It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend—of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”—only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. In all these cases, Hägglund identifies the true dynamic, the true anguish, as secular desire—a natural anxiety about loss, a natural mourning of the lost one—horribly distorted by its corrective religious gloss. The supposed attraction of eternity, Hägglund writes, is that you cannot lose anything there. “But if you can lose nothing in eternity,” he goes on, “it is because there is literally nothing left to lose.”

The great merit of Hägglund’s book is that he releases atheism from its ancient curse: its sticky intimacy with theism. Hägglund has no need for a parasitical relationship to the host (which, for instance, contaminates the so-called New Atheism), because he’s not interested in disproving the host’s existence. So, instead of being forced into, say, rationalist triumphalism (there is no God, and science is His prophet), he can expand the definition of the secular life so that it incorporates many of the elements traditionally thought of as religious. Hägglund’s argument here is aided by Hegel’s thinking about religion. For Hegel, as Hägglund reads him, a religious institution is really just a community that has come together to ennoble “a governing set of norms—a shared understanding of what counts as good and just.” The object of devotion is thus really the community itself. “God” is just the name we give “the self-legislated communal norms (the principles to which the congregation holds itself),” and “Christ” the name we give the beloved agent who animates these norms.

It’s strange that Hägglund, in a book that moves so easily between Hegel and Marx, doesn’t mention the German philosopher who bridges those two thinkers, and who wrote more lucidly than either about religion: Ludwig Feuerbach. In “The Essence of Christianity” (1841), Feuerbach proposed that when human beings worship God they are simply worshipping what they themselves value, and are projecting those values onto the figment of objectivity they choose to call God. Feuerbach is particularly interesting on the question of immortality. He says that Heaven is the real God of man: it is Heaven we are really after. When Christians say, “If there is no immortality, then there is no God,” they are actually saying, “If I am not immortal, then there is no God.” They make God dependent on them. “As man conceives his heaven, so he conceives his God,” Feuerbach writes.

Feuerbach wanted to liberate human beings from their harmful self-deceptions, but Hägglund sees no imperative to disdain this venerable meaning-making projection, no need to close down all the temples and churches and wash them away with a strong dose of Dawkins. Instead, religious practice could be seen as valuable and even cherishable, once it is understood to be a natural human quest for meaning. Everything flows from the double assumption that only finitude makes for ultimate meaning and that most religious values are unconsciously secular. We are meaning-haunted creatures.

That is the theory, at least. I’m not sure Hägglund can quite summon this ideal generosity toward all forms of religious practice. In “Field Flowers,” Glück’s flower scoffs that “absence of change” is humanity’s “poor idea of heaven.” But the religious believer might object that Hägglund’s idea of eternity is equally poor. In fact, his book is in danger of becoming a victim of its own argumentative victories. For if most religionists perform in ways that are unconsciously secular, as he observes, don’t many secularists behave in ways that are unconsciously religious? Doesn’t Chekhov, in the passage I quoted, sound quite religious (“our eternal salvation . . . the higher aims of our existence”)? I suspect that Hägglund would claim this as precisely his point—and as a win for the secular side. He is insistent about the secular importance of enjoying things in themselves and for themselves; treating them as a means to a different end becomes, for him, almost a secondary definition of what is wrong with the religious impulse. But don’t most of us, nonbelievers and believers alike, often substitute one thing for another—which is to say, read the world allegorically? Sometimes a cigar is not just a cigar.

None of these objections disarm Hägglund’s essential argument, which I find—having been raised in a Christian tradition relentlessly committed to preferring the eternal to the worldly—beautifully liberating. But “This Life” is aimed at what he sees as the very foundations of religious appeal; the buildings—the structures housing the exemptions, compromises, and fudges that religious people enact daily—interest him much less. He talks a good Hegelian game about the dignity of religious community, but actually he soars above it.

Yet you could not accuse “This Life” of being merely a work of theory. Hägglund wants to broadcast his good news evangelically—to slide from page to world, from map to journey. The second half of the book, by way of a long and dense reading of Marx, argues that the revaluation of everything we have formerly valued implies not just urgent spiritual redefinition but also political and economic transformation. A hundred pages or more on “Capital,” “Grundrisse,” and the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” might at first seem like an extended session of literary-theoretical self-pleasuring. But Marx is at the living center of “This Life,” not just as the slayer of religious and capitalist illusion but, more important, as the utopian who saw beyond merely negative critique. For it’s not enough to claim that religious values can be subsumed by secular ones. One has to lay out new, better secular values. Otherwise, why would religionists ever want to become secularists?

Savagely compressed, Hägglund’s argument goes something like this: If what makes our lives meaningful is that time ends, then what defines us is what Marx called “an economy of time.” Marx is, in this sense, probably the most secular thinker who ever lived, the one most deeply engaged with the question of what we do with our time. He divided life into what he called the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. Hägglund adopts these categories: the realm of necessity involves socially necessary labor and the realm of freedom involves socially available free time. Rationally, Hägglund says, we should strive to reduce the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom. But capitalism is systemically committed to exploiting most of us, and to steadily increasing the amount of labor at the expense of our freedom. Capitalism treats the means of economic life, labor, as though it were the purpose of life. But, if we are to cherish this life, we have to treat what we do as an end in itself. “The real measure of value,” Hägglund says, “is not how much work we have done or have to do (quantity of labor time) but how much disposable time we have to pursue and explore what matters to us (quality of free time).”