Platt writes his book as a reflection on basic Christian values—elements that he regards as foundational teaching for practical Christian living. He draws his portrayal of the Christian life from Jesus’s biblical teachings, and he challenges Christians to consider the ramifications of those teachings on practical issues of daily life. He positions Radical as a picture of ideal Christian values, one which Platt believes has been largely neglected in his own culture. This restorationist impulse—to recapture lost or imperfectly-practiced elements of original Christianity, as it was preached and practiced by Jesus and his apostles—is a recurring concern in Platt’s Christian context. He is a Southern Baptist pastor, and the Baptist movement had its beginnings in that very impulse. In the early 17th century, several groups of Christians in England sought to recover what they viewed as neglected aspects of early Christian practice—such as adult baptism, a ritual that symbolizes a rebirth into Christian faith. In contrast to infant baptism, in which parents dedicate their children to God, adult baptism signals an individual’s public commitment to Jesus Christ. Platt’s Baptist context also lies within the wider field of American evangelicalism—a subset of Christianity that centers a mandate to spread the gospel of Jesus across the world—which has had several significant restorationist movements arise in the course of its history.

In Platt’s case, the issues he feels need to be recovered have less to do with theological oversights than they do with the practical application of Christian belief. At its publication, Platt’s book was representative of a growing movement among evangelical scholars to think critically about cultural expressions of Christianity, especially when contrasting American evangelicalism with the way Christianity is practiced across much of the rest of the world. Evangelicalism in the early 21st century was the heir of the vast Protestant Christian mission movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. With churches around the world developing robust and independent expressions of the Christian faith, a beneficial backflow of ideas and practices from majority-world Christianity began to challenge some of American evangelicalism’s comfortable assumptions. As evangelicals grew ever more aware of those contrasts and challenges, some American scholars and pastors, like Platt, began to critically examine the practical outworking of their ideological traditions.

Radical reflects the ideological transformations of evangelicalism’s interplay with global Christianity, which led not only to an interrogation of American materialism but also paralleled other movements within evangelicalism at the time. Younger evangelicals were exhibiting a rise in interest regarding social justice concerns and were reacquiring older models of Christian life and practice, such as monastic-inspired communal living. Radical echoes much of the ethos of parallel movements within evangelicalism at the time of its release, such as Shane Claiborne’s “new monasticism.”