In this carefully researched study of nineteenth-century British Christianity, Michael Rutz explains the role of white colonial missionaries in advancing civil equality and religious freedom. The author is chiefly concerned with demonstrating his thesis that white missionaries transcended the imperial effects of British expansionism in Africa to advance progressive, humanitarian reform in Britain and throughout southern Africa. In this way, the volume aims to complicate a historiographical trajectory that has routinely highlighted the linkage between Christian missions and imperialism.

The context of this interpretive history is the rise of England's Dissenting church movement, which operated outside of and under repression by the established Church of England. Over several decades, the political activism of British Dissenters informed the ideological orientation of the London Missionary Society (LMS), which was established in 1795. As Rutz explains in chapters 1 and 2, the LMS was the chief institution that administered missions to Africa, and its largely Congregationalist constituency found deep resonance with Dissenters' promotion of religious toleration and their efforts to disentangle the state from the parish. Evangelical revivalism itself spawned the LMS's emergence and became fertile soil for the growth of British missionary zeal. For pragmatic reasons, the author shows, Dissenters cultivated an explicitly politicized religious life since they were at odds with state rulers. The author shows how in this context Dissenters produced an evangelical political culture powered by itinerants that engendered adherence to tolerance and religious freedom among Congregationalist missionaries. In this environment, the Dissenting church movement became linked to the foreign missionary movement. And as a result, British society began to embrace humanitarian principles and to mainstream the toleration of repressed church movements.

The evangelical Christian progression from religious liberty to abolitionism is the central concern of chapters 3 and 4. Here Rutz charts the role of Congregationalist missionaries who, by the 1830s, had successfully pressed the LMS to take a substantive stand against slavery. This development was in parallel to the ascent of abolitionism in Britain. Among the most articulate promoters of the anti-slavery movement throughout the Atlantic world were Christian evangelicals, and it is clear that the British metropole was no exception to this pattern. Rutz plies a persuasive hand in his demonstration of the important ties between religious advocacy and humanitarianism in this sphere.

Next, the author devotes extensive attention to the continually shifting political climate of religious activism in Britain under the frame of church-state relations. Of key importance in the metropole were tensions over state funding for missions. For example, Rutz explains that Dissenting Christians opposed the use of any tax revenues to fund religious enterprises, and they lobbied the LMS to this end. By the latter period of the book's purview, managing emancipated African slaves had become a major issue of its own, and readers are shown how various forces were at work to challenge missionary priorities concerning the fruition of abolitionist motives. So, for instance, the question of whether and how to educate freed Africans became a major public policy issue.

The final chapters (including a brief epilogue) turn attention back to southern Africa to interpret the impact of decaying support for missions and a declining evangelical ethos in synthesis with changing racial attitudes. Indigenous nations increasingly opposed the encroachment of white settler colonialism and went to war to defend themselves against the ever expanding system of colonial administrative that obliterated their own economic systems and the social structures essential to black sovereignty. Missionaries in sympathy with more docile colonized subjects were not similarly inclined toward black militancy. As in other chapters, the author sustains his narrative with coherent attention to key figures such as John Philip, a leading figure of the LMS who administered the mission stations of southern Africa.

Studies like that of Rutz are as helpful for exposing the fissures in scholarship as they are for elucidating their immediate subjects of study. On the one hand, it is a testament to interdisciplinarity that more historians have rediscovered religion (pace the widely discredited secularization thesis) as the elephant in the room of modern social and cultural history. The growing spate of monographs examining religion by scholars trained in history is a sure sign that the subject of religion will continue to receive the broad attention it merits for understanding larger problems of human sociality. On the other hand, this particular volume evidences only minimal engagement with scholars of religion—mainly works by John and Jean Comaroff. The work is not informed by even a single scholar of religion examining religious violence and religious hatred. So, David Chidester's study of religious violence and colonialism does not even appear in the bibliography (Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa, Studies in Religion and Culture [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996]). Moreover, the works of authors like Jonathan Schorsch (Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols., The Atlantic World, [Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009]), Itumeleng Mosala (Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989]), J. Kameron Carter (Race: A Theological Account [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008]), Dianne M. Stewart Diakité (Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004]), and Regina Schwartz (The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997]) have gone far to clarify how Christian supremacism—and monotheism more broadly—has been not merely complicit in but central to structuring white supremacism, settler colonialism and its attending apartheid policies, murderous cleansing, cultural genocide, and anti-black racism. But the volume devotes no attention to this line of analysis.

This problem raises what is arguably the greatest weakness of the volume: the author attempts to interpret religious freedom (for white Christian Dissenters in the white Christian state of England) as the central impetus for the humanitarianism that Christian missionaries extended toward black targets of Christian conversion in southern Africa. But how does one reconcile the notion of religious freedom with the quintessential raison d’être of these Christian missions—the extermination of indigenous African religions? It appears that Rutz does so by burying Christian supremacism and religious hatred behind an impenetrable wall of silence. It simply becomes a non-issue. As a case in point, not once does Rutz devote critical attention to the category of the “heathen” in his study (the term appears multiple times throughout the volume), despite the fact that this Christian category was the basis for establishing religious hatred and the murderous policies of white settler colonialism throughout Africa and the Americas.

The ease with which many contemporary scholars sympathize with white (or black) Christian supremacists when the targets of their missionary activity are the indigenous religions of Africans cannot be naturalized but must be historicized. It is partly due to the fact that African peoples and cultures have been so thoroughly dehumanized over several centuries. This historical process of dehumanizing African religions—for example, by displacing them into primitivist temporalities—occurred in step with rendering the subject of “Man” as the white European. In this context, natural rights discourse and its attending political liberalism would be articulated by the same white rulers and political philosophers who promoted anti-black racism, Christian supremacism, ethnic cleansing, and empire.

Rutz does a much better job of engaging studies of empire and postcolonial theory. His discussion of British imperialism is informed by works like Catherine Hall's Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002) or Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000) as well as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). And although he sharply departs from Elizabeth Elbourne's challenge to take Christianity itself seriously as a source of colonial violence in southern Africa, it is clear that he has studied her work closely (Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853, McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion Series Two [Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002]). So, throughout the text, he does attempt to account for the role missionary religion has played in imperialism while nevertheless proffering that humanitarianism and progressive liberalism constituted the essence of evangelical missionary politics.

Although some readers might take issue with the presumptions about the nature of religion and the connection between white social identity and Christian supremacism (or lack thereof) in Rutz's work, it is nevertheless clear that he has marshaled an instructive, evidentiary history of white missionary religion that renders an informative interpretation of white European liberalism's evangelical roots. Even those already familiar with the history of Atlantic abolitionism and evangelicalism will have much to learn from Rutz's studied attention to the overlapping contexts of revivalism, the Dissenting church movement, and African missions.