The Religious Revolution

"Brilliant, witty, enjoyably idiosyncratic . . . [The Religious Revolution] is 'literary' as much as it is 'historical'. . . Part of what makes Green’s narrative so beguiling is his strong sense of irony."—John Wilson, National Review

“Dominic Green’s focus on the second half of the nineteenth century as the moment when humanity started to look in a completely different way at everything metaphysical is inspired. His erudition is extraordinary as he takes the reader through the sometimes weird but occasionally wonderful worlds of alternative belief systems, mostly respectfully but with a pleasingly satirical edge for the more bizarre ones. I suspect this will remain the standard work on the subject for decades.”—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The Religious Revolution must be the most rollicking intellectual history of the Victorian age. It explains that Darwin, Madame Blavatsky, and Gandhi were carrying out a kind of common project, and it reveals why Nietzsche considered Emerson his ‘Brother-Soul’ in nihilism. Dominic Green is a consistently witty writer, and his book moves at the pace of a really good Victorian novel.”—Christopher Caldwell, author of The Age of Entitlement

“With magisterial sweep and authority, Dominic Green recasts our understanding of the nineteenth century, revealing the great spiritual hunger that powered the revolutions and cultural upheavals we know from the standard histories. This is a buoyant, important, and exciting book.”—Ruth R. Wisse, author of Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation

“This beautifully written and deeply researched book by Dominic Green purports to be a work of history. But really, it is a work of contemporary spiritual anatomy. Green deals with a host of nineteenth-century mountaintops—Emerson, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Darwin, Whitman, and many others—but his focus is firmly on the human heart. This is a profound and moving investigation of mankind’s deepest and most beguiling longings. The Religious Revolution is a book not for a season but for the ages.”—Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion

"An incisive study of the Western world’s shift from institutional religion to more personal beliefs in the second half of the 19th century . . . Throughout, Green draws illuminating connections between these transformational thinkers and briskly contextualizes the political, economic, and technological shocks of their epoch. This is intellectual history at its most comprehensive and convincing."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)