We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual by Spencer Jackson (review)

If you want to be able to appreciate what Spencer Jackson is up to in We Are Kings, it will help first to recall what John Milton was up to in Book 3 of Paradise Lost. A lot happens in Milton’s third book: We meet God for the first time, and also the Son, who immediately volunteers for a suicide mission, even as Satan is rocketing through outer space, landing on the sun, and asking anyone he can find whether they know the way to Earth. Book 3 also contains Milton’s compressed account of the End of Days—God’s insurrectionary Five Year Plan, which is to unfold in three stages:

Stage #1: Already here, in humanity’s earliest days, God is losing interest in ruling as a monarch, choosing instead to hand his sovereignty off to Jesus, who is in some respects a lesser being, and who uniquely in his person will end up sharing that power with humanity. So that’s two sharings now: God is going to share power with the one who shares power. In the figure of the Son, God and humanity will in some not fully manifest sense rule together and so un-sovereignly: He “shalt reign both God and man” (3:316–17). What had been God’s power alone will eventually become a condominium of two. (Or is that three? Or is it many?) Power has already started its trajectory out- and downward.

Stage #2: When the millennium comes, this figure of shared power is going to undertake a world revolution, installing himself as “universal king” (3:319) and thereby ridding the planet of its particular kings: its despots, tyrants, and bosses.

Stage #3: The universal monarchy’s last act will be to abolish itself. The Un-lord will become immanent in the world, which will henceforth be self-governing: “God shall be all in all” (3:343).

Our historicist scruples will never be pedantic enough to suppress the observation, as it flits across the mind, that Milton has in the passage of #2 to #3 anticipated the Bolshevik theory of revolution at its most controversial point: centralization as the counterintuitive path to decentralization, the amassing of power by one determined to give it all away. But we don’t have to establish that point here. For now, it will be enough to grasp that Milton’s prophecy also furnishes Spencer Jackson with the template for his argument. You might hear me as saying that Jackson has something new to report about Paradise Lost, but that’s not it. He has surprisingly little to say about Milton, in fact, and nothing at all about the epic’s third book. The point is rather that Jackson has silently and perhaps unwittingly modeled his book on Milton’s apocalypse. What if the millennium—the redeemed world, the all-in-all—had almost come to pass in 1812? Such is Jackson’s question to his readers. And what if its gospel had been eighteenth-century British literature, and not just this or that title from its canon, but all of them taken together, one long Book of Revelation to foretell Babylon’s late Hanoverian downcasting? And what if we had overshot the kingdom of ends, had missed our chance to build the reign of saints on earth, because it hadn’t occurred to us to read Augustan satire and the early novel as sacred texts? And what if we now had another crack at it? What if we could have the millennium after all if we only corrected our readings of Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson? We Are Kings is by all appearances an academic book, with eleven pages of endnotes and a University of Virginia logo on its back cover. But it is, in fact, something else altogether—a whirlwind scroll of radical Protestant prophecy masquerading, not all that convincingly, as literary history.

Jackson’s...