Holloway's is an unashamedly, but apparently unselfconsciously, Protestant account. He takes it for granted that the only religious experience that matters is divine revelation, when God talks directly to human beings: none of that ritual mumbo-jumbo that bothers the anthropologists. So we race past entire areas of human experience. He explicitly states that Shinto, ancient Greek polytheist and native American beliefs aren't proper religion; presumably he would say the same about the indigenous cultures of Africa or South America, since he never mentions them.

His account is largely narrative-driven, and every story always begins with the little guys – by implication, there were no women in religion until Mary Tudor – for whom the voice of God offers the route out of an oppressive society, whether it be Moses in Egypt, Christ or Muhammed. Religion is good in these situations; it only becomes bad when ossified into rigid, coercive social structures. God’s voice is generous and true, if we have the ears to hear it; it is human society that introduces the vanity and toxicity. For Holloway, it is the second commandment, forbidding idolatry, that defines the essence of religion. All great religious revolutions are founded in the rejection of artifice. "Like Muhammad and the leaders of the Protestant Reformation," he writes of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, he "hated showy religion. He was a monotheist with a profound contempt for the merchants of idolatry." It is no surprise to find a celebratory narrative of Europe's Reformation occupying the heart of the book. When the plucky Protestants cast off the shackles of corrupt, idolatrous Catholicism, it's the culmination of the same story that he has told from the start.

Holloway certainly tries to moderate the Protestant teleology of his history. He begins dutifully with Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, but then leaves these parked in the first millennium BCE. He has later excursions into Chinese and Zoroastrian thought, but these too prove to be dead ends in his overall story. Judaism features heavily, but only in its time-honoured role as parent of Christianity. (No Jewish history since the time of Jesus, then.) Islam too, is viewed primarily as an episode in medieval history, although even in his account of its formation Holloway introduces discussion of violent jihad and smuggles in metaphors of armed conflict (for example, when discussing concepts of Hell: "the Church's holy book couldn't beat the Qur’an in the terror stakes"), hinting that 21st-century fundamentalism was a theological inevitability. Modernity is represented in this history primarily by America’s Christian and para-Christian developments: Quakers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientologists and so forth.