This essay analyses the history of European attitudes to the religious life of the United States since the American Revolution. Howard's starting point is contemporary European disdain for the religiosity of American society, and the first half of the book is an exploration of its roots. He divides the critique into two streams. The first he calls traditionalist, in which nineteenth-century Europeans who believed strong State-Church links to be the basis of a moral society argued that all sorts of American social disorders could be attributed to the new republic's decision to separate the two. Tory Anglicans, German Hegelians and Roman Catholics saw religious freedom as a socially destructive force, and held up the United States as a cautionary tale for their compatriots. The second stream Howard calls the secularist critique. Here, Condorçet, Saint-Simon, Chevalier, Comte, Marx and others accused America of religious backwardness and said that this explained the country's lamentable social conservatism. Howard's distinction between these two streams provides a helpful analytical tool, and one that highlights the religious dimensions of European thought, especially in the nineteenth century. Howard does, however, recognise that derision was not the only trope for Europeans talking about American religion. Tocqueville is an obvious exception and Howard summarises his position, but the second half of his book focuses on Philip Schaff and Jacques Maritain, two Europeans who spent much of their careers in the United States and who presented a substantially different and more positive picture of American religion to audiences back home. For Schaff, a Swiss-born church historian who taught for two decades at the German Reformed Church in America seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, the religious liberty of the United States encouraged virtue and made it the most Protestant country in the world. Maritain, a Catholic philosopher who held several academic appointments in the United States after fleeing from France in 1940, used his American vantage point and the work of Thomas Aquinas to persuade European Catholics that ‘modern ideas of democracy, individual rights, and religious freedom, particularly as represented by the United States, could be developed from latent but dynamic possibilities within scholastic thought’. In his conclusion, Howard notes that some Americans, especially in the media and the Academy, have embraced the Europeans’ critique. His own hope is that better knowledge of the history of this aspect of transatlantic relations will enhance contemporary dialogue. This is a wide-ranging, well-written book that, by focusing on religion, sheds a great deal of light on the cultural differences between the United States and western Europe. It will commend itself to political commentators and scholars of international affairs as well as historians.