| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans, and the American Revolution. By James B. Bell. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. xxii, 323 pp. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-230-54297-6.)
James B. Bell returns to the old theory that Anglican attempts to have a bishop appointed for the colonies was a major cause of the American Revolution. In the process, he treats New England as both the center of the Revolution and of the Church of England in the colonies. The book is divided into two parts. The first summarizes a century of controversy surrounding the role of bishops and their possible introduction into the colonies, and the second focuses on the 1770s and 1780s. Part two makes use of biographical information on Anglican clergy, which Bell summarizes in appendices in chart form. The actual biographies, however, are only available online for a fee.	1
Tracing the origins of the Revolution to seventeenth-century Puritan distaste (on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean) for episcopacy and their fear that any support given to the Church of England was a conspiracy to undermine New England churches, Bell often adopts the Puritan perspective. He repeatedly calls attacks on Anglican belief and practice "temperate" (p.10) and "cogent" (p. 38). Defenders of the Church of England responding to the Puritan critiques are "strident" or on the attack.	. . .

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