Between 1890 and 1940, American society changed profoundly, forcing intellectuals and religious leaders to grapple with fundamental questions about the essence of religion and the grounding of values in the modern world. "Reimagining Religion" begins by elaborating the context of the late-nineteenth-century spiritual crisis in the U.S., focusing on two related factors: Darwinism and the secularization of higher education. The most devastating aspect of Darwin's theory of evolution was not so much its devaluation of human beings but, rather, the support it lent to a newly emerging conception of truth. Darwin's predecessors in England and the U.S. had looked to nature for the confirmation and elaboration of truths revealed in the Bible. For them, truth was fixed. But Darwin's method put the testing and confirmation of his theory at some indefinite point in the future; the truth it offered was provisional and cumulative. In these same late-century decades, partially as a result of the Darwinian revolution, higher education in the U.S. became increasingly secularized and divided into discrete fields of learning. The discovery of new knowledge became the primary mission of colleges and universities.

This paradigm shift, and the loss by religious organizations of their hegemony in the realm of higher education, precipitated a crisis of cultural authority. The vacuum created by orthodox religion's travails was filled by "the self," on the one hand, and by communities of experts and specialists on the other. Subjective religious experience became an important new basis of religious truth. At the same time, the ideal of value-neutrality increasingly held sway among academics. These conflicting trends—subjective religion and objective scholarship—formed the foundation of a new, distinctively post-Victorian culture in the U.S. "Reimagining Religion" charts its creation—as well as the intellectual, religious, and political backlash against it—by focusing on the stories of five individuals: the Harvard philosopher William James (1842-1910); the self-help guru Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952); the Columbia University philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952); the Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865-1933); and the Indianapolis-based evangelist E. Howard Cadle (1884-1942).