This is a book about religion in the new millennium. Lee and Ackerman begin with the premise that the Western Enlightenment brought about disenchantment; a process by which the world was rid of magic, superstition and arcane knowledge due to the elevation of reason. They hold that from the second half of the twentieth century the world has been experiencing a trend towards re-enchantment, as a counter-process to modernity. This re-enchantment is evidenced through a quest for new religious experiences in meditation, shamanism, ritual performances and healing. It is a trend, the authors says, ‘that disprivileges the authority of the rational and renews understanding of the irrational’ (p. 13). They propose that its roots lie in the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, this lineage can be explicitly traced in the case of Protestant charismatic and neo-pentecostal churches, who have roots in Wesleyan holiness movements, though Lee and Ackerman are not writing this kind of cultural and intellectual history. As sociologists, they see the turn that many individuals make towards Indian religions and Far East Asian religions, and towards neo-paganism as part of the same search that charismatic Christians undertake, for sources of re-enchantment. They examine this trend principally by reference to fundamentalism and the renewal of shamanism.

The authors seem at times to fall in to the trap of speaking too sweepingly about the Enlightenment and modernity, as a totalitarian effort to control the external world. Furthermore, they write as though the processes seen in much of Europe, concerning an increasing religious scepticism and disengagement from the churches, has been a global process, such that the global trends they are now describing can be classed as re-enchantment across the world. Yet, as Grace Davie’s work suggests, Europe has been an exceptional case. If Europe is indeed experiencing re-enchantment, perhaps other parts of the world are experiencing on-going enchantment or new kinds of enchantment (something the authors acknowledge at the end of the book with regard to Asia).

The central claims of the book are difficult to grasp because the authors provide little grounding to illustrate their complex theory. For example, they write that the ‘Western Enlightenment empowered reflexivity to place the subject at the centre of the lifeworld. The goals of world mastery could not be realized without the mediation of reflexivity’ (p. 7). This reader is left wondering what exactly they mean. Or again, ‘the paradigmatic assumption of linear progression turned charismatic origins into a victim of historical movement to be engulfed and overcome by the processes of institution-building’ (pp. 22–23). Without concrete examples to make their point, their theory is both hard to follow and difficult to evaluate critically. This becomes a particular problem regarding the distinction that Lee and Ackerman draw between sign and symbol. This distinction is pivotal for the book, which claims that we have moved in to the age of the sign and that the sign has encroached on the symbol. We could do with clearer examples of sign and symbol and the ways in which they function.

The authors describe fundamentalism in terms of the revenge of the symbol. This is interesting to theologians, who are more used to regarding fundamentalism as anti-symbolic in the sense of favouring a non-figurative, seriously literal reading of the world. This reader remains unconvinced that fundamentalists adopt a model of symbolic truth, and disagrees with the account of fundamentalism as a defence of traditional religion. Fundamentalism is more primitivist than traditionalist, seeking to go back to some pure source, rather than to honour the development of tradition down the ages. But this disagreement is probably a case of theologian and sociologist talking past each other rather than against each other. Greater clarity from Lee and Ackerman would help me to be sure that this was the case. They are, however, convincing in their argument that since the Cold War liberals have reified the fundamentalist threat, and they show admirably how disparate movements across the world and from many different faiths, have thus been brought together under the fundamentalist label during the past two decades.

Their final word on the future of religion is ominous. Because we are in the age of the sign, and signs relate to nothing other than themselves, religion under the sign fails to anchor us or refer us to a deeper reality, and instead has a destabilizing effect. The re-enchanted self finds that the signs of re-enchantment point only to other signs. Lee and Ackerman do not themselves provide clear examples, but one sees this process explicitly in post-evangelical, post-charismatic Christianity, where the internet chat-sites are full of people debating whether anything really points to anything. The book ends with the claim: ‘Religion is shattered as symbolic culture comes under the power of the sign’. And yet, again just taking the case of recovering evangelical and charismatic Christians, religion heals by bringing people back in to the realm of the symbolic, and it thereby redeems itself.