This book is a detailed and thorough history of a Progressive Era phenomenon—the construction of Jesus as a political and social radical. Burns argues that radical intellectuals of the Progressive Era drew on historical-critical study of the Bible to construct a “radical historical Jesus.” This Jesus was solely human, not divine or supernatural and not defined by doctrine. Born into a context of imperial rule and unequal wealth, he became a class-conscious workingman “bent on overthrowing the prevailing order” (49). He affirmed international brotherhood and resisted institutional power in all its forms. A touchstone for this tradition was the story of Jesus' driving the money-changers out of the temple.

Burns offers both an intellectual and a cultural history. His narrative is organized around major literary works, the life and thought of their authors, and the network of influences among them. Burns also traces the reception and impact of these works in radical communities.

The introduction lays out the differences between radicals, theological modernists, and liberal social gospellers. Chapter 1 surveys early development of the “radical Jesus” idea in the life and work of Ernest Renan, Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the leaders of two dissenting churches. Chapter 2 takes up the socialist Jesus of George Herron and of Cyrenus Ward's The Ancient Lowly (1889–1900), along with religious tensions in the Socialist Party. Two chapters on the pastor and theologian Bouck White form the centerpiece of the book. White's popular book The Call of the Carpenter (1911), “a didactic piece of radical art” (82), depicted Jesus building up a revolutionary movement against the Roman Empire and its materialistic greed. In the context of widespread unemployment, labor unrest, and violence, White's Jesus inspired direct confrontations with Christian capitalists and their churches, as well as a fleeting alliance between radicals and lay Protestants. A final chapter argues that Eugene V. Debs drew on the radical-Jesus tradition more than on evangelical influences for his religious thought and rhetoric. The “death” of the radical Jesus, says Burns, was due largely to the rising cultural emphasis on a heroic warrior Jesus in the years before World War I. An epilogue considers the survival and revival of the “radical Jesus” idea since that time, with particular attention to African-American theologies.

Burns invokes Sidney Ahlstrom's idea of “secular religion” as a guiding motif (A Religious History of the American People, [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972]), and he describes his subjects as “secular-minded religionists.” I am not persuaded, though, that the polarity of “secular” and “religious” is the most useful way to frame radicals' appropriation of Jesus. While most of Burns' subjects denied the divinity of Jesus and rejected conventional forms of religion, neither of these gestures necessarily defines them as “secular.” And, while Burns's commendable aim is to show that radicals did practice a kind of religiosity in relation to Jesus, the book struggles to describe the nature of that religiosity. Dan McKanan's Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (Boston: Beacon, 2011) provides a clearer treatment of the varieties of religion in radical movements. McKanan also offers a broader perspective on the relationship of the Socialist Party to religion.

More intriguing is Burns's thinking about history. He contends that the “radical historical Jesus” was not only historical but imagined. Indeed, most of his subjects freely admitted that they filled in the gaps in the historical record with imagination and storytelling, even as they insisted that their imagined Jesus was an accurate historical representation. As George Herron put it, “We have no way of actually knowing what Jesus did or said . . . Out of the fragments and distortions we may put together what seems to us his original image and purpose.” Creative narrative, in their view, was potentially more truthful than the “scientific” history espoused by liberal academics. Here is a significant addition to conversations about history, public memory, and nonprofessional interpretation.

The book suffers early on from the absence of an explicit definition of “radical.” I would also have liked to see a more nuanced treatment of the boundaries of radicalism. The idea of a fully human Jesus, removed from the accretions of theology, doctrine, and institutions, is beloved of liberals and moderates, not only of radicals. Yet Burns at times seems to present humanness and historicity as definitive of, and exclusive to, the radical Jesus. The book is also marred by an unfortunate tendency to refer to events and entities before introducing them to the reader.

In general, however, this book is a valuable contribution to the literature on American constructions of Jesus. It foregrounds a neglected intellectual and spiritual tradition, situating it carefully in its cultural context, and it offers a fine-grained study of an important period in radical history. Burns's discussions of Renan, Ward, and White are particularly useful. Students will find contemporary resonance in the controversies over flag-burning, in White's late turn to localism, and in the broad question of income inequality. The illustrations are well-chosen and informative, especially the wonderful images of Jesus the worker.