Religion and the American Revolution. By Katherine Carté

Abstract

In Religion and the American Revolution, historian Katherine Carté interprets changing relationships in religion between Britain and its American colonies from the Toleration Act (1689) and the Acts of Union (1706–1707) to the 1790s through the concept of “imperial Protestantism,” a political theology that defined the British Empire as a Protestant political and religious project. Carté tells this long and complex story from the perspective of the Empire’s religious constitution and its government in the London metropole, an orientation embodied by elite figures like William Legge (1731–1801)—2nd Earl of Dartmouth, a celebrated evangelical Anglican, patron of the colonial college that still bears his name, and Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1772 to 1775—who is featured in the book. This angle of vision, following recent scholarly emphasis on the transatlantic dimension of colonial American culture, marks a refreshing change from decades of debate about whether or not religion...