In this provocative book, literary scholar Stephen Cox argues that American Christianity cannot be explained by narrative convention, theoretical constructs, economic models, or references to race and class. This is because American Christianity is “a triumph of unpredictability.” “The only way to explain it,” Cox argues, “is by reference to Americans’ strange and incalculable ways of reaching out to God, and to their churches' strange, incalculable, but generally successful ways of reaching out to them” (5–6).

Cox begins with a description and three photographs of the Episcopal Church of St. John the Divine in New York City. Started in 1892, the church has never been finished. The analogy is apt. Through fits and starts the edifice stands today as “an agglomeration of strange, fantastic, and discordant parts” (2), just like American Christianity. From there, Cox takes the reader on a travelogue through places as diverse as Jackson, Michigan and Brooklyn, New York, covering figures as dissimilar as Henry Ward Beecher and Aimee Semple McPherson. He discusses liberals, fundamentalists, Catholics, and Mormons along with Christian Science, abolition, prohibition, social gospel, civil rights, end-times prophecy, and more. And somehow he holds it all together as a story that cannot be held all together.

Along the way, Cox makes some highly insightful observations about the ironies of American Christianity. In discussing the Great Awakenings, he notes that while revival looks backward, conversion looks forward. Change becomes tradition, which sends people looking back through history for new ways to innovate, so the older becomes the newer. Megachurches do everything they can to look like anything other than a traditional church—a traditional church being that which replaced ancient and medieval spirituality by routinizing the faith through innovative hymns from the eighteenth century. Megachurches then become the new tradition, and some of their members set off on a spiritual quest to discover ancient and medieval spirituality—and on and on through time.

Similarly provocative is the discussion of end-times prophecy. Cox argues that rather than irrational, as some social scientists have argued, millennialism is the triumph of reason over tradition. Tradition is a unifier, while reason “is always productive of difference” (143). Thus, when popular prophets apply reason to apocalyptic passages of scripture, all manner of disagreements and schisms ensue. The vast array of end-times scenarios, and their ability to survive and thrive after their predictions fail, show how difficult it is to predict what the movements will do. Again, no theory suffices to explain them.

Having started with St. John the Divine, Cox comes back to architecture later in the book, showing how American churches are traditional and contemporary as well as completely unpredictable. Church architecture is then and now, historic and modern, functional and symbolic, practical and aesthetic, as function usually follows form. Particularly telling is the story of Episcopal Cathedral of Christ the King in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Built in 1968 as a hideous Gothic structure, the edifice was purchased by an evangelical congregation in 2007, which promptly built a modern megachurch and turned the older building into “a historic facility . . .available for rental,” as the church itself advertises (194). And of course all this took place in the shadow of the interstate highway. What could be more American?

No discussion of American Christianity would be complete without a consideration of music, and Cox includes a fascinating chapter on the subject. From Isaac Watts through Fanny Crosby to Charles Price Jones, American Christians have struggled over how theological the lyrics should be and how snappy the tune. Should the music be doctrinal or emotional, and how does one set the balance between performance and participation among those in the pews and those on the platform, or stage.

Cox illustrates over and over that the mystery of the individual's response to various forms of Christianity cannot be accounted for by social scientific theories that package the past and predict the future. At times he seems to be arguing against a socio-economic consensus interpretation of American religion that does not actually exist. In other words, all the theories he refutes are challenged by various religious historians as well. The book, therefore, stands alongside other works that take religion seriously as religion and accept as a working premise that individuals really are spiritual beings—i.e., their religion is not an expression of something else. In doing so in a highly creative way, the book would serve equally well in a graduate seminar or Sunday school class. This is a welcome addition to the conversation on religion and American culture, and it is a wonderful read.