Joseph reads the Haitian Revolution as a religious event as much as a political one, and builds his book around figures whose theology has rarely been treated as theology. He opens with a survey of recent North American scholarship, naming what he calls a Haitian Turn in how the field now handles freedom, modernity and the Enlightenment.

At the centre is a close reading of the prayer attributed to Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman in August 1791. Placing it beside James Cone's writing on the God of the oppressed, Joseph argues that Boukman articulated a black liberation theology long before the term existed, one that dismantled the master's God and claimed divine vindication for the enslaved. A companion chapter reads François Makandal's campaign of violence through Fanon's account of decolonization and revolutionary humanism.

Two closing chapters follow Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, who weighed Christianity and Vodou differently but both took the revolution as proof of black self-determination.