Revolution as Reformation is a compelling collection that opens with expansive goals. Its age of revolutions was a full century and a half, beginning with England's 1688 Glorious Revolution and continuing through the first third of the nineteenth century. Revolutionary thinkers of this age, the book argues, were almost always religious thinkers. The secular and sacred were interdependent, and “ideas about and experiences of religion developed in tandem with ideas about and experiences with politics” (1). Protestant thinkers did not simply adapt to revolution, but helped create it, making Protestantism a “source of revolutionary change” (5–6). According to Messer and Taylor in the introduction, the book presents several “dimensions of Protestant thought”—individual interpretation of the Bible, emphasis on theological revision and renewal, and a resulting theological adaptability—which demonstrate “the influence of Protestant theology and practice” on Atlantic World revolutions (4, 1).

The book's conclusion, however, provides a slightly different take, framing the book as an attempt to push back on a secular eighteenth century. Most thinkers in this long revolutionary era were consumed with memories of the Reformation, the Wars of Religion, and the resulting spiritual conflicts. What some scholars have seen as an increasingly secular time was not secular to the people who lived through it. And so, the volume argues that religious debates were important to revolutionaries but not necessarily that the debates directly impacted revolutions. For the most part, the essays in Revolution as Reformation fit more into this second framing than the first. They certainly demonstrate that revolution and religion were intertwined. But it seems more often that revolutionary events impacted Protestantism rather than the other way around. It is hard to clearly see Protestant thinking serving as a stimulus for revolutionary change.

Bryan A. Banks's interesting piece on Pierre Bayle provides a good example. Bayle was an exiled French Huguenot who argued against any link between Protestantism and England's Glorious Revolution. The late seventeenth century was seeing a rise in eschatological thinking among the Huguenot diaspora, especially after William of Orange deposed the Catholic King James. Some in the diaspora who were desperate to return home to France saw the hand of God at work in the conflict. Bayle said no. He argued that if Huguenots in the Dutch Republic or England kept making wild millenarian claims, Louis would never let them back into France. The upheaval of 1688 was totally secular—just another moment in the “general dynastic war that had embroiled Europe for a millennium” (22). Similar debates figure into S. Scott Rohrer's chapter on the American loyalist Thomas Bradbury Chandler. Rohrer points out that almost a century after the Glorious Revolution, its meaning and legality was still hotly contested between patriots and loyalists in the American colonies. This was an argument among Protestants, though, about politics. The primary issue was the legitimacy of rebellion and the relationship between king and parliament, rather than ideas about Protestant theology.

The essays on France similarly show the effects of the revolutionary era on French Protestants instead of arguing that Protestant thought contributed to the revolution itself. Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler describes how one prominent Huguenot pastor learned to use the language of natural rights to push for religious freedom in 1789. But she also notes that this process had been ongoing since well before the revolution, resulting in the 1787 Edict of Toleration among other small victories. Rebecca K. McCoy similarly details the long struggle between French Protestants and Catholics for worship space in the Napoleonic Era and the Bourbon Restoration. This struggle flared up most severely during the second White Terror of 1815, when royalist Catholics in the south of France burned Protestant churches and targeted ministers for assassination. These are compelling examples of “Protestant engagement with the French Revolution” (203). Obviously “religion was at work” in what is often seen as a political crisis. (204). Toward the end of the volume, Anderson R. Rouse details how Black Loyalists created a transatlantic evangelical network through the disruptions of the post-1783 period. Again, here is revolution clearly shaping Protestant networks—but are Protestant ideas shaping revolutions?

A few of the contributions do make Protestantism more of a catalyst in specific revolutionary developments. William Harrison Taylor's essay on the suppression of the Jesuits as reported by American newspapers is a fascinating explanation for one small mystery of the American Revolution: the willingness of virulently anti-Catholic Americans to leap into an alliance with Catholic France. Taylor convincingly argues that by the 1760s, blind hatred of “Catholics” had been effectively converted into blind hatred of “Jesuits.” As popes and various Catholic kings then began to suppress the Jesuits, newspapers convinced colonial Americans that reformation was imminent within the Catholic Church, which made them more likely to ally with Louis XVI. Gideon Mailer makes a good case for the importance of Scottish Presbyterian immigrants—through their experience with Presbyterian jurisdictional autonomy in Britain—in debates over autonomy and federalism in the revolutionary and constitutional eras. Here we have one specific kind of Protestant practice playing an influential role in the early republic, though its impact on the revolution itself is unclear.

The book is not divided into thematic categories, but the essays gradually progress from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. They focus almost entirely on the Glorious, American, and French Revolutions, but bring in a diverse range of actors, from Pennsylvania Quakers to Calvinist Vermonters to the aforementioned loyalist evangelicals. It should be noted that there is basically nothing here on revolutions in Spanish American or Haiti, though that should not be too surprising as Protestants were in short supply in those places. Those working on the Anglo-American or French revolutionary eras, however, will likely find several pieces in Revolution as Reformation to stimulate new thinking and fruitful future research.