Time was that mainstream historians regarded anyone who took Evangelicalism seriously with ambivalence. While Elie Halévy's attribution of Britain's immunity from revolution after 1789 to the presence of Methodism was influential in the early twentieth century, in the 1960s Marxist-influenced social historians came to regard counter-revolutionary religion as a Bad Thing. E. P. Thompson's famously colourful characterisation of Wesleyan Methodism as ‘a ritualised form of psychic masturbation’, whose revivalist meetings sublimated radical energies into ‘sabbath orgasms of feeling’ and irrational adherence to the status quo, ultimately sidelined it: it came to be regarded as an unfortunate wrong turning that delayed the arrival of the English working class. Evangelicalism seemed all the more aberrant when set against an enlightenment often regarded, in the words of Peter Gay, as ‘the rise of modern paganism’. Sustained interest in the subject was largely the preserve of sympathetic denominational historians, many of them on the fringes of professional academia. Since the late 1980s, however, things have changed. The rip-roaring revisionism that made debates about the Reformation so vibrant has also been echoed, more soberly, in studies of Hanoverian religion. Perhaps more surprisingly, Evangelicalism has come to be seen as having a crucial influence on the world around it. In 1987 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall placed Evangelical piety at the centre of Family fortunes, their seminal study of the making of pre-Victorian middle class and gender identities. The following year Boyd Hilton argued that Evangelical notions of providence and divine discipline underpinned economic and social thought in the early nineteenth century, a period he christened the ‘Age of Atonement’. Immediately after this, in 1989, emerged David Bebbington's Evangelicalism in modern Britain.
While the other two books were interested in the effects of Evangelicalism, Bebbington wrote from within the tradition and focused more squarely on it, advancing a broader narrative that ran from its rise in the 1730s via its nineteenth-century dominance to its persistence as a religious subculture in the later twentieth century. In doing so, he advanced two highly influential arguments. One was that Evangelicalism was a coherent phenomenon across different times and places, identifiable by the presence of four key features: crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism and activism. (It can seem as though no essay on the subject is complete without a mention of the famous ‘Evangelical quadrilateral’ – more colloquially referred to as the ‘Bebbington quadrilateral’.) Similarly important was Bebbington's insistence that Evangelicalism cannot and should not be considered apart from its culture. While this second argument has often been overlooked by historians trained in secular academia, for whom it probably seems obvious, for those formed in confessional settings it has been tremendously influential in stimulating more credible study of the past. Although aspects of Bebbington's interpretation have come under critical pressure – not least his insistence that the Evangelicalism of the 1730s represented a new, experiential piety distinct from, earlier reformed traditions – it has never been superseded, being developed further in The dominance of Evangelicalism: the age of Spurgeon and Moody (Downer's Grove, Il 2005) and Victorian religious revivals: culture and piety in local and global contexts (Oxford 2012). If Bebbington is respected in the British historical profession, he is revered in the United States, where he is often grouped alongside Mark Noll and George Marsden as a magisterial figure whose sympathetic but rigorous scholarship has brought what was once a niche subject into the mainstream.
These two volumes are an extended meditation on Evangelicalism in modern Britain rather than a new departure. Readers will find within them two useful historiographical introductions in which the author reflects on both his own development and that of his field since the 1980s. They will also encounter thirty-two essays, one of them hitherto unpublished and the rest written for edited collections and academic or denominational history journals, largely in the last twenty years. They cover a wide range of subject matter, the first volume focusing on themes including culture, globalism, science-and-religion, and the second examining denominational strands within Evangelicalism, often through the lens of individual lives: J. C. Ryle, Hugh Price Hughes and others. While Bebbington is alive to the international concerns of his protagonists, and of Anglo-American exchanges in particular, having ranged more widely in his other works, his focus here is chiefly on insular Britain. Not surprisingly, Bebbington is at his best when evoking the thought-world of provincial Nonconformity. The chapter on the intellectual life of Primitive Methodists in nineteenth-century Weardale, and that on secessions and schisms in Louth, for instance, are especially rich in personalities and vivid detail. The sense throughout the volumes is of a serious scholar studying serious subjects: temperate, controlled, courteous, although not without an occasional twinkle in the eye. Bebbington and his editor have opted to leave the essays largely as first published: this makes sense given that some of were written for journals that are otherwise hidden behind paywalls or even published in print alone. Yet this comes at a cost. Anyone who chooses to read several essays in succession may find the formula remorseless: subjects are introduced and defined, used to exemplify the key criteria of crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism and activism, and then examined against broader cultural currents. The approach will be familiar to anyone who has read Bebbington before, and while it showcases his skill in crafting case studies, the cultural backdrop (‘enlightenment’, ‘romanticism’, ‘modernism’) is often highly impressionistic: a two-dimensional backdrop to the main action.
To cavil at this, however, is to miss the point: these volumes will be an excellent starting point for new scholars seeking crisp, authoritative introductions to a variety of subjects.
