Straddling the divide between religious and social tolerance, Carys Brown's book makes a strong case for understanding eighteenth-century England as a place where religious conflict remained significant, notwithstanding its superficially peaceable veneer. Beginning with the passage of the so-called Toleration Act of 1689, Brown shows how this temporary and uncertain political compromise evolved into a religious pluralism that everyone had to cope with in some way in their daily lives. To recover this quotidian experience, Brown sampled a variety of local sources from across England: church and court records, diaries, journals, commonplace books, and correspondence. Combing through them with a keen eye for awkward moments when religious difference suddenly rent social harmony, Brown argues that post-1689 England was not becoming increasingly secular, nor was religion becoming more personal. Long after the days of violent persecution had come to an end, one's religious affiliation continued to shape one's broader social experience.

Jews are not included in this study, while Roman Catholics figure primarily as a “popish” point of comparison. Popery represented the unreasonable alternative that all English Protestants abhorred, even when they could not always get along with each other. However, Brown explains that the focus here on Protestant Dissenters is justified by the peculiar circumstances created by the 1689 Act. Unlike Roman Catholics, they were now officially tolerated and recognized. Unlike Jews, they were also fellow English people who could easily be assimilated into the established Church and dominant culture. Where Catholics used assimilation to prevailing norms of politeness and sociability to bridge the gulf created by their un-tolerated religious difference, Dissenters fought to avoid the assimilation made possible by their new acceptability. If they embraced the new sense of belonging too much, they would cease to be Dissenters. Such assimilation is exactly what many Anglicans continued to hope and conspire for. With this focus on how Dissenters maintained their sense of difference, notwithstanding the broader pressures for assimilation, Brown's study does not include evidence of integration like interfaith marriages.

Chronologically, Friends, Neighbors, Sinners ends with the rise of Methodism. The confrontational environment created by Methodist activism and the reaction to it seemed like a throwback to the sort of religious violence more typical of the seventeenth century. Clearly, the “Toleration Act” had not resolved the challenge of religious pluralism. With Methodists, people once again teased out its implications and resisted its possibilities, just as they had been doing with Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists for the previous five decades. There are parallels with the histories of Huguenots showing how they became almost a separate ethnic group from their French Catholic neighbors, but Brown's eighteenth-century context is noticeably different.

The approach is thematic, with five chapters covering key issues. The first covers the era's religious politics, highlighting how little had changed from before. Anglicans refused to accept their loss of religious monopoly. Dissenters continued to stress their suffering. The second chapter turns to the new public experience made possible by the changed religious regime. Dissenters’ participation (or not) in parish governance, their construction of meeting houses, and their participation in communal ceremonies like funerals provided flashpoints for negotiating the place of their religious difference in the public life of their communities.

Chapter three addresses the eighteenth century's culture of politeness, showing how it was not religiously neutral. Indeed, “Persecution by politeness” (110) might be the concept that will really stick with readers. Where a growing body of work on the culture of politeness and sociability has emphasized how English people could overcome religious difference through new social ties and standards of behavior, Brown finds Protestant Dissenters struggling to find a balance between participating in the culture of politeness while remaining distinct from their Anglican interlocutors. Holding the line between deploying outward signs of religious difference (in clothing or behavior) while avoiding accusations of hypocrisy was not easy. One thing is clear. If Dissenters wanted to remain Dissenters, they were going to be held to higher standards.

Both Dissenters themselves and their non-Dissenting neighbors expected Dissenters to be somewhat different—but not too different. Once again, when it came to negotiating their neighbors’ customs of drinking, dancing, and talking (chapter 4), they found themselves “teetering between integration and separation” (2). To a degree these social norms were, religiously, “things indifferent” that could demonstrate Dissenters’ belonging in the wider society. Yet they were not completely indifferent. To uphold the spiritual demands of their faith, Dissenters had to elude the temptations of the broader social world. With the aid of recent scholarship on neighborliness, “company,” and friendship, Brown charts how individual Dissenters navigated this social maze. For many years, scholars assumed that the need and moral imperative to be a good neighbor could smooth over religious differences. Brown shows that, while Dissenters were generally good neighbors (they recognized this was a crucial justification for the tolerance they enjoyed), when they could choose with whom they might associate (their “company”) it was predominantly members of their own faith. As for people to whom they felt close enough that they could expect active support as well as fellowship, their “friends,” those people were exclusively co-religionists. Individuals who had friends and company with non-Dissenters were viewed as liable to violate the demands of their faith, and punished accordingly by their religious community.

Ireland, Scotland, and the American colonies are also absent from this study, but it is not hard to see how the social dynamics Brown uncovers here could be found in those other places as well. In that regard, Friends, Neighbors, Sinners provides not only a useful argument for a more complex understanding of the role of religion in eighteenth-century England, but also a model for how to think about it in the wider English world.