Are religion and democracy hopelessly incompatible forces in our time? David Gutterman would like us to believe that they are not. In this book, he examines both recent historical and contemporary examples to show how religion can either thwart or support democratic politics, depending upon how it is practiced. He looks at four Christian “social movements”: the revivalism of Billy Sunday in the early twentieth century, the ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid–twentieth century, and the Promise Keepers movement and Jim Wallis's Call to Renewal in our own time. Gutterman shows that whereas the movements of Billy Sunday and the Promise Keepers are essentially antidemocratic (and also “antipolitical”) in nature, the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Call to Renewal demonstrate that religious social movements can enhance pluralism, mutual respect, and dialogue in American politics.

The author's helpful insight is that these movements can best be understood via an analysis of the rhetorical narratives that they communicate. Specifically, he notes that all four shape their self-understanding through the story of Exodus. Each of these movements has a wildly different take on this story: Sunday stresses the correct upbringing of Moses by his mother, King stresses how Moses learned leadership from his experiences, the Promise Keepers see Moses as a “man's man,” and the Call for Renewal stresses Moses' ordinariness, how he is just like anyone else (and can therefore be emulated). It is these various articulations of the story of Moses that constitute the terrain of Gutterman's “prophetic politics.”

For Gutterman, the crucial distinction among these narratives lies in whether they are framed in terms of already being in the promised land (as Sunday and the Promise Keepers do) or being still in the “wilderness” (as King and the Call to Renewal do). To consider America as “the promised land” implies that the great political questions are already settled; the only danger is corruption and degeneracy, the solution to which is personal salvation and a strong sense of “us” (saved) versus “them” (damned). To consider America to be the wilderness, on the other hand, is to see that collective action and social responsibility remain necessary and to recognize other citizens as fellow “sojourners” who require respect and recognition.

The main theorist that Gutterman evokes for his analysis is Hannah Arendt (partially as received via Lisa Disch, among others). In particular, he takes from Arendt the notion of “visiting,” a kind of political interaction whereby we “recognize the constructedness of our own and others' governing narratives—and still [are] able to engage in politics” (p. 38). Rather than override the other with our projections (as Sunday and the Promise Keepers implicitly do), visiting allows us to maintain a sense of both our mission and value while we engage in meaningful dialogue with others in our midst.

In general, Prophetic Politics is a very engaging text; the framework of using the Exodus narrative helps make for clear comparisons, and this book is exactly what political theorists should try to write more often: a work that engages with contemporary politics using political theory (in this case the work of Arendt) as a basis of discernment. The book is also very timely insofar as it reflects a growing belief on the part of more progressive elements in the United States (or at least the Democratic Party) that it is not wise to cede religion and “values” to the right wing (an argument that is encapsulated by Wallis himself via his best-selling God's Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, 2005).

Before we all jump on this bandwagon, however, Gutterman's book offers, perhaps unintentionally, as many cautions as it does means by which to make discernments among various religious movements in this country. Besides the ennoblement of the not-uncontroversial Wallis via the analogy to King, Prophetic Politics expresses some deep ambivalence on the author's part. He expresses this ambivalence directly when he writes that he is “ultimately ambivalent” about the “challenge religion offers democratic politics.” Yet he is “unwilling to cede prophetic politics … to anti-democrats” (p. 19).

This ambivalence is also expressed through a series of hesitations on the author's part. For example, he is indecisive about whether to consider the negative characters in this book to be “political actors.” He tells us, for example, that Sunday's theology is “surely political” but not part of “democratic politics.” He ends up stating that Sunday offers us an “anti-political prophetic politics” (p. 69), a term redolent of the author's ambivalence.

Another hesitation comes when Gutterman remains uncertain as to whether the movements he prefers are revolutionary or reformist. He argues that there is nothing wrong with being reformist, but he seems to accept King's claims to being a kind of revolutionary and offers (against Sacvan Bercovitch) that something (radically?) new can be produced via prophetic politics.

This ambivalence on the author's part may even extend to the notion of visiting itself, insofar it remains uncertain how much visiting allows for a genuine encounter with the other. As we have seen, Gutterman tells us that visiting involves “recogniz[ing] the constructedness” of our own and others narratives, something that Billy Sunday and the Promise keepers clearly do not do. Yet, given the primacy of rhetoric in this analysis, it might not be so much that visiting allows a genuine openness to others' stories as it might serve as a construction that makes us seem open to others' stories. In such a case, openness itself is part of what we construct (just as Sunday and the Promise Keepers construct a relationship with the other that seems closed).

This book reflects much of the bafflement and worry of the liberal Left about the issue of religion in American life, and it is a brave attempt to face that issue head-on. But in many ways, in its ambivalence, the book shies away from its own rhetorical insights insofar as it continues to treat the darker variants of American religious practices as somehow mysterious and opaque. We might recognize that the very idea that Sunday and the Promise Keepers are antipolitical (even if “politically” so) is part of the rhetorical power of their variant of religious discourse, a power to delineate a particular version of publicness that works to their own advantage. Rather than see religion as being somehow different from politics (in which case we dismiss or tolerate it, but also fear it), we might see it as a style of politics, a style of persuasion that is as vulnerable to critique and counterpersuasion and as fungible as any other. We do not have to argue that someone's practices are antipolitical to dislike their politics, and we do not have to think we have actually encountered the “other” in order to have a sense of relationality that is politically meaningful (to us, anyway). Nor do we have to write off great masses of Evangelical Christians from the public realm (which Gutterman clearly does not want to do) when it is clear that they are busily acting in and upon the very realm that we uncomfortably share with them.