Pietism, Douglas Shantz concludes, originated as a seventeenth-century urban phenomenon that owed its capacity to generate a host of activities within German Protestantism to a “new paradigm.” Ranging from intensely personal “conversions” or “re-births” that followed hard (for some) on the heels of a harrowing struggle for repentance, the movement's members produced conventicles of the like-minded whose communal focus flowed from a determination to be Biblically literate, sober in behavior, and watchful for the “end times.” Imminent advent helped spur hopes for internal European renewal of education, orphanages, and poor relief but spread to ambitious international missions intent on converting both Jews and non-Christians (7). Given the utopian aspirations, students will hardly wonder at the difficulty scholars have faced in defining pietism, as well as the inevitable disappointment that dogged it.

In four sections, Schantz introduces readers to the movement and how it has been treated (and ignored) especially in the Anglophone world. Explaining the urban Holy Roman Empire context that produced the first renewal cells, he provides a selective social and cultural analysis of the movement's Central European impact and how it found expression in North America, South India, and Labrador. Finally, the book assesses the movement and “modernity.”

Schantz announces forthrightly: “German Pietism represents a key, but forgotten, strand of the religious DNA of North American Christianity” (1). By stitching together different definitions and analyses of the movement by the German and Dutch scholars Johannes Wallmann, Hartmut Lehmann, Fred van Lieburg, and Martin Gierl, Schantz skillfully integrates older historiography with newer research trends that include both theological and socio-cultural analyses of what “pietism” may have meant and how long it endured, if at all. No other comprehensive survey of German Pietism in English has emerged since the work of the transplanted Württemberger F. Ernest Stoeffler in the 1960s. Schantz's narrative provides the most accessible summary of the movement's many facets and his own assessment.

Schantz offers an homage to the posthumously published judgment of the late Carl Hinrichs, that with church music, “Pietism” was one of “the two great creations of German Protestantism” (Preußentum und Pietismus: Der Pietismus in Brandenburg-Preußen als religiös-soziale Reformbewegung [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1971], 17). The author seems to share Hinrichs's perspective, especially given the book's title about “modern” Europe. Schantz acknowledges pietism's failures and shortcomings but reaffirms the “new paradigm that was marked by the experience of renewal and new birth, conventicle gathering for mutual encouragement, successful mission to the world, and the millennial reign of Christ on earth” (279). These characteristics have remained the identifying markers of Anglophone Evangelicalism down to the present. The affirmation of “individualism, diversity, pluralism, and tolerance” and the sense of being “homeless” in the world will resonate with those who, along with Schantz, have learned to think of “modernity” in terms Peter Berger has sketched from a sociological perspective, one underscored by Schantz's own probing of the melancholic “subjectivity” of major pietist figures (277). Even the supposed characteristics of “radical” pietists (heterodox teaching, refusal to remain connected to an institutional church, and dissent from accepted societal norms [150]) do not adequately identify the radicals Schantz divides into spiritualist-alchemists, millennialists, conventicalists, and sectarians (154–177).

Schantz's perspective is openly stated: “radical pietism was the original, more genuine form of Pietism” (177). That conclusion hardly surprises, for in the long historiography of pietism, its heirs on the North American side of the Atlantic have always been sympathetic to the radicals and largely uninterested in the ecclesial version European scholars have focused on, both Lutheran and Reformed. Schantz laudably points out that the caricature of Lutheran and Reformed “Orthodoxy” remains hard to displace given the fascination of scholars with “early modern radicals, including mystical Spiritualists such as Christian Hoburg, Valentin Weigel, and Jakob Böhme. There is a need to do a better job of setting the radicals in the context of the Orthodoxy from which they deviated” (38). But one wonders at Schantz's own conclusion that “the differences between Pietism and Lutheran Orthodoxy . . . should not be exaggerated” (41). What is missing in Schantz's analysis of both “orthodoxy” and pietism is a grappling with how the implications of “modernity” raised a critical question: what was the Protestant understanding of “the church” and did these supposed radicals actually replace what was already present? If, as Schantz (correctly) concludes, “the story of Pietism is in large part the story of personal discovery” (278), then Protestants of whatever stripe may pause before cheering their “religious DNA” of “modernity.” Schantz cites fellow Canadian Charles Taylor's A Secular Age as well as Karl Barth in tracing secularity to a Protestant subjectivism, social practicality, and “improvement” of the human condition (276–277). But as readers of Brad Gregory's critique of “supersessionist” narratives will recognize, there is something unconvincingly naive about accounts that posit “medieval realities [that] gave way to early modern realities [that] gave rise to modern realities, leading to where we are” (The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society [Cambridge, Mass.: Beklknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012], 9). Why pietism, Christianity, or any “religion” is necessary in such a narrative is well worth asking. What Schantz has accomplished in this learned book is to clear the way for asking such hard questions about pietists and their critics.