In this fascinating and brilliantly conceptualized book, Amy Kittelstrom provides the genealogy of an idea: the “religion of democracy.” The term comes from William James, perhaps the United States' most influential and profound thinker, who, in his late nineteenth-century writings argued for a social and cultural pluralism grounded in a provisional, even uncertain, sense of truth. The religion of democracy thus created and allowed space for real, manifest difference among people, and “forbade judgment of others' incomprehensible values and ways because in a moral multiverse in which each individual's perspective is partial, each culture is partial too, each position ‘peculiar,’ and therefore each angle on reality is needful” (200–1). It was more than a mere idea: it gave life to a whole program of pluralistic political inclusion that lives with Americans to the present day.

The Religion of Democracy moves far beyond the thinker who articulated the central idea. Kittelstrom's narrative spans from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth, detailing the story of American liberalism in its shift from post-Puritan Congregationalism in New England, to Unitarianism, to a “religion of democracy” as espoused by the non-Christian James, and ultimately to post-Christian social justice arguments emphasizing the dignity of all people and the value of all belief systems. Kittelstrom focuses her story on “seven liberals” connected to the intellectual world of Boston elites: John Adams (1735–1826); Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863); William Ellery Channing (1780–1842); William James (1842–1910); Thomas Davidson (1840–1900); William Mackintire Salter (1853–1901); and Jane Addams (1860–1935). Each of these individuals is the subject of their own deeply researched chapter, which might suggest a kind of prosipographical slog through a series of “life and times.” The Religion of Democracy is not that. Instead, in lively, often arresting prose, Kittelstrom deeply contextualizes each of these lives to show connections far and wide into the main streams of American thought and political action. Among this book's many virtues is its taking an ostensible story of New England Brahmins—in other imaginings, people with dense, impenetrable ideas developed aloof from the concerns of everyday American life—and showing how the history of the religion of democracy is absolutely central to understanding one of the underlying currents of American political ideology over time—including our own.

At its core, Kittelstrom argues, liberalism was premised on pluralism; but by the middle of the twentieth century it became “dogma” in various social justice movements, and even required a kind of government action, if not coercion, to achieve its aims. That would have been foreign to Kittelstrom's seven liberals. As she puts it, “once liberals became dogmatists, they were no longer pluralists” (355). Maintaining the balance was never an easy thing, and for the main actors in The Religion of Democracy—elite, white, by turns hampered by their own versions of intolerance in their own times—it might be said that their arguments were often more aspirational than applied. Yet as Kittelstrom shows, each actor believed in a kind of moral progress, as well as a strongly political application for their ideas—whether in the creation of the American republic; the resistance to slavery; the call for women's rights; support for religious inclusion; or, by the end of the book, the work of Jane Addams, whose labors among Chicago's urban poor and then efforts at peacemaking among Western nations earned recognition with the first Nobel Peace Prize given to a woman.

In telling this story, Kittelstrom deftly questions several verities that have guided historians of religion and politics in the United States. The most significant of these is that liberalism is somehow “secular.” That was an argument many nineteenth-century opponents of liberalism made—and in fact one liberals told themselves—which historians have uncritically absorbed into their own analyses. The reality is far more complicated. American liberalism proceeded from what Kittelstrom calls an “American Reformation,” which for eighteenth-century New England believers grew from the Protestant Reformation launched in Europe. New England Calvinists and their nineteenth-century evangelical heirs argued intensively that theirs was the “orthodox” faith, but in the disestablished American religious landscape no such orthodoxy ever existed. It was a religious free-for-all. In such an environment, the evangelicals and Calvinists made right belief—doctrinal assent—the litmus test for true religion, but that view separated “head and heart, or intellect and soul,” which was never the intention of the European Reformers of an earlier era (6).

Those who fell on the liberal side of the theological spectrum in turn emphasized the converse: they extolled freedom of thought, the liberty of conscience of all people, because it was God alone who could actually understand the world perfectly. This argument, rooted in the American Reformation, animated the politics of John Adams, who called for freedom from British tyranny, and it soon proved a boundless faith in the early American republic. It would lead the next generation of liberals, such as Congregationalists Mary Moody Emerson—aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson—and William Ellery Channing, often called the father of American Unitarianism, to go further in their critiques of evangelical orthodoxies. Yet as Kittelstrom shows repeatedly, the American Reformation's de-emphasizing of doctrine did not lead to a lack of concern about moral action, or even sin in the world. Rather, it animated a growing concern for toleration, and the fruit of action as the proof of a religious system's value. As new knowledge entered the scene—from Darwin and science, from growing historical work on the Bible, from new encounters with non-Christian world religions—it was a short step from the ideas of the American Reformation to the ideas of what formally became known as pragmatism. That view was grounded in the “religion of democracy.” And there was nothing secular about its history.