This unconventional cultural history explores the lifecycle of the radical historical Jesus, a construct created by the freethinkers, feminists, socialists and anarchists who used the findings of biblical criticism to mount a serious challenge to the authority of elite liberal divines during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

List of Illustrations ; Acknowledgements ; Introduction: The Human Being from Galilee ; Chapter 1: The Birth of the Radical Historical Jesus ; Chapter 2: The Militant and Lowly Historical Jesus ; Chapter 3: The Radical Historical Jesus in Action ; Chapter 4: The Clash of Christs ; Chapter 5: The Fireman of Terre Haute ; Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Radical Historical Jesus

"[T]his book is a valuable contribution to the literature on American constructions of Jesus. It foregrounds a neglected intellectual and spiritual tradition, situating it carefully in its cultural context, and it offers a fine-grained study of an important period in radical history." --Church History "Burns's focus allows him to contribute to the current scholarly conversation about American secularity... Burns deserves our deepest thanks for starting the conversation [about the radical historical Jesus] with this fascinating and ably executed study." --American Historical Review "A notable social and cultural labor history of the US working-class movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries... Labor historians will gain much from Burns." --CHOICE "A fresh and vital contribution" --The Journal of American History "In this superb book, David Burns reclaims one of our nation's most important, but also most neglected, radical traditions. In rediscovering the democratic, and socialist, and feminist, Jesuses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, Burns offers a significant intervention into how we view the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He also provides a creative new way for us to think about the connection between secularism, religious thought, and politics throughout our nation's past." --Robert D. Johnston, author of The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon "David Burns examines a fascinating intellectual movement that viewed Jesus as mortal, and held that Jesus' contribution lay with his example of human solidarity, not with the supernatural actions attributed to him. Now mainly forgotten, this movement had a profound impact on late nineteenth-century American thought. By excavating this worldly Jesus, Burns challenges the standard narrative that overstates the role of Protestant and Evangelical belief in Gilded Age intellectual life." --Charles Postel, author of The Populist Vision "This book's fascinating story is set in the America of 1870 to 1920 and focuses on a 'Christ constructed by radicals who denied the divine, scorned the supernatural and secularized the sacred.' Its opening pages, for example, cite debate in the Machinists' Monthly Journal of 1906 about whether the economic face of Christianity can be (no!) or must be (yes!) Socialism. This is a powerful and persuasive, timely and timeless, account of how those in positions of religious power and political privilege can cloak Jesus in layers of glorious irrelevance but how his economic radicalism surfaces again and again among those of kindred conscience." --John Dominic Crossan, Professor Emeritus, DePaul

Selling point: Shows that understudied popular radical religionists had a tremendous combined impact on the popular consciousness Selling point: A new depiction of the relationship between the secular and the sacred as it reaches back through 20th-century history

Selling point: Shows that understudied popular radical religionists had a tremendous combined impact on the popular consciousness Selling point: A new depiction of the relationship between the secular and the sacred as it reaches back through 20th-century history