Ever since Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age—from Jamaica's "Living God" Haile Selassie to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island. And as Anna Della Subin points out in this unconventional history of an idea, because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence—civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions—they have much to teach us about religion, colonialism, racism, and resistance.

"An irreverent bible in its own right, a sort of celestial thought experiment…. A roving and ambitious book."—NYTBR