If politics and religion are inseparable, few historiographies exemplify the connection more vividly than the literature on Britain and America in the age of democratic revolution. In Britain, scholars as different as Edward Thompson and Jonathan Clark have noted religion's preeminent role in determining how various sectors of English society responded to the revolutionary crisis. Similarly, American historians have long recognized that, for men and women of all walks and races, the epoch that began in 1776 was as much sacred as secular. There is, however, a good deal less agreement over exactly how, to whom, and in what ways religion mattered. As Jon Butler has written of America, “organized religion not only survived the revolutionary era but … prospered from it,” yet it is clear that “the Revolution was a profoundly secular event,” one whose causes “placed religion more at its margins than at its center” (Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge, MA, 1990], 195). Although men and women throughout the English-speaking Atlantic inhabited political cultures shaped by what David Hall has termed the “Protestant vernacular tradition,” the age of revolution occurred at a moment when, practically for the first time in the history of Latin Christendom, it was possible to think of politics and religion as distinct (Cultures of Print: Essays on the History of the Book [Amherst, MA, 1996], 5–6).

This tension between the sacred and the profane lies at the heart of Susan Juster's important book on Anglo-American prophets and prophecy. Focusing on the period between 1750 and 1820, Juster uses the approximately 300 prophets known to have been active in Britain and America to examine the complex relationship between the emergence of a market-driven public culture deeply skeptical of religious enthusiasm and the enormous popularity of men and women who often seemed like “throwbacks to an earlier age when people still believed in witches and demons, in miracles and cunning folk, in the unexpected and dramatic intrusion of the supernatural world into daily life” (20). As Juster shows, prophets like London's Joanna Southcott, Nimrod Hughes of New Jersey, and Jemima Wilkinson of Rhode Island and upstate New York owed their remarkable success in part to their ability to “commodify” their message by making spectacles of themselves and publicizing their visions in inexpensive, readily available pamphlets (8). But the most popular (or notorious) figures also succeeded because they were able to blend millennial themes with the philosophical and political concerns of the day. One of the best known was a former British naval lieutenant and London shopkeeper named Richard Brothers, who spent eleven years in a private insane asylum for claiming in 1795 that God would destroy the British nation if the Pitt ministry declared war on the French Republic. The more extreme prophets often deliberately avoided taking sides in the great divisions of the revolutionary era. (Far from being a French apologist, Brothers publicized Britain's impending defeat because he believed that God's ultimate plan was to make him the head of a Jewish universal monarchy based in Jerusalem [183].) By contrast, the more moderate and respectable “prophetic writers” (who were invariably male) “embraced the idea of revolution with such enthusiasm … that we can speak of a shared sensibility uniting men across the political and religious spectrum” (162). Whether their prophecies were fantastic or measured, the widespread interest that such figures commanded played a key role in dramatizing the new revolutionary idioms to people who might not otherwise have been exposed to them.

Told in this way, Juster's is a familiar story—of the convergence of revolution and revival, of the packaging of new, potentially atheistic ideas in the traditional language of Anglo-American Protestantism. Yet, as Juster argues in a novel and important twist, the market forces that allowed so many prophets to achieve temporary fame also acted as a powerful regulatory mechanism. Unlike the great millennial upsurge of the English Civil War, when the government used force to control the excesses of enthusiasm, both political officials and the general public regarded the prophets of the later eighteenth century as an entertaining curiosity—deviants to be tolerated and, perhaps, pitied but who did not require harsher methods of restraint. Indeed, the more flamboyant and successful prophets were in dramatizing themselves and their message, the more vulnerable they became to charges of false posturing or, in many cases, insanity. Because they were assumed to be apolitical, such restraints tended to weigh less heavily on women. Of the “enthusiastic” prophets treated by Juster, the most enduring and successful tended to be female, notably Southcott, whose miraculous pregnancy and subsequent death at the age of sixty-five dominated the London newspapers in 1814, and Mother Ann Lee, founder of the American-based Shakers. By contrast, men like Brothers or his American counterpart Hughes were widely satirized and quickly discredited. In a sense, the civilizing dynamic of the Anglo-American public sphere ensured that the prophetic forms likely to gain the widest audience and have the greatest subversive impact were also the most ephemeral.

Doomsayers is an important book, both for what it says about the power of popular religion in the age of revolution and for what it reveals about its limits. For the men and women who lived through the upheavals of the American and French Revolutions, the dominant political idiom remained religious, yet the political impact of the prophets who captivated the Anglo-American reading public was far less than that of their English predecessors 100 years before. As Juster so ably demonstrates, the ultimate marginalization of such figures was no less important than their momentary embrace. Together, they tell us a great deal about the political culture of Hanoverian Britain and the Early American Republic.