Perhaps rightly, the modern historical profession is deeply suspicious of grand theories. The specialist monograph is venerated as the highest form of academic life, the holy grail that lies at the end of the postgraduate student's quest for intellectual salvation. It thus takes a rare breed of historian to attempt a work of scholarship that spans every continent and the whole sweep of human history from the first millennium bce to the present. Alan Strathern's ambition is not quite that grand, but to attempt a universal theory of religion and its relationship to political power on such a broad canvas, and to illustrate that theory by reference to two sharply contrasting religious traditions – Christianity and Buddhism – is both impressive and perilous. Though a member of the Oxford History Faculty, Strathern comes from notable anthropological stock, and this is history at its most anthropological, unafraid to construct theoretical models or to make bold comparisons that stretch across the oceans and centuries.

Religion, according to Strathern, comes in two types, or at least has done so ever since the so-called ‘Axial Age’ of the first millennium bce. These he labels as immanentism and transcendentalism. Immanentist religion came first – indeed, previous generations of scholars labelled it as ‘primitive’, then ‘primal’, or, most recently, as ‘indigenous’. It is experimental and experiential, and deploys ritual to harness the unpredictable power of essentially amoral supernatural forces (‘metapersons’) to ensure that these work to the protection and flourishing, rather than to the detriment, of human kinship communities. Transcendentalist religion was an invention of the Axial Age. In contrast to immanentism, it is concerned to transcend the limitations of mundane existence and liberate humans from the fallibility of the human condition. It is concerned to preserve eternal truths and individual morality, and not simply with what works for the community. Transcendentalist societies are held together more by kingship than kinship, and the kings are supposed to be righteous ones, manifestly conformed to transcendentalist standards of orthodoxy and morality. The revealed teaching of transcendentalist religion is enshrined in sacred scriptures, whose exposition is the task of a clerisy of religious specialists (who sometimes create problems for the kings).

Transcendentalism is a subsequent superstructure, parasitic on an immanentist base. Paradoxically, it is able to make conversionist headway only by making a claim to be more effective on immanentist terms than the primal immanentism that it seeks to replace. Christianity and Buddhism, in other words, have had to prove, not simply that they are ‘true’, but also that they ‘work’. The monks, missionaries and (central in Strathern's narrative) divinised kings, who have commended these faiths to peoples firmly wedded to immanentist presuppositions have had to present themselves as purveyors of supernatural power, capable of effecting victory in battle, miraculous healing or exorcism of malevolent spiritual forces.

The Protestant Reformation, argues Strathern, was a reassertion of transcendentalism, seeking to exalt the otherness of God over the realm of the mundane, and to curb the exploitative wonder-working to which immanentist popular Catholicism in the late medieval period was so prone. Conversely, he sees Pentecostalism, and the prosperity gospel in particular, as the latest example of the universal tendency of immanentism to resurface, displacing concerns for doctrinal orthodoxy with a preoccupation with spiritual power and all that makes for human flourishing.

Strathern's thesis is an appealing one, even if painted on such a broad canvas as to make specialists in the history of one religion shift uneasily in their intellectual bunkers. The book is fluently written, with an engaging turn of phrase: rulers and their respective clerisies, for instance, are amusingly described as ‘jealous neighbours, always casting covetous eyes over the boundary and stealing each other's clothes from the washing line’ (p. 143). The argument is supported with a dazzling display of erudition; the footnotes are impressive, and the bibliography extends to fifty pages. Furthermore, Strathern toys with, but finally and rightly resists the temptation to push his grand anthropological theory further than the historical evidence warrants. He concedes at the end of the book that patterns of conversion of divinised kings are not ‘particularly clear’ or consistent enough to form a secure foundation for prediction. Models, then, whatever their gleaming intellectual attraction to the theorist, do not always ‘work’.

This is a profoundly stimulating book that no serious historian of either Christianity or Buddhism can afford to ignore. However, this reviewer would wish to issue three caveats. They reflect the perspectives of a scholar of Protestant (and in particular mission) history. A reviewer who is a specialist in Buddhism might wish to make wholly separate points.

First, Strathern is tantalisingly ambiguous on who has won in the age-old battle between immanentist and transcendentalist varieties of religion. If transcendentalism can make progress only by accommodating itself to the pre-existent norms of immanentism understanding, it might appear to follow that ultimately the resulting process of hybridisation will eventuate in the dissolution of transcendentalist claims to doctrinal orthodoxy. Some trends in modern neo-Pentecostalism might appear to support such a (for Christians) pessimistic verdict. Yet, Strathern cannot resist the conclusion that, more often than not, the story he is telling ends with the triumph of transcendentalism, which has succeeded, not merely in the ‘election of a new party, but in ‘a re-writing of the constitution’ of religion (p. 292). Modern scholarly definitions of what religion is reflect transcendentalist more than immanentist assumptions, as specialists in indigenous religion regularly complain. Perhaps the ambiguity over the respective identities of the victor and the vanquished is intrinsic to any form of hybridity, but the reader is left wondering.

Second, it is not immediately clear why the theme of the divinisation of kinship and the role of kings in the promotion of conversion so dominates the narrative. The most obvious answer is that Strathern is, originally, a historian of early modern Sri Lanka. He draws his examples of religious conversion mainly from medieval and early modern Catholicism, although he does pay some attention also to conversions to Protestantism in the early nineteenth-century South Pacific, where kings were again the key actors in promoting religious change. However, kings and rulers figure only intermittently in the story of popular conversion to both Catholic and Protestant Christianity in Africa (Buganda is the obvious exception), India or China from the nineteenth century to the present. In these regions, European missions long persisted with their forlorn strategies of seeking conversion from the top down, preoccupied with the Christian education and evangelisation of rulers, elites and higher castes. They were slow to perceive that, under their noses, quite autonomous processes of religious change were at work driven by the (largely immanentist) perceptions of extended families and communities, usually those located at the margins or the bottom of stratified societies. Though in his final sentence Strathern provocatively suggests that twentieth-century fascist dictators or communist leaders may be divinised kings in disguise, the reality is that the global fabric of contemporary Christianity owes little to convert kings.

A third set of questions relates to Strathern's surprising neglect of the most obvious recent winners in the competition for global religious supremacy, namely Islam and evangelical Protestantism. He says relatively little about either. The late John D. Y. Peel wrote with illumination of the story of how Islam in late nineteenth-century West Africa made great progress at the cost of substantial compromise with indigenous religious perspectives. It was then hauled back again by Islamic reformers to the purity of Qu'ranic orthodoxy, thus leaving the field open for Christian missions belatedly to espouse the cause of inculturation. Strathern cites Peel in places, but a closer engagement with his penetrating scholarship on the Yoruba could only have enriched his account.

Where do we fit Evangelicalism within Strathern's grand schema? On the one hand, it seems to be emphatically transcendentalist, focused on individual salvation for eternity, scriptural exposition and a reasoned defence of the truth as a received body of sound doctrine to be imparted to ordinary people. Yet on the other, Evangelicalism has always been more of a populist and lay movement than a clerical one. The heart of Evangelical faith lies in personal spiritual experience and in lay initiatives that have frequently paid scant attention to ecclesiastical or political authority. Evangelical preaching has frequently made its appeal to large groups gathered in camp or revival meetings or, in non-European contexts, to entire communities, and it has generated phenomena of emotional enthusiasm, charismatic gifts and sheer democratic cussedness.

Evangelical Christianity has thus tended to oscillate between the transcendentalist and immanentist poles. At the Reformed (Calvinistic) end of the spectrum it has been most obviously transcendentalist, reining in the excesses of popular religiosity through a learned teaching ministry and strong confessional statements. At the more experiential, charismatic or Pentecostal end of the spectrum it has made many compromises with immanentism. It can sometimes pursue spiritual power with a pragmatic single-mindedness that keeps the Evangelical clerisy awake at night, yet is deeply appealing to many ordinary people, especially those who live in continual awareness of the radical unpredictability of the natural world and the spiritual forces that lie behind it. Once transmitted to the non-European world and removed from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment framework in which it was born, Evangelicalism has gravitated increasingly towards the immanentist pole.

It may be that the reason for this perennial magnetic attraction of biblicist strands of Christianity back towards the more mundane preoccupations of ordinary human beings is that Christianity at its scriptural roots is not quite the purely other-worldly and heavenly-minded religion that it has appeared to be for much of its history. Christian understandings of heaven as ‘radically different from this worldly existence’ (p. 49) have indeed held tenacious sway down the centuries, but arguably they owe more to Platonic idealism than they do to a religion that at its birth was grounded in the Hebraic affirmation of bodily, material modes of being. Strathern lists ‘escape from mundane existence’ as the second of fifteen universal defining characteristics of transcendentalist religion, but one of the awkward features of Christianity is its insistence that salvation is not in fact about escape either from the body or from the terrestrial sphere. Christian salvation is rather about the redemptive transformation of both the body (into the resurrection body) and the earth (what the book of Revelation calls the new heavens and the new earth). The contrast with Buddhism could not be more striking.

That may appear to be a theological point rather than a historical one, but it does highlight the potential pitfalls of a scheme of interpretation whose working assumption is that Buddhism and Christianity are two species of the same genre, more akin to each other than they are to the pragmatic and communitarian preoccupations of immanentism. None the less, Strathern has with considerable brilliance opened up a rich field for debate and reflection.