Albert J. Raboteau's latest book, American Prophets, is one part history, one part jeremiad, and one part memoir. According to its subtitle—Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice—the book purports to be a study of Americans who led opposition to militarism, racism, and materialism. Raboteau fulfills some of that promise. He also provides a glimpse of the attributes that drew him to these religious figures.

The seven prophets covered are Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), A. J. Muste (1885–1967), Dorothy Day (1897–1980), Howard Thurman (1899–1981), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), and Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977). Finding common attributes among them beyond the author's own selection is a challenge. They did not belong to the same generation; Muste, for instance, was almost forty-five when King was born. Three of the seven were born in Europe—Heschel in Poland, Muste in the Netherlands, and Merton in France. They did not share the same religion. Heschel was Jewish, Muste grew up Dutch Reformed and became a Quaker, Day and Merton were Roman Catholic (one lay, one religious), and King, Thurman, and Hamer grew up in Baptist churches—but only King and Thurman became ministers. They did not join the same organizations. Muste and Thurman had ties to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist organization formed at the beginning of World War I. Heschel was active in Clergy and Laity Concerned about War in Vietnam. Day's institutional outlet was her own: The Catholic Worker. Merton had a hand in the Catholic Peace Fellowship. King and Hamer worked for civil rights in a number of organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Only a few of Raboteau's prophets knew each other and collaborated. Merton read Heschel and corresponded with him. Thurman and Muste cooperated in the Fellowship of Reconciliation. King was a friend of Heschel and had contact with Muste. Each had interests and outlets that only accidentally overlapped.

What did unite these prophets were commitments to “movements of social and political change.” They took up the cause of people “suffering injustice and oppression.” Raboteau uses Heschel's own definition of a prophet to frame his approach: a person in “fellowship with the feelings of God,” in “sympathy with divine pathos,” and so hears “God's voice and feels His heart.” In turn, the prophet “tries to impart the pathos of the message” and he or she speaks “out of the fullness of . . . sympathy” (xvi).

Discerning such an encounter with the divine sets a high bar for academic inquiry, and Raboteau's accounts of each prophet rarely rise to the mystical or existential heights of Heschel's description. For instance, Heschel himself first considered the call of social activism during the 1950s while at work on his dissertation and became convinced that he needed to “be involved in human affairs, in human suffering” (8). He found justification to shift from the sort of theological inquiry on which he had been reared to activism by recognizing God's own pathos for those who suffer. As Heschel put it, “Prophets have a bias in favor of the poor” (11). Divine pathos was also part of Muste's motivation for social involvement. While working as a pastor during World War I, he became a pacifist when he realized he could no longer comfort those who had lost sons in battle. He soon resigned, became a Quaker, and lived in settings and established organizations designed to “express the teachings and spirit of Jesus” (37). In the case of Day, her identification with the plight of the poor was bound up in her conversion to Roman Catholicism. As such, her divine encounter was not one of God calling her to prophetic work but one of seeing Christ in the worker or poor person. When providing shelter or sustenance, Day believed, she was “replaying the part of Lazarus or Martha or Mary, and that my guest is Christ” (77). For Thurman as well, the event that triggered his activism was less an experience of divine presence than a recognition of solidarity with all humanity. While traveling in India and meeting a scholar of Indian religions, Thurman recalled an awareness of “the most primary naked fusing of total religious experience with another human being.” It was a “watershed” moment in his life and led to efforts to cultivate such a sense of “religious fellowship” in the United States that cut across racial barriers (105).

Why these particular religious experiences led to civil rights and anti-war activism, Raboteau does not explain. For instance, women's rights is not a theme that he features in the lives of these figures. The possibility that these prophets were already committed to certain social causes and then found religious justification for them is just as plausible as arguing that religion supplied the chief motive for activism. The explanation for the contours of these prophets' lives and thought is likely Raboteau's own experience. The book is personal in two significant ways. First, not only did the book emerge from the course “Religious Radicals” that Raboteau regularly offered at Princeton, but it also starts with his own recent experience in a bookstore when asked, “What good does religion do in politics?” His answer was King and Hamer—people who enabled white Americans “to empathize vicariously with the suffering of African Americans” (105). Second, the very nature of prophetic witness, as Raboteau understands it, is to release “the efficacy of redemptive suffering” and prompt action (151). That action, as the book portrays it, does not take shape in policy or legislation, activities that bear directly on the question, “What good does religion do in politics?” Instead, the action is experiential, embodied in “deep compassion for those suffering injustice” (145). Raboteau admits that his aim is to help readers “grasp the divine pathos that moved each” of the figures he covers (xiv). The example he gives of such an encounter is one of his students who, after taking Raboteau's seminar, acknowledged that he was an alcoholic and entered a twelve-step program. That is when Raboteau learned “that teaching and reading could inspire action” (xvii).

The awkwardness of framing a book about radicals who protested social injustice with an account of a person who enrolls in a rehabilitation program haunts Raboteau's achievement. Is the book more about its subjects' political achievements, or is it a tribute to figures who inspired a particular professor and a course in which he took pride? Raboteau does not sort out these tensions. Nevertheless, his book is instructive for understanding the appeal of religious radicalism in the contemporary university.