This text uses the nature writing of Annie Dillard and the philosophical categories of Emmanual Levinas to critique the models of God that drive contemporary political theologies. These theologies ignore the amoral aspects of existence in the natural world, though they align God with the cosmos.

The Savage Side critiques the primary models of deity in dominant political theologies, especially those which align God with the natural world. The justice-seeking, political revolutionary God that the oppressed worship has dwindled back to the political fervor from which it sprang. In its place, a God based on our struggling existence in the natural world emerges, terrifyingly indifferent to any political or moral ideology.