In this passionate, insightful book, William E. Connolly tracks the work of the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine,” both source and exemplification of a destructive ethos characteristic of contemporary American political life. Born out of the elective affinity between a segment of evangelical Christianity, based on vengeful visions of the Second Coming, and the “cowboy sector of American capitalism,” defined by its “exclusionary drives and claims to special entitlement” (p. 7), this evangelical-capitalist ethos works to shore up and deepen existing inequalities. Through church sermons and Fox News Reports, in practices of consumption and investment, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine reverberates, working to stymie political debate and deflect political responsibility for the problems this same destructive ethos creates.

With compelling respect for spirituality and for the diversity and resilience of capitalism, Connolly invites his readers to “visualize an interim future that departs significantly from the shape of the present, and then to work back from that image to see what changes are needed and possible today” (p. 14, original emphasis). He thus criticizes the bellicose ethos of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine without repudiating capitalism or Christianity as such. Primarily addressing scholars and activists on the left, Connolly enjoins us to consider how to “recompose positive attachment to the earth” (p. 63), to appreciate the “pluralization of faith” and develop an “agonistic respect for alternative faiths” (pp. 62, 80), and to abandon intransigence without sacrificing militancy. In short, he joins Nietzsche in calling for a “‘spiritualization’ of enmity between noble partisans of different existential doctrines, a spiritualization in which partisans imbue their relations with elements of reciprocal prudence, forbearance, and presumptive generosity” (p. 58; see also 135). For too long, much of the Left has been wedded to secular theories, and Connolly's is a corrective to secularist assumptions and commitments. Secular theories have mistakenly represented modernity as marking a clean break with the medieval past. Secularists also ignore the need to “engage the spiritual dimension of life” and to understand how spirituality can be “critical to civilizational health” (p. 63). The secular division between the spiritual and political, which often maps on to distinctions between private and public, moreover, blocks our access to potential political alliances with parts of the Christian community. And relegating “religion” (itself a vexed term) to the domain of private life also forecloses novel ways of imagining an affirmative, affective connection to, and care for, the world.

Connolly himself identifies as an “immanent naturalist,” espousing faith in a “nature and human culture” that can “survive without the aid (or obstruction) of a divine force” (p. 79). Beholden here to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Connolly also speaks of a world in which immanent forces are intense enough to “make a difference in an undesigned world of becoming. These volatile forces flow through and around historically established entities, and they are not fixed enough to be identified as stable theoretical objects” (p. 81). As an immanent naturalist, he appreciates the uncertainty, unpredictability, and contingency involved in worldly affairs—a complexity that exceeds the analyst's ability to fully know or explain reality. But immanent naturalism also gives him the theoretical tools to “reconfigure established concepts of causality” and to put forward the concept of “emergent causality, applicable when previously stabilized systems enter a period of heightened disequilibrium” (p. 82). Connolly's immanent naturalism permits recognition of volatility, challenges claims to total explicability, and demonstrates similarities between assertions of social scientific and spiritual certainty. Like William James, he advocates treating the universe as “unfinished” and “pluralistic,” keeping a “window open” to competing theories, even while insisting that your “own doctrine may be true” (p. 90). Like James, and evocative too of Deleuze, Connolly views ethics through “inspiration, attraction, and attachment to an abundance of being…. A morality with strictly defined principles and universals lacks the flexibility to respond sensitively to a ‘world in the making’” (p. 130). Combining James's meliorist potential—the possibility that reflective action, pursued in concert with others, might promote a better world—with a tragic vision, Connolly's is a call to urgent action. A tragic vision with meliorist potential requires recognizing human limits in the context of ontological uncertainty, nurturing a love of the world and knowledge of suffering within it, and negotiating the tensions between gratitude for life's abundance and an awareness of its finitude.

Capitalism and Christianity, American Style gives its readers the gift of language, supplying us with a vocabulary to diagnose crucial problems in contemporary politics while creating and nourishing visions of a better future. Capturing well the tension between processes of reproduction and possibilities for innovation, the book is neither overly optimistic nor unduly despairing. It is an attempt to visualize a “counter resonance machine” while also recognizing the difficulties of realizing such a project in the face of a formidable, organized right-wing movement. Creating a countermovement entails understanding the affective intensities that ally entrepreneurial greed with vindictive, evangelically motivated campaigns against diversity, ecological accountability, and equality. And it also requires making thinkable what Connolly calls “eco-egalitarian capitalism” in Chapter 4—a chapter that provides concrete examples of existing experiments and new, alternative possibilities for politics and policy.

One of the book's many strengths is its focus on texts associated with the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. In particular, Connolly's discussion of the best-selling Left Behind novels is brilliantly attentive to their logics and appeal. With considerable nuance and the interpretive agility of a preeminent theorist, the author draws us in to the escape fantasy these books indulge, one that purports to chart future events and divine injunctions while drawing evidentiary sustenance from the divinely inspired Book of Revelation. These narratives enjoin believers to fight to the death against unbelievers, world government, and various personifications of the Antichrist. They are chilling reminders of the quotidian ways in which certain ideas, populations, and events can be the object of profound resentment and demonization. The righteousness of a vengeful Christ resonates with the assertions of entrepreneurial entitlement, dramatized in radio programs and televisions shows, that celebrate ongoing tax cuts for the wealthy, demonstrate an unwillingness to accept strong evidence in support of global warming, and all too readily advocate the imposition of new economic burdens on the poor.

There are, of course, minor points with which to quibble: Chapter 3, “Between Science and Faith,” is perhaps the least integrated chapter and could have done more to engage the work of evolutionary biologists and complexity and chaos theorists, as well as social scientists interested in emergent causality. “Faith” might be too capacious a term to describe the distinct ways in which commitments to secularism, religion, ethics, and science operate (I am reminded here of Talal Asad's argument [1999] that secularism is a set of principles for defining the proper place and practice of religion[s], and therefore cannot be a religion itself.). In addition, the descriptions of white working- and lower-middle-class men's attraction to a bellicose evangelical-capitalist ethos in Chapter 1 does not explain why white working- and lower-middle-class women often support male resentment, reproduce intense identifications with military campaigns and patriarchal norms, and defend men's claims to special compensation.

I want to focus, however, on two aspects of the book that seem particularly central and therefore worthy of further elaboration. First, there is the possibility of reading Connolly's interim agenda as too conservative. Although it is refreshing to think about intermediate horizons, it seems important to understand an interim in terms of a telos or long-term trajectory. In the absence of a Marxist commitment to eradicate capitalism, where should we ultimately want to go, and who are the “we” aspiring to the envisaged destination? Does the emphasis on tragedy prevent important forms of utopian imagining? How do aspirations toward radical transformation interact with and become imbricated in our expectations for and claims about the shorter run?

Second, there is the fraught issue of race in American politics. I wish the book had devoted more time to the history of racism and its centrality to capitalism. Connolly is unlike some on the “old left” who disparage social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but he does lament the failure of organizers “to build a class dimension into the counter-movements, otherwise so brilliantly forged” (p. 30). As Michael Dawson has pointed out, many movements structured by and on behalf of people of color in the 1960s and into the 1970s (including the Civil Rights movement Connolly invokes) understood the co-implications of race and class. Examples include the United Farm Workers, La Raza Unida, The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the Black Panthers. The real question may be why movements that did have a class dimension failed. In the contemporary period, a focus on race and class continues to inform some of the progressive movements he champions, such as egalitarian ecology collectives, public health initiatives, and immigration activism. And the question here is how to sustain these movements and turn them into a vibrant, powerful counterpublic capable of frustrating current right-wing movements. Perhaps most importantly, racism is critical to the functioning of the resonance machine Connolly so aptly describes. The emergence of a dominant Right, the intensity of some citizens' anxieties and resentments, and the success of the Republican Party (at least until recently) cannot be explained without understanding how race is manipulated by that sector of evangelical Christianity allied with cowboy capitalism. Or to put it differently, in the same way that historians are beginning to rewrite the history of early capitalism by tracking its constitutive relationship to slavery, Connolly's story of the evangelical-capitalist machine would benefit from a richer account of the machine's dependence on race and racism.

These criticisms are in no way meant to detract from my overall admiration for Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, which is a provocative spur to reflection about spirituality's centrality to people's lives. A clarion call for the Left to counter the Right's destructive forces, the book refuses to be derailed by the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine. With intellectual courage and an attachment to human plurality, Connolly embraces luck, creativity, surprise, and innovation while acknowledging life's tragic potential for loss and failure. He performs the presumptive generosity he urges us to adopt, providing us with a language for, and examples of, how to be and act in the world.