Religion and the Human Prospect

Religion and the Human Prospect is a work of amazing originality and profound scholarship that is an urgent tract for our time. Saxton brings us face to face with the massive worldwide religious revival of the past quarter century and the flight of major social scientists from Enlightenment values and scientific conquests. In response, he offers huge, and disconcerting, analyses of the universality of religion in human societies, of its historical role in sustaining the species, of its capacity to circumvent the most devastating intellectual criticisms, and of its current potential for accelerating environmental destruction and bringing on war. Saxton has, in previous incarnations, given us the classic proletarian novel, The Great Midland, and path-breaking studies of working-class racism. His new, rigorously argued book might be his most important contribution yet. None of us can afford to ignore it.

—Robert Brenner, director, Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, UCLA

author of The Economics of Global Turbulence

In this astonishingly learned study, the great historian and novelist Alexander Saxton illuminates the central questions of human existence and of our time. Brilliantly applying materialist methods, even when departing from specifics of Marx’s conclusions on religion, Saxton’s work ranges widely from anthropology to history, from revolution to theology, from Milton to the faith-based brutalities surrounding us. Alive to contradiction, this book is among our best and most spirited guides to what Saxton calls the ‘common-law marriage’ of science and religion and, we might add, of capitalism and fundamentalisms.

—David Roediger, Babcock Professor of History, University of Illinois, author of History Against Misery

Alexander Saxton has written yet another brave and important book. In his proletarian novels, his histories of race and class in America, and now his long-awaited study of religion and human life, he tells big and uncomfortable truths. He is a writer to be treasured.

—Marcus Rediker, professor of history, University of Pittsburgh

author of Who Built America? and Villains of All Nations

Whither the world in the new millennium, as we face the perils of nuclear annihilation and ecological death? Anxiously concerned for what the future may hold, Saxton ponders the role of religion in creating our frightening human condition. His brilliant and deftly written treatise is a jeremiad of hopeful despair.

—Ronald Takaki, author of Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb