Those religious believers still willing to claim the term “liberal” are tired of being kicked around. In a swelling chorus of outrage, they have fought back against the cultural hegemony of evangelicals and the rampant rumors of liberal demise that have haunted their sanctuaries for the past three decades. In reaction, some mainstream Protestant churches in this camp have mounted concerted and organized efforts to rescript their public relations. I think here, in particular, of the United Church of Christ (UCC), a left-leaning denomination that launched a massive advertising campaign in 2004 to raise its public profile. That effort is perhaps best known for its prominent comma (“God is still speaking,”) and edgy advertisements depicting bouncers at the doors of conservative churches who physically eject potential members not in conformance with their white, heterosexual standards. The banning of those ads by many television stations, at the behest of conservative religious groups that took exception to the UCC proclamation of inclusiveness as a stab at evangelical orthodoxy, may only confirm the mainstream lament that liberalism is truly a countercultural proposition.

Even less well equipped to fight back are the religious adherents for whom institutions and traditions themselves are problematic. As heirs of the radical Reformation, a movement that prized individual piety over the controlling arm of the Church, this strand of liberals is fundamentally leery of the level of collective organization required to mount a public battle for hearts and minds. Indeed, they tend to chafe against the constraints of bureaucratic impulses as a fetter on their creative self-expression. Yet they have their champions, and perhaps none more accomplished and eager to assemble historical accounts of religious liberalism in the US than Catherine L. Albanese and Leigh Eric Schmidt. The latest books by these authors are elegantly written and perceptively argued. Even better, they are delightfully laden with details culled from prodigious primary research. Both authors see themselves writing against a decades-long flood of scholarship that has obscured or, worse yet, scorned their subjects. In this sense, Albanese and Schmidt pose themselves as the champions of intellectual underdogs. As historians, both are also faced with the daunting challenge—which they well recognize and articulate—of sympathetically defining and narrating a lineage for individuals who might vehemently oppose that very act.

Albanese and Schmidt both employ the broader term “religious liberalism,” but they have different groups in mind. Indeed, the dilemma of providing a working definition of the term proves a daunting task. Neither would equate religious liberals with other kinds of political or economic liberalism, although they are not simply referring to theology, either. One common denominator, to be sure, is that both authors admire the intellectual expansiveness and freedom from ecclesiastical constraints exhibited by their subjects. Schmidt's introduction helpfully outlines some of the key features he associates with the genre. He describes it as a radical version of Protestantism that emerged among New England Unitarians in the 1820s, defined by a set of intellectual affinities: religious liberals are individualistic with respect to religious authority; suspicious of creedalism and wary of the idolatry of scriptural texts; committed to progress in spiritual, intellectual, and social realms; and capacious in their pursuit of deeper spiritual experience. His study seems most anxious to counter claims from the political left, most notably the work of T. Jackson Lears and Christopher Lasch, which castigate religious liberals for their bourgeois, therapeutic bent. Schmidt wants to reclaim his figures as politically invested in American reform, not simply starry-eyed utopian dreamers content to sit back in their cozy armchairs and dream of social harmony.

In contrast, Albanese focuses specifically on what she terms “metaphysical” religions, a subspecies that functions, in her words, “in a borderlands at the edge of liberal Protestantism.” Her goal is to recount the flourishing of metaphysical communities, or networks, as she prefers, since individuals involved in metaphysical practices were often only loosely affiliated with organized groups but were more frequently connected through common texts and friendships. With antecedents in the Hermetic traditions of the Renaissance as well as the mystical turns of radical Protestant leaders such as Jacob Boehme, metaphysical practices were transported to the British colonies through multiple routes. They were manifest, she argues, in the Ramean philosophy and cunning ways of the Puritans, Virginia gentry gambling with its attendant dreams and omens, Continental Hermeticism as it was channeled through Quakers and others in the middle colonies, and the zodiacal portents of backcountry Appalachians. In North America, these folkways mixed with African diasporic traditions and Native American notions of spirit and nature, resulting in new combinatory forms that, by the early nineteenth century, emerged in the Shaker tradition, Mormonism, and spiritualism. After the Civil War, groups such as the New Thought movement, Christian Science, the Vedanta Society, and theosophy represented the blossoming of mature and identifiable metaphysical traditions, a trend that continues to this day.

Much like evangelicalism, a concept that serves as both a foil and a template for the author's understanding, the metaphysical tradition is conceived as both a recurring feature of American life and a movement. Thus metaphysical features are glimpsed in a wide variety of religious actions, but they also give rise to fully formed systems. Several concepts serve as definitive markers of metaphysics: a focus on an individual's “turn of mind” rather than a change of heart; an emphasis on theories of correspondence between natural and spiritual worlds derived from ancient cosmologies; a recourse to magic, or a willed instrumentalism, in order to manipulate material and/or spiritual energies, particularly for the purposes of healing; and a tendency to form fluid, egalitarian networks rather than formal organizations. Less interested than Schmidt in countering claims of liberal social apathy, Albanese is fascinated by the intellectual systems created that diverged sharply from traditional Christian norms. In her rendering, metaphysical adherents contributed significantly to the intellectual making of American spirituality, although she admits that the political investments of her subjects, with the notable exception of involvement in the antebellum abolitionist movement, were contradictory at best.

In her resuscitation of the intellectual integrity and social viability of metaphysical groups, Albanese challenges another set of detractors. In both heft and scope she takes aim at the big guns in the field of American religious history such as Sydney Ahlstrom and Jon Butler, arguing that the addition of metaphysical religion provides a fundamental correction to a half-century of overemphasis on evangelicals and the mainstream denominational establishment. She contends that metaphysical religion is a fundamental and largely absent third story that is necessary to make sense of American religious life. Alongside the evangelical inclinations toward conversion and evangelism, and next to the denominational obsessions with public power, hierarchy, and organized religious activity, we must place those mediums, mystics, and mental healers interwoven into the fabric of the American past. Most importantly, perhaps, dimming the organizational lights foregrounds the explicitly combinant character of religious life, the crossings, borrowings, and exchanges of ideas and practices that shape the religious landscape. The mature metaphysical groups may have been less inhibited by orthodoxy in the giving and taking of such spiritual gifts, but Albanese's study certainly suggests that exuberant piracy is a ubiquitous feature of religious practice.

Equally laudatory is Albanese's effort to continually highlight related—or perhaps parallel—themes as they manifest themselves in the lives of Native Americans and African Americans. It is debatable whether and to what extent Euro-Americans in the colonial period were impacted by subaltern religious practices, since few would have admitted such influence. What they did admit, the author demonstrates, was an awareness of spiritual persuasions and powers that they did not understand but that they acknowledged as efficacious. Expressions of fear and ostracism, in significant ways, make the point that Euro-American religious life was demonstrably molded by encounters with racial Others. Albanese makes a strong case that at the level of practice (healing and revelations of the spirit, in particular), colonial blacks, whites, and native peoples lived intimately and exchanged and adopted one another's customs. The notion of interracial combination becomes politically more fraught in the case of spiritualism, a movement in which Euro-Americans clearly fetishized Native American and black “spirit guides,” seeing them as more religiously authentic than other available escorts into the world of the dead. The question is whether one could rightly call those alternative traditions “metaphysical” or even “premetaphysical.” To be sure, they are combinative, as were the later metaphysicians, but it is not entirely clear of what usefulness this categorization could be to our understanding of African American or Native American religious systems when we have little access to the intellectual foundations behind their activities.

This focus on popular or “folk piety” may also leave out some groups that would reinforce Albanese's argument for the interpenetration of practices across racial lines. Aside from scattered black spiritualists and Father Divine's twentieth-century community, an integrated group with clear allegiances to New Thought, evidences of African American metaphysics are relatively scarce. One has to wonder whether this is a function of the definition of metaphysics employed here: I would suggest that some of the clearest examples of hermetic borrowings among African Americans can be found within Protestant Church communities, not outside of them. From Richard Allen to Jesse Jackson, the history of Prince Hall Masonry has been closely linked to churches; sermons by free blacks beginning as early as the 1780s mined the ancient Chaldean and Egyptian legacies as evidence of African glory and access to occluded (Christian) wisdom. Unlike white evangelicals, who broke with the Masons in the late 1820s and stamped fraternal societies as non-Christian, blacks by and large did not bifurcate the two, either organizationally or intellectually. To this day, the hermetic tradition serves as a resource for Afrocentric racial and religious self-understanding. Similarly, one gets hints in this story of churchgoing Presbyterians or Episcopalians who also practiced phrenology or mind-cure. But because the emphasis falls on individuals and groups outside of the denominational mainstream, those who exhibit both the tendency toward institutional fluidity and the other hallmarks of the metaphysical synthesis receive considerably more attention than their bureaucratic brethren.

These quibbles have more to do with the construction of a lineage and historiographical foil than with the details of Albanese's account. The book is magnificent, and it would be a monumental achievement even without its claims to frame a “third way” in scholarly discourse. Rather than simply placing the metaphysical stream alongside evangelicals or denominations, or, more egregiously, repeating the mistakes made by scholars who were willing to substitute a part for the whole in the drive for a grand synthesizing narrative, it may be more helpful to see the metaphysical legacy as a refracting lens through which it is possible to see glimpses of the whole by revealing patterns of thought, action, and behavior that have been ignored in previous work. We could then turn to the important business of figuring out just what it was about American intellectual and religious life in the nineteenth century that encouraged the flourishing of these styles.

Schmidt's study begins in the moment of this flourishing, thus elevating the historical questions of “why here?” and “why now?” even more. Restless Souls tells a story that is conceptually and chronologically more circumscribed than Albanese's sweeping survey, homing in on those religious liberals engaged in “spiritual seeking.” Schmidt sees a particular style of religious questing as distinctively American as well as historically specific; through cultural analysis he traces the means by which “spirituality,” as opposed to an institution-bound “religion,” came to be seen by many Americans as a worthy objective.

There are many resonances here with Albanese's work, aside from the invocation of liberalism and the common focus on transcendentalists, spiritualists, New Thought advocates, Vedantists, and theosophists. Like Albanese, Schmidt links nineteenth-century developments to contemporary religious trends. He also wants to resuscitate the reputation of seekers who have been maligned by both scholars and popular audiences. Here, too, the shadow of evangelical scholarship looms large: Schmidt is particularly sensitive to the criticisms of those who consider seeker spirituality either intellectually flaccid, crassly instrumentalist, or both. He wants this tendency to be taken seriously, and to be seen as more than the result of privileged baby boomers indulging voraciously in a spiritual all-you-can-eat buffet (although his entertaining examples from car commercials and grocery store magazine racks certainly animate the narrative). Indeed, he is downright irked by the “hackneyed familiarity of the male pundit's jeremiad” against the seeker tradition (284)—embodied memorably by Robert Bellah's castigation of the religion of “Sheilaism” in Habits of the Heart—instead contending that liberalism represents an important legacy in which “the primacy of individual experience is joined to a whole web of spiritual practices and social commitments” (286). Even more momentously, Schmidt hopes that seeker spirituality might “reclaim an alternative vista from which to view the outworking of American democracy” (19).

And there is no doubt that his narrative, like Albanese's, is groundbreaking and illuminating. The growth of spirituality, at least in our current sense, did not exist within Protestant circles prior to the nineteenth century, and its gradual acceptance represented a significant shift away from traditional Protestant models of religiosity. Schmidt dismisses the recourse to ancient origins (including, presumably, Albanese's linking of early cosmology and Hermeticism to later trends) as “grandiose” (6) and not very accurate. The real sources lie closer to home, he thinks, and particularly within the bastions of mid-nineteenth-century transcendentalists, who came to value many religious activities traditionally scorned by Protestants. The common characteristics of liberal seekers that he cites include the individual quest for mystical religious feeling or experience; the positive valuation of silence, solitude, and meditation; an enhanced appreciation of religious variety and commonality; a focus on ethical action in society; and an emphasis on creative self-expression as a primary purpose of life. Those inclinations form the basis of Schmidt's thematic chapters, with a concluding chapter on twentieth-century mystic Quakers who serve as a bridge to contemporary modes of spirituality.

In light of the overlap with Albanese's metaphysical social networks, it is notable that Schmidt does not use “metaphysics” as a component of his definition. I suspect he would argue that the metaphysical tradition was only a small and perhaps less consequential strand within the liberal tapestry. Moreover, since he wants to assert the political efficacy and reformist impulses of liberal views, the metaphysical groups, especially with the flowering of New Thought and the New Age in the twentieth century, both of which remained well outside spheres of political activism by almost any measure, are hardly useful poster children. Mirroring his argument that liberal spirituality can rightly be linked to a tradition of social activism, Schmidt focuses on practices rather than on the endurance and transmission of theological concepts and spiritual wisdom. Indeed, his concentration on “mystical religious feeling” rather than “metaphysics” shifts attention away from the intellectual rigor of liberal ideals to the intensity of sensation. One wonders whether Schmidt believes that transcendentalists Emerson or Alcott even had metaphysics—at least of the more systematic or cerebral variety.

Schmidt recounts a fascinating story. The better-known Emerson, Thoreau, and William James figure alongside Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Farmer, and Thomas R. Kelly as leading lights that systematically pushed American intellectual currents in novel directions. Mysticism, solitude, and meditation, previously seen as the twisted obsessions of radical enthusiasts and Catholics, were refashioned into a romantic, poetic, and intuitive brew that would take the Protestant believer further into the inner sanctum of her own soul and simultaneously release the will to the “shuddering delight” of an immediate experience of the divine. Confirming the assertion of Octavius Frothingham that “We crave more mist and moonlight in America” (quoted on 53), poets, artists, and scientists in the late nineteenth century sacralized nature; leavened it with dashes of Sufi mysticism, yoga, and Buddhist philosophy; and employed novel religious practices that allowed multiple interpretive glosses to coexist side by side. Schmidt is especially adept at recovering the idiosyncratic figures that prove his point: He pinpoints cowboy hermits in the western states, Hindus from the Himalayas, feminists seeking their own brand of solitude, and failed Ph.D. candidates turned authors of popular spirituality in sharp and unfailingly animated prose.

More than that, Schmidt raises critical questions of much wider import. Each chapter explores the consistent tensions in these movements between inner exploration and social action, focus on the self and focus on the divine, “scientific” and mystical approaches to meditation, and freedom and self-surrender. William James's invocation of the happy and healthy-minded notwithstanding, seekers struggled mightily, Schmidt reminds us, over questions pertinent to our own times: how does one simultaneously appreciate religious diversity and yet seek commonality? Is religious seeking a means to an end, or an end in itself? Extended biographical portraits of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Sarah Farmer, and Thomas Kelly poignantly demonstrate that the fulfillment of expansive liberal dreams was frequently partial, fleeting, and conflicted. More often than not, solitude beyond its rhapsodic representations was accompanied by darkness, despair, and the specter of death. These material reminders are necessary, and keep Schmidt's survey of what is essentially a text-based movement (spiced by tantalizing vignettes of lectures on yoga at the Green Acre retreat center in Eliot, Maine) from spinning into the ecstatic spheres inhabited by his seekers-as-writers. Schmidt's approach astutely reminds us that even those who do not believe in ghosts can lead haunted lives.

Most haunted and haunting of all is the life of Sarah J. Farmer (1847–1916). Farmer, the child of devout Methodists, was the quintessential religious seeker, equally at home with spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists. Well traveled and wealthy, the never-married Farmer took it upon herself in the 1890s to establish a Maine retreat center, Greenacre, where open-minded participants were exposed to a dizzying variety of world religious beliefs and practices. From 1894 until Farmer's death in 1916, Greenacre served as a gathering point for some of the most progressive northeastern intellectuals of the day, and its eclectic lecture series set a new standard for cosmopolitan spirituality. Receptive to novel practices such as chants, yoga, and cold baths, Farmer sought not only to study but to embody the “piety of the world” through her communal summer gatherings. Yet at the acme of Greenacre's success Farmer herself found the bliss she had been seeking: after a pilgrimage to Ottoman Syria in 1900, she embraced the teachings of Bahá’í, with its vision of the ultimate unity of all religions, as the realization of her quest. Freedom, she felt, had come finally through the cessation of inquiry; as she put it, “We are never free until we have felt the Rock under our feet” (quoted on 207; Farmer's italics). But not all of her compatriots appreciated her newfound certainty, and their tolerance for diversity quickly turned to anger. In an escalating series of battles, and despite her efforts to maintain the openness of the summer retreat to a variety of viewpoints, Farmer was castigated for her sectarianism and narrowness. In failing health, Farmer's final years transpired in a near-farcical flurry of efforts to liberate her from the clutches of the New Hampshire asylum where she was either—depending on who one believed—experiencing a mystical exaltation or suffering delusions.

Schmidt's elucidation of this tragic episode prompts crucial questions: what are we to make of the fact that liberal infighting—among those theoretically most devoted to peace and tolerance—drove Farmer round the bend? Is religious seeking an end in itself, or a means to something else? Is there a way to foster a style of cosmopolitan spirituality that is capacious enough to countenance particularistic beliefs, or must they be driven out of the community in the name of universalism? Schmidt astutely illuminates the lure of self-surrender in the midst of the cult of creative individualism, and underscores the gendered assumptions about human agency and will, freedom, and self-surrender that many liberals expressed. Self-surrender “confounded one of the primary emphases of religious liberalism” (215), Schmidt explains, which was the notion of the “self-reliant quest.” Such a relinquishing of individual ego, with its suggestions of passivity and submission, were considered decidedly feminine characteristics by nineteenth-century Americans, although self-reliance was not just advocated by men (one thinks immediately of Margaret Fuller's appeal to “self-trust” in Woman in the Nineteenth Century) nor self-surrender just urged by women.Footnote ¹ Still, gendered biases in formulations of the ego in religious liberal discourse can hardly be missed. As the Buddhist sympathizer and (in this case) critic put it, self-surrender deprived one of the “manly vigor” entailed in a “higher spirituality” (221). Carus's gender-specific and pointed skepticism was rendered in graphic form in the frontispiece of his journal Open Court, in which he printed Sasha Schneider's image “The Feeling of Dependence” (1899). In that rendering, a man stands shackled and naked, head cast down, facing the unblinking eyes of the devil in the form of an enormous monster. Farmer, Schmidt suggests, was thus the victim of both a struggle for power and traditional views of masculine piety.

Restless Souls is at its strongest when it is plumbing the depths of these questions, rather than arguing a case for the broader significance of the liberal story. Perhaps after reading both of these books I am simply sold on the importance of the topic, but it seems that the quality of the evidence and the arguments speak for themselves without the necessity of viewing the narrative as an exemplum of the “outworking of American democracy,” as Schmidt would have it. Interestingly, despite Schmidt's protestations about the need to quit the cheap attacks on spiritual seekers, his underlying rejoinder to critics is itself a consummately liberal and Jamesian point: we should value these traditions because authentic individual religious experience has inherent integrity and value. Even if liberals were not as consistent or loving or reform-minded as we might wish, they should be judged by their (literary) fruits as reflections of their deepest desires and aspirations. This is a point that most certainly will satisfy neither the evangelicals, who would wish for a positivistic evaluation of good religion, nor the radicals, who would still fault the social function of spiritual seeking as fundamentally apolitical. Still, it is an answer that the Sheilas and Sarah Farmers of the world would respect and applaud. Although he does not define what he means by “democratic,” Schmidt's book implicitly argues for the innate worth of individual religious expression as a positive good.

The creation of liberal lineages in these texts is also noteworthy because of the way the narratives diverge in the twentieth century. Albanese and Schmidt both begin with the same cast of spiritualists, New Thought advocates, and theosophists, but their concerns take them to different destinations. A Republic of Mind and Spirit spends considerably more time detailing Asian influences and the imaginings of Asia shaped by late Victorians to their own purposes. In substantial explorations of the contributions of Swami Vivekananda, Yogi Ramacharaka (also known as William Walker Atkinson, a nominal transformation that beautifully demonstrates the transgressive allure of Asian representations), and Buddhist sympathizer Paul Carus to American metaphysical understandings, Albanese points out that combinatory impulses in the twentieth century moved well beyond discernibly Protestant roots. By the time we pass the New Age shamans and neopagans of the 1970s and 1980s, the energetic borrowings seem to have taken on a life of their own, culminating in a continuous motion of constant reinvention and even a “reenchantment of the world” (515). Although older forms of metaphysical religion pass away, its fundamental traits of correspondence, the power of mind, and the manipulation of energies appear in newer and even more sophisticated forms in the “new spiritual” moment. Albanese wants to tie up loose ends, arguing that the New Age is a culmination and reunion of all the prior pieces of American metaphysical history that have preceded it, and perhaps it is—at least in the sense that recent practitioners have been less constrained, more exuberant, and more self-conscious in their reclaiming of much of this heritage. But the point is asserted rather than proved, and one would be hard-pressed to define the grounds on which one might judge “progress” in the unfolding of American metaphysics.

Schmidt's endpoint is quite different. He more briefly touches on Asian influences, and consistently remains a few steps closer to the Protestant mainstream. His primary twentieth-century examples are Rufus Jones and his protégé Robert Kelly, both seeking Quaker professors and popular authors with mystical tendencies. Institutionally embedded at Haverford, each explored the inward fellowship of their tradition, with Jones firmly establishing the radical roots of the Society of Friends in the English Reformation, and Kelly exploring Quaker connections to other world religions and advocating the practical elements of spiritual devotion in the 1930s and 1940s (anticipating the popularity of contemporary devotional author Richard J. Foster's 1978 Celebration of Discipline). Through connections to the Pendle Hill retreat center in Pennsylvania, an eclectic group of men—and this is a more male lineage than what has come before, and than Albanese provides—such as the novelist Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Merton, and theologian Howard Thurman, explored the interconnections of devotionalism, activism, and ecumenism, establishing templates for a characteristic brand of spirituality that endures to this day.

The juxtaposition of these historical trajectories raises a host of intriguing questions. Why do they end in such different places? Are these simply two branches of a tree, two subspecies of religious liberalism, with the same nineteenth-century roots, and if so, how many more might we explore? The organizational elusiveness of these communities is part of their fascination, of course, but it also lends a slipperiness to lineage and scholarly categorization, challenging the terms—liberal, metaphysical, and spiritual—used by the authors to capture their purportedly unchanging qualities. We have alluded to this already with the black Protestant Masons in Albanese's account, who do not seem to fit the category well. But the problem rears its head again in Schmidt's rendering of twentieth-century seekers. If Richard J. Foster is an heir to Jones and Kelly's spiritual seeking, he is not a liberal in any straightforward sense, celebrating, as he does, the “great traditions of Christian faith.” This is a far cry from the eclecticism of Greenacre. Or is it? Schmidt's point about the practice of meditation as a vessel that could contain many meanings is instructive: it suggests that spiritual discipline, be it meditation, retreating, or cold-water treatments, could potentially serve as a bridge to unite theologically disparate systems, creating communities in which the focus on embodied activity triumphed over intellectual debate. That was Sarah Farmer's aspiration, one suspects. Albanese, on the other hand, puts more stock in the articulation of intellectual systems that counter and interact with dominant American Christian forms.

There is also a silence in both of these accounts about the specter of Catholicism. In useful genealogical prefaces, the authors provide insights into how the terms metaphysical, spiritual, and mystical were transformed in nineteenth-century America. In each case, their etymology owes much to medieval Catholic beliefs and practices. In order to revivify the terms for Protestants, liberal leaders had to negate their Catholic connotations—to negate the negations, in other words, in order to turn them into something positive and congenial to Protestant models of appropriate conduct. Catholic Americans crop up in these texts, to be sure, but it would be fascinating to explore how those same themes unfolded within Catholic intellectual contexts. Further, how did liberals deal with that closer form of ecumenism? Did priests get invited to Greenacre alongside yogis and Buddhists? When Albanese describes the “reenchantment” of the world in the present age, is she also charting the gradual reincorporation of Catholic modalities into Protestant life under other guises? Was “Asian” simply a more acceptable designation in a predominantly Protestant setting?

The issue of American religious exceptionalism is also worth further exploration. Schmidt and Albanese introduce such lively and international casts of characters that one is hard-pressed to know whether any of this liberal seeking is indeed distinctive to this nation. One gets the sense that in the nineteenth century there were swamis and positive thinkers traveling the globe to sell their ideas and their texts. It might be argued that Protestant Americans exhibited a particular fondness for exotic religious traditions (non-Catholic, preferably “oriental”). But was this a function of voracious religious appetites, new socioeconomic and educational opportunities, religious disestablishment, or delayed Protestant yearning for a less arid spiritual landscape? These books marvelously document how our current spiritual seeking came to be, and they celebrate its rich and varied intellectual legacy. Still unclear, however, is precisely why such movements came to maturity when and where they did.

Assuming, for now, the inherent importance of these liberal traditions, it is still fair to assess what social and intellectual impact they have had beyond enchanting poetry and scenic Maine landscapes. Both authors emphasize the desire of their subjects to reform communities beyond their own inner worlds. Culturally, Americans owe much to the seekers, from yoga classes at the local gym to everyday mindfulness to Oprah's Big Give. There are political inheritances as well. Many of the early liberals, and especially the transcendentalists, were keenly devoted to the cause of abolition. The presence of women as leaders in many of these groups clearly reshaped American understandings of gender roles (although their considerably more conservative Pentecostal counterparts were doing much the same thing for female leadership). Still, the legacy of social activism is decidedly mixed, despite the most noble of intentions. As Schmidt points out, these were movements propelled in large part by the dissemination of texts, and their reception was likely limited to educated, middle-class, and elite Americans. Albanese uncovers more diversity in her groups because her metaphysical tendencies cut a wider swath, but aside from the ever-active spiritualists, her subjects are also more focused on psychic landscapes than on social revolutions. While this does not condemn these seekers to political purgatory, it does suggest that theological stances, no matter the sincerity of stated aspirations, are not the best predictor of social efficacy. Intellectual legacies, however, are another matter, and both of these studies argue persuasively that religious liberalism has had impact far beyond the bounds of a few Protestant churches. Employing both novel practices and novel concepts, liberals slowly infused American religious life with new combinations of spiritual expression. Southern Presbyterians practice yoga. Baptists desire mindfulness. Liberals have transformed ways of thinking about spirituality into a desirable, ubiquitous quest that even some evangelicals might join.

Still, the critics have not been vanquished. When the UCC “bouncer ad” hit the airwaves in December 2004, it had appreciable effects. Some UCC churches noticed an increase of up to twenty-five percent in weekly attendance in the following months, and clerical leaders expressed pride that their message of inclusiveness and affirmation of difference was being heard. At the same time, conservative religious leaders interpreted the ads as a direct attack, and some longtime members of the UCC resigned because they felt that the proclamation of openness was itself a condemnation of other religions. Just a few years later, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a UCC minister in Chicago and then pastor to Barack Obama, came to prominence for his fiery sermons that seemed, to many, to condemn white America as irredeemably racist. The UCC, that most liberal and non-creedal of Protestant denominations, stood convicted of narrowness in its inclusion of Afrocentric affirmations.

The ironies of religious liberalism are many, and perhaps such seekers of openness, in their celebration of individuality, leave themselves vulnerable to the pieties of others for whom such mist and moonlight is pure mental fluff. I, for one, am glad liberals have such capable champions, and I suspect that they may still have the last laugh. These books move us toward a considerably more balanced understanding of the multiple intellectual, cultural, and social impulses that have shaped American religious life. Even more important, they give us language to begin discussing the many concepts and activities that fall outside or rest uneasily within the walls of religious institutions. In their quest to reclaim and hold up the experiences of ordinary believers—particularly those who chafed at the constraints of institutional pieties and sought to liberate individual self-expression—these studies are themselves briefs for the renewal of liberal spirituality.