Readers may breathe a sigh of relief and should take keen interest. Scott Dixon, an esteemed historian of the Reformation, has not produced yet another textbook on this topic. These we have in great abundance. Dixon is fully aware that “the realities of the English-language book market make it unnecessary” to add to the grand narratives of the Reformation (4). Protestants is a sociological study in identity, taking the history of Protestantism as “a transatlantic event” (5). It persuasively challenges the established convention of interpreting the Protestant Reformation as a revolutionary movement, as in, for example, Steven Ozment's Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday,1993), Alister McGrath, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), William Naphy, The Protestant Revolution: From Martin Luther to Marin Luther King, Jr. (London: BBC, 2007). Protestantism was “an extremely conservative movement” with “very few revolutionary qualities” (4). Dixon's story is of Protestants seeking to re-establish order. The titles of the first four chapters emphasize stability: foundations, kingdoms, communities, and dominions.

Dixon does not suppress the revolutionary qualities of Protestantism. Its challenge to medieval Catholicism was certainly a “theological revolution” (8). The political resistance theories developed by French Huguenots against a persecuting monarchy were revolutionary, even if Calvin's “real concern was with religious order. . . how Christian society could best serve the divine will on earth” (48). The “radicalism” of English Puritanism “was a consequence of the evangelical antipathy to Catholicism and the revolutionary potential that inhered in the idea of Protestant identity.” Nevertheless, Reformed Protestantism “required a system of rule that could contain sin and make the world safe for Christians” (112).

In the “tension at the heart of all Protestant communities” (114), constraint tended to trump liberty. Flirtation with freedom yielded to a “crusade for order” (38) in the wake of the German Peasants’ War of 1525. In Europe, Protestant theology collaborated with statecraft to secure religious and social order. Even in America, Protestants meticulously balanced freedom and order. With its representative government limited by church membership as a necessary condition for holding political office “New England society was a godly republic in the complete sense” (117). American and European Protestantism both insisted on orthodoxy and orthopraxy. These formed the basis of social and political order. Dixon rightly observes that within Europe's confessionalized culture Protestants, that is Lutherans and the Reformed, were intolerant of each other and denied that the Bible promoted independent thinking. The emphasis on orthodoxy delayed and diminished Protestant missionary activity, for “the idea of mission conjured up the fear of forces—peripheral, improvised, centrifugal—that threatened the ordered constitution of the Protestant church” (169).

The fifth and final chapter, “Revivals,” takes us “to an extent” to the “end phase of the Reformation” (175), beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century. The radical tradition within Protestantism re-emerged to challenge the religious and social establishment constructed and sanctioned by magisterial Protestantism, which had consigned the radicals to a peripheral existence in the sixteenth century. Dixon's emphasis is on German Pietism and Pennsylvania's Quakers. He describes as “revolutionary” (195, 196) Pietist teachings on the priesthood of all believers and of spiritual rebirth as well as its self-fashioning as a church within the traditional Lutheran church. Yet Protestant radicalism of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not anarchistic. It developed new forms of order. William Penn's “experiment” in religious pluralism diluted the purchase of established orthodoxies and also led to “new dialogues about Christian order and Christian belief” (221).

Eminently readable, Protestants ought to appeal to a wide audience. In its pages, the usual suspects—Luther, Bucer, Zwingli, Calvin—mingle with lesser-known Protestant men and women, who enrich Dixon's analysis. Only the hefty cost of the book stands in the way of its potential for bringing together experts and students in stimulating classroom discussions of Protestant identity in the Reformation era. Will Dixon's book inspire a similar study of Catholics in the same period?