At their criminal trial in 1973, a group of Catholic antiwar activists drew on ideas and values from Catholicism to secure their acquittal, even though ‘they readily admitted to committing’ the crimes of which they were accused (p. 162). Two years earlier, they had broken into a federal building in Camden, New Jersey, with the goal of impeding the US government’s ability to draft young men into military service. These activists, the so-called Camden 28, are the subject of Michelle M. Nickerson’s outstanding book. Just as the Camden 28’s outlook on the Vietnam war resulted from ‘a combustible mix of political movements, foreign policy decisions, and theological developments’, this study seamlessly weaves together political, legal, cultural and religious history (p. 2). Spiritual criminals is at once a rich examination of the intellectual currents that informed Catholic protest movements during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a timely reflection on the legacies of the Catholic Left and its political activism in the decades that followed.

Nickerson’s book consists of three sections, each with several chapters. The first section traces the intellectual origins of the Catholic Left. Chapter i situates Catholic protests against the Vietnam war against the backdrop of the larger antiwar movement, as well as in the context of the popular view within US Catholicism that supporting the nation’s military was among the ‘duties of citizenship’ and a way for Catholics ‘to demonstrate their allegiance to state leaders’ (p. 24). Chapter ii examines the longer history of Catholic protest in the twentieth-century United States, from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement through the Civil Rights campaigns of the sixties. While the background provided is important, much of the content will be familiar to knowledgeable readers. These context-heavy chapters delay the arrival of the volume’s stronger contributions. The book becomes notably stronger in chapter iii, as Nickerson explores the complex interpersonal dynamics that resulted as ‘the sexual revolution and radical movements … shaped and actuated each other’, leading to experiments in ‘communal living’ and new relationships among members of the Catholic Left (p. 63).

Spiritual criminals fully hits its stride in its second section. Here, Nickerson’s skill at crafting historical narrative and developing the central characters of the study is on full display. With style and pacing reminiscent of a captivating heist novel, Nickerson offers detailed discussion of the events leading to the break-in, as well as vivid description of Camden and the racial and class conflicts that divided the community in the early 1970s. The feeling of lost opportunity and powerlessness in Camden both inspired critiques of the resources the US government devoted in Vietnam as well as deep feelings of empathy for the Vietnamese in their suffering. These chapters also allow Nickerson to analyse more fully the motives of the various participants in the break-in and offer important contextual information about similar raids on government facilities.

The third section explores how these twenty-eight ‘different defendants’ facing ‘varying stakes’ if convicted had trouble finding a ‘common strategy’ for their defence (p. 125). Eventually, they reached sufficient consensus and grounded their defence in what they understood to be Catholic values. While also seeking to undermine the government’s case against them, the defendants emphasised their belief that their actions were morally justified. They arranged the trial so that ‘every witness represented an opportunity to explain why the jury should not convict them’ (p. 162). Religious themes pervaded the testimony. One priest explained ‘the moral and spiritual underpinnings of the antiwar movement’ (p. 169). The parent of one of the defendants proclaimed, Nickerson writes, that ‘she knew no group of people more “Christ-like”’ than the Camden 28 (p. 173). The book concludes with Nickerson’s assessment of the legacy of the Catholic Left, especially as conservative forces came to dominate Catholicism at the end of the twentieth century and dawn of the twenty-first.

Spiritual criminals is an immensely valuable study of how a secular event can become a religious one. In this case, Nickerson persuasively argues, the legal proceedings became ‘sacramental’ through the close relationships among the defendants and their commitment to ‘Catholic Left principles of communitarianism, peace, and personalism’ (p. 122). The book is also an important contribution to recent scholarship on how US Catholics navigated the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, including Peter Cajka’s Follow your conscience: the Catholic Church and the spirit of the sixties (Chicago 2021), as well as the larger body of work on religious contributions to that decade’s protest movements. The book’s central claims are very well supported by the wealth of information that Nickerson gleaned through personal interviews with her subjects, which additionally provide rich details of their often-fraught relationship with Catholicism. As Nickerson notes of one subject, ‘she adopted the ideals of community and the Gospel examples of nonviolence but let go of the sacraments’ (p. 83). Many of the Camden 28 had equally complex understandings of their Catholic faith.

This strong emphasis on the personal is critical given that the defendants’ ‘intimate and informal’ appeals to the jury were among the most compelling parts of their defence (p. 149). Nickerson recognises that her readers will become invested in the central figures of the study, and she wisely devotes considerable space at the book’s conclusion to sketching their life stories after the trial, especially the way that many drifted away from the Catholic Church even as they remained politically active. As she centres the activists, Nickerson nevertheless strikes a deft balance that keeps her treatment of them from becoming hagiographic. Though Spiritual criminals presents its subjects sympathetically, Nickerson does not neglect more troublesome dynamics of the Camden 28 community, including the ‘problematic but consensual sexual liaisons’ marked by significant power imbalances that developed among several of its members (p. 178).

Given the book’s ambitious goals of providing detailed personal histories of the Camden 28 while also situating them in the longer arc of Catholic protest movements in the United States, it is perhaps inevitable that some elements of that larger story might be neglected. One notable instance of this occurs with Nickerson’s discussions of Dorothy Day. A long treatment of her activism in chapter ii concludes with Day in a state of ambivalence, viewing the ‘property destruction’ caused by raids on draft boards to be itself ‘a form of violence’ and thus something to be rejected (p. 43). Day makes a brief appearance later in the book at an Ash Wednesday liturgy where draft cards were burned, and Nickerson suggests that the Catholic Worker leader had warmed to the activists’ strategies. But it remains unclear to readers to what extent Day’s perspective had changed. This is a relatively small issue as Day is not essential to the story of the Camden 28. Nevertheless, a fuller examination of the evolution of Day’s thought would have gone a long way in highlighting just how strong the influence of these activists was – or was not – on US Catholic thought outside their immediate circles.