In 1764 the celebrated evangelical itinerant George Whitefield reportedly told ministers in New Hampshire that ‘there is a deep plot laid against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end’ (p. 190). In this valuable book, Jerome Dean Mahaffey examines how Whitefield rhetorically prepared Americans to see themselves as having a common identity, an essential precursor to their revolt against Britain. The literature on George Whitefield is well developed, especially because of important biographies by Harry S. Stout and Frank Lambert published in the 1990s. Mahaffey's book leans very heavily on the secondary literature on Whitefield and the Great Awakening, much of which has focused on Whitefield's Journals rather than on his other writings. What makes Mahaffey's book worth reading is its analysis of Whitefield's 110 published sermons and pamphlets. These sources have probably been neglected because historians have studied Whitefield's preaching more than his thought. Most historians have viewed Whitefield's sermon content as conventional and relatively unremarkable, especially when compared to sermons and writings of his contemporary Jonathan Edwards. Mahaffey uses these neglected sources to bolster the case, made most effectively by Harry S. Stout, that Whitefield helped to prepare American culture for the Revolution. Some readers will be put off by the jargon of rhetorical studies (‘deictic parameters’, etc.) that Mahaffey uses in his introduction and first chapter. But there is a thesis here that is worth considering: that Whitefield's popularisation of a ‘constitutive rhetoric … worked to unify American colonists into a cohesive whole’ (p. 2). Before Whitefield, the book argues, diverse American colonists had little in common, but after Whitefield they increasingly saw themselves as a spiritual and political ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The evil ‘them’ was, variously, the unconverted, the Catholic French or the conspiring British. Some may wonder whether many Americans (and human beings generally) had not long since used such binary patterns of thinking to make sense of their world, but Whitefield's binaries undoubtedly influenced more Americans than any other figure of the mid-eighteenth century, simply because of his widespread preaching itinerary, and the huge crowds that followed him. It is instructive to see here that Whitefield reflected not only the emphasis on the ‘new birth,’ but also intense anti-French Catholic sentiments, and fear of the subversion of American liberties. To what extent Whitefield exercised a causal influence in shaping these tendencies in the ‘American spirit’ (p. 2) remains unclear, but Mahaffey has done a good service by demonstrating the existence of salient political, as well as spiritual, themes in his lesser-known writings.