In Linda Colley's much acclaimed account of the construction of British identity in the eighteenth century, considerable stress is placed on the importance of a shared Protestantism in drawing together the peoples of the island in a struggle against the Catholic ‘other’ of France and other European powers. This enabled Scots in particular to play a significant role in creating the British Empire, as soldiers, administrators and merchants. Such participation, in turn, reinforced loyalty to the British state, certainly among the country's elite. There is much that is persuasive about this account, but J. C. D. Clark points to some dangers in glossing over important distinctions. Colley, he argued, ‘treated “Protestantism” without further discussion as essentially one thing, where the reality was much more complex’. In particular, he pointed to differences in ecclesiastical polity between the component parts of the country. His account is developed very much from an English perspective and on the basis of elite writings; this book seeks to examine these differences from the perspective of Scotland through a detailed examination of practice.

In one account, which combines religious and social history, Jeremy Gregory has speculated on the degree to which the Book of Common Prayer might have fostered a sense of national identity, in being used routinely across the country over long periods of time. This is, of course, a matter of English, Anglican identity; the attempt to impose the Book of Common Prayer on Scotland in the early seventeenth century was a factor in the religious conflicts, which created some potent Scottish traditions. What we often sense in such accounts, for all their value, is a conflation of the English experience with Britain. In this book, contrasts with English practice will be important and will help to point up the distinctiveness of practice in Scotland. It was to preserve the distinctive Presbyterian polity that eventually triumphed after the conflicts of the seventeenth century that so many associated with the Church of Scotland came to support the Union of the two countries of 1707. One of the conditions of that Union was the affirmation of the Presbyterian theology and polity of the Church of Scotland.