I have been waiting for this book by Dominic Green since 2015, when an essay of his, “Soul Survivor,” appeared in an issue of the Hedgehog Review devoted to the theme of “re-enchantment.” The author’s note informed us that “his next book, The Religious Revolution, is forthcoming with Farrar, Strauss [sic] & Giroux.” And so it was, though not as soon as we had reason to expect. But it was worth the wait. Brilliant, witty, enjoyably idiosyncratic, it is not a work of “history” as conventionally understood (and here “conventional” is purely descriptive, not pejorative); it is “literary” as much as it is “historical,” rather like the unclassifiable books of the late Roberto Calasso, though Green’s style is distinctively his own.

A Jewish skeptic, Green distinguishes between what he calls “religiosity” and “religion”:

Crudely, the difference between religiosity and religion is the difference between hunger and lunch. Hunger is a biological inheritance, its pangs inescapable proof of our nature. Lunch is a result of recent cultural evolution. The menu varies and is shaped by environment and appetite. Religion explains and organizes the experience of life, and when that experience changes, so does its explanation.

But it is not necessary to share Green’s understanding of religion in order to profit from his book; religious believers (such as myself) can learn from it and relish it even as they disagree with his framing.

To get a sense of what Green’s title signifies, it’s useful to turn to the last page of his book. In the epilogue, he briefly recounts the afterlife of the principal figures he has toggled between in his narrative: Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx; Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson; John Ruskin; Charles Baudelaire; Annie Besant and Helena Blavatsky; Friedrich Nietzsche; Theodor Herzl; Mohandas Gandhi; and more. Here is the last paragraph of the book, which concludes the entry for Gandhi:

Today, one in three Americans believes in reincarnation. Nearly one in eight practices yoga. Nearly one in five describes themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” The Religious Revolution is not over.

Wait a minute, you may be protesting. THIS is the payoff? It’s old news. We’ve been hearing this from pollsters and such on a weekly basis. Why should I slog through 400 pages to hear it yet again? But that’s just the point. What Green gives us is a series of fine-grained and wide-ranging episodes, wildly diverse, that flesh out commonplaces. In his “Prologue: 1848,” Green tells us, “I call the modern transformation of inner life the Religious Revolution,” and what he means by that includes much more than clichés about “spiritual but not religious.” Consider the concluding paragraph of the prologue: “This [that is, the period between 1848 and 1898] is the age of the Religious Revolution. It is also the age of science and race. This is the age of the Religious Revolution because it is the age of science and race.” Hence a book that includes Charles Darwin and Theodor Herzl.

Much as I learned from Green’s book and delighted in it (“The summer sensations of 1884 were the slow martyrdom of General Gordon at Khartoum and two images of feminine power, anonymous, mysterious, and dressed in black”), I couldn’t help but brood about the way he simply leaves out all sorts of things that might seriously complicate or even disable his thesis. After all, the 50-year period that he focuses on saw the explosive growth of Christian “foreign missions.” While Green mentions missionaries here and there in passing, one would hardly guess from his account the long-term impact of the missionary enterprise. If we are going to talk about “modern spirituality,” don’t we have to include the experience of Christians today in Africa and China and South Korea and Latin America (for instance) alongside that of the one in three Americans allegedly believing in reincarnation? And what about Islam in the 21st century?

Please don’t suppose that I am at all idealizing these religious communities, any more than I would idealize my own (Evangelical!) Christian community here in the United States. But they are indisputably examples of “modern spirituality” that differ markedly from those Green prefers to highlight.

Part of what makes Green’s narrative so beguiling is his strong sense of irony. (Actually, “strong” is too weak a word here; I suspect that the first words the infant Dominic Green spoke were ironic.) To illustrate, I opened a page at random (landing in the middle of p. 247): “In September 1882, as Nietzsche finished The Gay Science, Blavatsky set off for the pure waters and yak milk of Tibet.” There is of course something inherently ironic about the technique of juxtaposition that Green employs throughout. For that reason, I suggest reading the book in small bits, so you are able to savor the sudden shifts rather than routinizing them. They are funny, but they also have moral force, to undercut pretension.

In addition to being a historian (and a musician, and a good deal more), Green is a commentator for the American (“World”) version of the Spectator (where he became editor in chief last year). His pieces on current events (some of them written for the Spectator’s website) are often ferocious. His loathing for cant is palpable, and that is apparent in the pages of The Religious Revolution:

In London, Henry Hotze rented an office in Fleet Street and contrived a newspaper, The Index, to explain the “mild, humane, and Christian” slave system of the South. The Confederates, The Index said, were sons of English liberty. . . . Hotze distributed books and pamphlets, and blurred the loyalties of British journalists with gifts of whiskey and cigars. To emphasize ties of blood, he placed posters in streets and railway stations that blended the Confederate flag with the Union Jack.

In my experience, it is rare to see such “savage indignation” paired with good humor, and yet we find both on virtually every page of The Religious Revolution: “The best lies,” Green writes, apropos Blavatsky, “have the ring of plausibility.” Yes, alas, how true — and also how funny! What strange creatures we are.