests a pattern of rhetorical change, and raises a series of questions, which all scholars of Protestantism will have to take very seriously indeed.