John Catron's Embracing Protestantism effectively reframes the history of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. With a broad geographical and chronological scope, Catron emphasises the centrality of the Caribbean in creating African-American Protestantism. He shows how black Christians moved from the Caribbean to elsewhere in the Atlantic world, spreading new ideas and beliefs with them. While much of the book focuses on the Moravian Church, Catron also examines Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist Evangelical networks in the Atlantic world. His most compelling achievement is to demonstrate the importance of Afro-Caribbean Protestantism in creating North American and Atlantic Christianity. He rightfully points to the Protestant Caribbean islands as important locations where black Christian culture was being articulated and defined.

Catron begins his study with a chapter on ‘Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800’. He argues that Christian influence in West Africa began in the fifteenth century and ‘endured as a largely indigenous movement over the following three hundred years’ (p. 17). The development of Christianity in Africa was an Atlantic phenomenon and there were ‘far more Christians in Africa before 1800 than previously recognized by most scholars of the Americas’ (p. 17). Catron synthesises a number of missions and indigenous Christian movements – both Catholic and Protestant – that took place in Africa during the early modern period.

Chapter ii moves to the Caribbean island of Antigua, which Catron argues was ‘the epicenter of Afro-Protestantism in the Americas’ (p. 51). On Antigua, Moravian and Methodist missionaries had baptised thousands of blacks by the late eighteenth century. Yet while the actions of white missionaries were important, Catron emphasises that it was enslaved and free blacks who reached out to ‘religious third parties … in their struggle for freedom’ (p. 51). This, he suggests, was the decisive factor in their conversion. For Catron, the Moravian and Methodist missions in the Caribbean represent a component of the Great Awakening that is often overlooked. Black Christians from Antigua also migrated, both by force and by choice, influencing evangelical practice elsewhere in the West Indies, North America, Africa and Europe.

Chapters iii and iv follow the movement of black Christians and white missionaries from the Caribbean to North America. In Chapter iii, Catron examines the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the lives of two Africans -- Ofodobendo Wooma and Beulah, later known as Andreas and Magdalene. He argues that Afro-Christians like Andreas and Magdalene ‘used evangelical missionary religion to create a cosmopolitan, pan-African sensibility’ (p.148). Chapter iv goes into more detail about the black evangelical diaspora and shows how white missionaries and black Christians moved from the Caribbean to the mainland where they helped to cultivate and spread Atlantic African identity. The final chapter of the book extends the theme of diaspora to the age of Revolution. As black loyalists were relocated after the Revolution, they spread Atlantic African Christianity to Nova Scotia, London, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. These individuals ‘created a vibrant and meaningful type of Christianity that thrives to this day’ (p. 223).

Catron's approach offers a fresh perspective on the growth of black Protestantism and the Great Awakening. With a wide geographical span and an inter-denominational perspective, it paints a broad picture of an eighteenth-century cohort of Afro-Christians. Furthermore, his argument that many Afro-Christians chose to identify with evangelical Christian networks such as the Moravians or Methodists is compelling and important. He suggests that these religious-based identities were, in part, a rejection of the ‘racially exclusionary tendencies of the rising nation-states’ (p. 4). Catron is weaker on theoretical issues related to cultural and religious change. At multiple points in the book, he posits a binary between ‘African’ and ‘white’ cultures that leads him to argue that Afro-Christians were taking a ‘middle path’. Despite this weakness, Catron's description of Atlantic African culture and his inter-denominational lens are essential for telling a new and important story about eighteenth-century Atlantic religions and the expansion of black Christianity.