An age of grand ideas and great turbulence, the late 19th century saw a major shift in how people worship. Dominic Green charts this profound cultural and political shift through the lives and ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Helena Blavatsky, but also of Wagner, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi. These figures found themselves connecting with the religious impulse in surprising new ways, inspiring others to move away from the strictures of religion and toward the thrill and intimacy of spirituality. The modern era is often characterized as a time of increasing secularism, but Green demonstrates how the foundations of modern society were laid as much by spirituality as by science or reason.