In this important new book, Dan McKanan seeks to tell nothing short of a religious history of America's “Secular Left.” It is a much-needed new narrative. For despite the recent revival in the study of religious liberalism, scholars have largely focused on mainline denominations and established political subjects. But as McKanan convincingly shows, even those radicals who denounced both the religion and the politics of their day understood their efforts to be part of a profoundly sacred struggle. Of course, Prophetic Encounters is not the first text to make this claim. Scholars have long shown the importance of religion to social movements like abolitionism, organized labor, and civil rights. But McKanan is the first to synthesize this established, but scattered literature. In the process, he traces a new genealogy of the Left that casts even freethinkers and anticlerics as major characters in an understudied strand of American religious history.

The text's subtitle, Religion and the American Radical Tradition, makes clear McKanan's framework. It highlights the main interventions he seeks to make in constructing this religious history of the Left. First is that American radicalism is a tradition. Where other scholars have approached the Left as a history of disaggregated movements, McKanan sees succeeding generations of activists who drew upon the ideas, tactics, and resources of those who came before. He begins, for example, with the Working Men's movement of the early republic. For McKanan these journeymen were the first to employ the memory of the American Revolution to expand its promise to disenfranchised groups. The abolitionists that followed similarly drew upon both the “spirit of 1776” as well as the journeymen's tactical precedents, which in turn shaped subsequent radical movements on through the present.

Central to these traditions and alliances, McKanan notes in his second guiding insight, is religion. Religious “ideas, institutions, and practices” (4) were vital, McKanan claims, not only in advancing the causes of radical movements but also in carrying them from one generation to the next. In many ways his efforts to expand upon this claim constitutes the book's main strength. McKanan's keen eye looks deep into the radical tradition to pinpoint those religious communities and theological debates that connected numerous leftist campaigns into an ongoing conversation about social justice and political liberation. We see, for example, how the Working Men's movement's appropriation of evangelicalism's egalitarian theology became a foundation from which abolitionists would advocate for the humanity of slaves. This, in turn, helped later Social Gospelers and even freethinking socialists to demand that the church side itself with the poor and oppressed, which then set the stage for the intradenominational battles over civil rights, women's rights, and the Vietnam War that defined twentieth century church history. Prophetic Encounters follows all of these strands and dramatically expands the religious history of American politics in the process. The struggle for women's ordination becomes a central part of women's suffrage; Gandian pacifism becomes a player in the growth of the AFL-CIO; and liberation theology becomes essential to the New Left's identity politics. Indeed, the comprehensiveness of McKanan's history of the Left coupled with religion's centrality to it convincingly conveys that there is no history of American radicalism that is not also a history of religion—which is exactly McKanan's final intervention.

Religion has more than a mere presence in the Left's history, McKanan argues. Rather, leftist activism in America has been, and continues to be, “almost a form of religion” (4). It occupies “the same psychological and social space” (4), codifying moral claims into rituals that produce new identities, new communities, and new forms of social encounters. “Encounter” is key here, as the book's title makes clear. To McKanan, American radicalism's diverse history is rooted in the deep, interpersonal relationships activists formed in the struggle for freedom. These social encounters—or the quest for such encounters—unleashed in radicalism a sacred power, turning activists into prophets as they denounced the evils of this world and proclaimed the promises of the next. From here, McKanan is able to recast even the most skeptical activist like William Lloyd Garrison or Bayard Rustin as pilgrims on a quest for deliverance alongside their more recognizably religious brethren like Sojourner Truth or Martin Luther King.

If McKanan's religious history of the secular Left is Prophetic Encounter's strongest contribution, his recasting of American radicalism as a form of religion is certainly the book's most provocative. Yet it is also in an unfinished one. The argument that radical political activism is a distinctly religious form is a profoundly theoretical claim. It requires a reconfiguration of political tactics, practices, and ideas into a series of community- or identity-anchoring cultural manifestations. McKanan begins this process, seeing the Left's causes, rallies, and campaigns as a collective yearning for socially transformative spiritual encounters. But throughout the text, the Left's desire for encounter more often serves as a chronological tool than a theoretical one. Abolitionists of the antebellum period, McKanan suggests, desired new forms of “personal encounter” with the Other, while labor activists yearned to build a “collective encounter” with the industrial masses. Both were eventually replaced by the “encounters of identity” that drove the divergent campaigns of the New Left. To be sure, these concepts provide a useful structure for understanding the evolution of religion of radicalism. But they do not fully unpack the theologies, rituals, and associations that constituted them.

In the end, however, Prophetic Encounters is more concerned with fostering more research in this direction than concluding it. Covering two hundred years of history, it should be of interest to scholars working on any aspect of American political history. It is also a very accessible text that would work well with undergraduates. In either case, the book deserves a wide audience. Because as McKanan notes, “To say that radicalism is almost a form of religion is not to deny the tension between the two but to explain it” (4). Here's hoping this important book launches a number of similar attempts to do so.