Chad E.Seales: The Routledge Handbook of Religion and American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2025; pp. xiii + 520.

This Handbook delivers a bold reimagining of how scholars might think about the intricate entanglement between religion and American culture.Far from treating religion as a static set of doctrines or denominational structures, this volume approaches it as a cultural performance shaped by material practices, contested identities, and the economies of labour, media, and power.This approach eschews binary oppositionssacred/profane, church/state, belief/practicein favour of a theory of religion as co-constituted with American culture through sites of extraction, industry, entertainment, and death, etc. Rather than seeing religion as a spiritual essence made manifest through American forms, Seales and the contributors claim that religion is constructed through the very mechanisms of American capitalism, racial hierarchies, and cultural production.The volume unfolds across seven thematic sections: Energy, Industry, Public Life, Music, Arts and Entertainment, Literature, and Life and Death.This structure frees the work from traditional denominational boundaries, allowing for an exploration of religion as it materialises in surprising placesfrom sugar plantations to gospel choirs, fossil fuel infrastructures to Broadway stages.The opening section, Energy, redefines religion not as a metaphysical energy but as something materially produced through extractive logics.Susannah Crockford's chapter on sugar production links the violent plantation economies to the formation of black religious resistance and white theological justifications.Richard J. Callahan Jr. reveals how whaling fused missionary fervour with imperial commerce.Meanwhile, Evan Berry and Amanda M. Nichols trace theological imaginaries embedded in fossil fuel and nuclear energy narratives, respectively.Robin Globus Veldman concludes with an analysis of renewable energy as a quasi-religious movement that sanctifies capitalist environmentalism.In Industry, religion is shown to be entangled with the rise of corporate capitalism.David Walker excavates the Protestant moral roots of fiduciary trust within the banking system, while Kati Curtis uncovers how Fordist efficiency was elevated to moral doctrine.Jenna Supp-Montgomerie draws connections between telecommunications and spiritualism, and Gary Laderman exposes the salvific discourse surrounding Big Pharma.Mara Einstein closes the section with a piercing critique of evangelical branding campaigns that commodify Jesus for mass consumption.The third section -Public Life explores how religion animates the ostensibly secular domains of civic culture.Adrienne Krone links agricultural practices to spiritual myths from Puritan expansion to contemporary organic movements.Ann Marie Borys analyses the theology of architectural verticality in skyscrapers and megachurches.The domestic sphere becomes a site of spiritual improvisation in Shampa and Sanjoy Mazumdar's chapter on the home, while Ari Y. Kelman and Isaac Weiner unpack how education and workplace environments serve as ritualised secular spaces.The section on Music vibrates with theological and political resonance.Tracy Fessenden frames jazz improvisation as a theological method, while Paul Harvey maps gospel and blues as sonic expressions of black liberation.Christina Zanfagna's hip-hop chapter situates rap as both a sacred and insurgent practice.Jason C. Bivins analyses punk as a ritualised rejection of capitalist and religious orthodoxy.Collectively, these chapters argue that American music is not simply influenced by religionit often is religion, performed through sound.