George Shulman's American Prophecy represents an attempt to recuperate American biblical traditions in the interests of what he calls “prophecy as a political vocation” (43). While acknowledging European theorists of religion as metaphorical practice – “Walter Benjamin or Jacques Derrida on messianism, Emmanuel Levinas on transcendence and ethics” (27) – Shulman himself is much more attracted to an American tradition of prophecy centred upon race, whose prime exponents, as discussed in consecutive chapters of this book, are Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Shulman's basic point is that an “esoteric” discourse with origins in scriptural hermeneutics can pragmatically be translated into more “vernacular and vulgar” forms (233), so that American prophetic language comes to expose hierarchies silently kept in place by what he calls “the liberal ordinary” (xvi). Allen Ginsberg's “Ode to Failure” is offered as the epigraph to this book, while the author is so taken with Simon and Garfunkel's lyrics from “The Sounds of Silence” – “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls” – that he cites them not once but twice (2, 233).

This is a useful book, which makes some perceptive observations about ways in which religious rhetoric comprises what Tocqueville called the “grammar” beneath every aspect of American life (248). Shulman says he first came to his topic through a reading of Morrison's Beloved, and the chapters on Morrison and Baldwin will be especially valuable for those interested in the problematic relationship between religion and aesthetics in African American culture. What was not so convincing, to my mind, was Shulman's more general attempt to take issue with Sacvan Bercovitch's thesis (in The American Jeremiad) about how prophetic language is locked into the hegemonic mode of American liberal politics, so that oppositional discourse itself becomes part of what Bercovitch called “the rites of assent” (23). Shulman argues, conversely, that progressive forms of prophecy can be dissociated from the more conservative kinds proposed by the likes of Jerry Falwell, who notoriously claimed that 9/11 exemplified a just God giving America “probably what we deserve” (13). In thus seeking to redeem the rhetoric of redemption itself by affiliating it with more a more open political praxis – a strategic move that he links, somewhat optimistically, to Nietzsche (176) – Shulman at times risks relapsing into a nostalgic kind of religious revivalism that already seems outdated, particularly in the light of Barack Obama's appropriation of power by the careful avoidance of prophetic language in his 2008 presidential campaign. This is really another book whose heart lies in the civil rights era, with Martin Luther King at its core, but it is nevertheless a skilful and scholarly account of what the author calls “Jeremiah's legacy” (1) across two centuries of American culture.