Chris Beneke's intent in this survey is to explain how Americans managed to overcome the religious violence and intolerance that characterised Europe and Europe's seventeenth-century colonies in America. In it he attempts to explain how and why Americans moved from a society premised on religious uniformity to a culture premised upon religious diversity. Beneke is particularly interested in the changes in language and behaviour that facilitated this change. As a colonial historian, I found a good deal to question in Beneke's treatment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author makes little attempt to understand the rationale for religious uniformity and the steps taken against dissent by colonists such as the ‘so-called Puritans’ (p. 20) and others in the seventeenth century. There is little of the subtlety to be found in recent explorations of English persecution and toleration in this period by scholars such as John Coffey and Alexandra Walsham. He tends to neglect divisions within the orthodox Churches over issues such as the Half-Way Covenant and the founding of the Third Church in Boston, and to overestimate the uniformity of the ‘ministers of Massachusetts who finally reached a determinative judgment on the revival [the First Great Awakening]’ (p. 60). His discovery of a new, ecumenical spirit in the eighteenth century ignores the support that many New Englanders gave to the ecumenical efforts of John Dury and Samuel Hartlib in the seventeenth century. The author appears to be on more solid ground when focusing upon how language in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected a growing willingness to accept religious pluralism, though his focus on white, Protestant intellectuals is fairly narrow. There is also a sort of Whiggish optimism that leads him to perhaps exaggerate the degree to which Americans moved beyond intolerance and accepted religious diversity – the limits of which would be felt in the mid-nineteenth century by groups such as the Mormons and Catholics. Mark Noll's America's God (2005) is much more persuasive in explaining some of these changes by dealing with a broader variety of American religious figures and with the social and economic changes that facilitated the growth of pluralism.