The opening page of Gregg L. Frazer's God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy's Case against the American Revolution (2018) reminds us that despite the very significant historical research over the last few decades into the Loyalists, the popular narrative has remained unchanged. The 'Tories' are still routinely dismissed as a small minority of elite, self-interested, placeholders. The reality of the struggle between Loyalist and Patriot was radically different. As historian Robert Calhoun has stated, "The Revolution was in some respects a civil war", with "large numbers" serving in Loyalist military units, and Loyalism embracing a range of perspectives with significant roots in colonial society, from "principled loyalism", to "accommodating loyalism", and a "doctrinaire toryism [which] was an extension of the stability of Anglican parish life in England".Frazer's focus on the Loyalist clergy recognises that - amongst both Loyalists and Patriots - the pulpit was a key factor in shaping local allegiances. In fact, this reliance on the pulpit was more pronounced amongst Loyalists because there were few other "public advocates for Loyalism ... aside from churchmen" (p.2), not least due to the aggressive mechanisms to enforce political conformity created by the Patriots. What is more, clergy were particularly suited to participation in political and public controversy as they tended to be "observant political subjects and well-educated men" (p.78), "well-educated Englishmen" (p.99).Identifying 182 Loyalist clergy, Frazer notes that 76% of these clergy were Anglican (p.29). This statistic in itself, however, can be misleading as the conflict bitterly divided Anglican opinion in the colonies. Of the Church of England clergy in the colonies at the outset of the conflict, 128 can be identified as Loyalist, 130 as Patriots, and 59 as unaligned (p.5). What is more, there were significant differences between the southern and northern colonies:(p.5).This reflects J.C.D. Clark's summary of differences between the colonies:A theological divide underpinned much of this contrast. Southern clergy tended to be low church and latitudinarian, whereas northern clergy were usually high church. And it was northern colonies which had a higher number of missionary clergy from the high church Society for the Propogation of the Gospel. As Frazer notes:[to the Crown](p.5).Amongst the five Loyalist clergy identified by Frazer as the "most prolific writers", four were Anglicans, and three of these names in particular will be familiar to many readers: Jonathan Boucher, Charles Inglis, and Samuel Seabury (p.29).Reviewing the arguments put forward by the Loyalist clergy, Frazer considers in turn the Biblical, philosophical, and legal arguments. He points to significant contrasts in how Loyalist and Patriot clergy handled Scripture:(p.36).Words from Mark Noll are used to drive home the point:(p.36).Frazer goes on to neatly summarise the different approaches to Scripture:(p.38).It is difficult not to, at least partly, see this as an outworking of the theological differences between the different theological traditions within colonial Anglicanism, with Patriot latitudinarian clergy approaching Scripture with a quite different mindset to the orthodox doctrinal commitments of Loyalist clergy:(p.234).When it came to philosophical arguments over allegiance and rights, the Loyalist clergy were able to invoke a well-established Anglican political theology which rejected the visions of Hobbes and Locke. Thus Frazer quotes Inglis:(p.80).Similarly, Boucher:" (p.91).Against Lockean abstractions, the Loyalist clergy - in a manner not unlike that later seen in Burke's- pointed to the practical wisdom of the British experience of ordered liberty. As Inglis states of the Aristotelian scheme of a constitution balancing monarchy, aristocracy, and the democracy:(p.81f).This also shaped how Loyalist clergy regarded the legal debates surrounding the colonial debates and then the cause of independence. The rejection of a settled constitutional order which had defended the colonies and enabled them to flourish deeply disturbed Loyalist clergy:(p.125).Frazer provides a convincing and comprehensive account of the theological, philosophical and legal case made by the Loyalist clergy. In his conclusion he summarises the contrasting approaches of Loyalist and Patriot clergy:(p.234).This summary of the Loyalist clergy has a Hooker-like quality to it. Indeed, it brings to mind the account given of Hooker in one of the classical texts of American conservatism, Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order (1974):The fact that Kirk thus identifies Hooker as a source of the 'American Order' does, however, make me wonder about that judgement from the opening page of Frazer's excellent book: that these Loyalist clergy were the "losers". If Yoram Hazony is correct, and the United States Constitution was established as a 'conservative democracy', an expression of what he terms "Anglo-American conservatism", and amongst the expounders of whom he lists Hooker, we might suggest that the concerns of the Loyalist clergy prevailed over what Hazony terms the "Enlightenment political tradition descended from the principal political texts of rationalist political philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke" - the very tradition invoked by the Patriots.Another reason to question the "losers" epithet is the emergence of the polity to the north of the United States. The Loyalists established this polity as, in the words of Ron Dart , "a more conservative society, a culture much more founded in an older Tory vision of the common good".And, finally, there is the role played by the Loyalist clergy in renewing and revitalizing Anglican political theology, particularly in the face of the 1789 Revolution in France. Peter Williams's The Church Militant: The American Loyalist Clergy and the Making of the British Counterrevolution, 1701-92 powerfully demonstrates how the Loyalist clergy played an "expansive role" in both the renewal of Anglican political and in the popular reaction against revolutionary ideology.This is something which had already been indicated in the place JCD Clark had given in English Society 1688-1832 to the Loyalist cleric Jonathan Boucher, in his account of Orthodox Anglican political theology and its understanding of allegiance in the face of the ideology being exported from revolutionary France. Rather than 'losers', then, the Loyalist clergy become key players in the revitalizing of the British polity in the face of conflict with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and in the renewal of Britain's imperial mission.In The North American High Tory Tradition , Ron Dart states:Apology of the Church of EnglandOf the Laws of Ecclesiastical PolityPart of the Church's mission is to articulate an understanding of human flourishing. This necessarily requires a political theology, an account of the right ordering of the polity. This is what the Loyalist clergy in the American colonies were doing, in a time of political uncertainty, questioning, and upheaval. Frazer's book is a reminder to the contemporary Church that the collusion with the empty secular order that is the late 20th and early 21st century Church's withdrawal from the political realm is a catastrophic failure to engage with debates and questions concerning the right ordering of the polity, a collective shrug of the shoulders in the face of the contemporary desire for polities shaped by something more substantive and meaningful than a coalition of technocrats, entertainers, and consumers.In other words, we need to listen afresh to Boucher, Inglis, and Seabury, and regain a proper confidence in the necessary place of political theology in the Church's mission and teaching. As Boucher himself stated in a sermon:- Discourse XII 'On Civil Liberty; Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistance' (a sermon preached in the parish of Queen Anne, Maryland, in 1775) in Jonathan Boucher A View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution (1797).