Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition. By Dan McKanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 2011. vi + 330 pp. $34.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition . By Dan McKanan . Boston : Beacon Press , 2011. vi + 330 pp. $34.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn this important new book, Dan McKanan seeks to tell nothing short of a religious history of America's "Secular Left." It is a much-needed new narrative. For despite the recent revival in the study of religious liberalism, scholars have largely focused on mainline denominations and established political subjects. But as McKanan convincingly shows, even those radicals who denounced both the religion and the politics of their day understood their efforts to be part of a profoundly sacred struggle. Of course, Prophetic Encounters is not the first text to make this claim. Scholars have long shown the importance of religion to social movements like abolitionism, organized labor, and civil rights. But McKanan is the first to synthesize this established, but scattered literature. In the process, he traces a new genealogy of the Left that casts even freethinkers and anticlerics as major characters in an understudied strand of American religious history.The text's subtitle, Religion and the American Radical Tradition , makes clear McKanan's framework. It highlights the main interventions he seeks to make in constructing this religious history of the Left. First is that American radicalism is a tradition. Where other scholars have approached the Left as a history of disaggregated movements, McKanan sees succeeding generations of activists who drew upon the ideas, tactics, and resources of those who came before. He begins, for example, with the Working Men's movement of the early republic. For McKanan these journeymen were the first to employ the memory of the American Revolution to expand its promise to disenfranchised groups. The abolitionists that followed similarly drew upon both the "spirit of 1776" as well as the journeymen's tactical precedents, which in turn shaped subsequent radical movements on through the present.Central to these traditions and alliances, McKanan notes in his second guiding insight, is religion. Religious "ideas, institutions, and practices" (4) were vital, McKanan claims, not only in advancing the causes of radical movements but also in carrying them from one generation to the next. In many ways his efforts to expand upon this claim constitutes the book's main strength. McKanan's keen eye looks deep into the radical tradition to pinpoint those religious communities and theological debates that connected numerous leftist campaigns into an ongoing conversation about social justice and political liberation. We see, for example, how the Working Men's movement's appropriation of evangelicalism's egalitarian theology became a foundation from which abolitionists would advocate for the humanity of slaves. This, in turn, helped later Social Gospelers and even freethinking socialists to demand that the church side itself with the poor and oppressed, which then set the stage for the intradenominational battles over civil rights, women's rights, and the Vietnam War that defined twentieth century church history. Prophetic Encounters follows all of these strands and dramatically expands the religious history of American politics in the process. The struggle for women's ordination becomes a central part of women's suffrage; Gandian pacifism becomes a player in the growth of the AFL-CIO; and liberation theology becomes essential to the New Left's identity politics. …