Oxford Handbooks are a booming industry, marketed especially to universities, colleges and seminaries, offering wide-ranging scholarly surveys of a multiplicity of research fields. They are an excellent means of navigating a subject quickly and the extensive bibliographies are invaluable to any student digging deeper. At the latest count, there are over a thousand Oxford Handbooks in print, with many more commissioned. Within the narrow world of modern evangelicalism, they include Handbooks on Methodist Studies (2009), Evangelical Theology (2016), the Bible in America (2017), Presbyterianism (2019), Reformed Theology (2020), Calvin and Calvinism (2021) and Christian Fundamentalism (2023), among others. This new volume on Early Evangelicalism is a worthy addition to the series. The authors frequently engage with recent historiographical trajectories and demonstrate the creative energy currently being generated by scholarly discussions of evangelical identities. There are, though, some signs of overly-rushed production by the publishers – for example, editorial strike-throughs and a message to the copy-editing team remain printed in the text (pp. 96, 307), infelicities which hopefully will be corrected in later printings.
The editor, Jonathan Yeager (Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee), has brought together a strong team. His own credentials for the project are excellent, with monographs on the eighteenth-century transatlantic book cultures surrounding John Erskine and Jonathan Edwards, and a helpful edition of key primary texts, Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (OUP, 2013). This handbook emphasizes the multifaceted theological, ethnic and political diversity of early evangelicalism. Several chapters take their lead from David Bebbington’s famous ‘quadrilateral’ of evangelical biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism, but others push these boundaries in new directions. The chapter on ‘Dutch Evangelicalism’, for example, suggests that this nomenclature is misleading because there was no cohesive movement, nor an identifiable Dutch variant, although the adjective evangelisch ‘served as one possible identity marker of those navigating between extremes of confessional traditionalism and intellectual criticism’ (p. 191). Other chapters examine the relationship of evangelicalism to puritanism and pietism, and to the social, cultural and intellectual contexts, which gave it birth. In a stimulating essay, Stephen Berry shows how the explosion of the popular press and the rapid expansion in transatlantic shipping, commerce and migration created webs of communication and fanned the flames of revival. John Coffey deftly guides the reader through recent lively debates over whether early evangelicalism was an anti-intellectual movement, helping to ‘plot a path between polarized accounts’ of its incompatibility or affinity with the enlightenment (p. 29).
The handbook includes topics such as capitalism, politics, anti-Catholicism, hymnody, slavery, and missions. Twelve chapters – nearly 40% of the volume – have a denominational or geographical focus, from English Congregationalism and Scottish Presbyterianism to Canadian Evangelicalism and the ‘New Divinity’, which captivated New England until the mid-nineteenth century. Several authors make a persuasive pitch for neglected themes to be taken more seriously. Wendy Raphael Roberts calls for historians to dust down the forgotten abundance of evangelical poetry and properly integrate it within their accounts of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Hilary Wyss and Anthony Trujillo call for a radical reorientation of the standard Euro-American narratives to put the experience of New England’s Native American evangelicals at the centre. Although we hear a good deal in passing about ‘new birth’ and the vitality of ‘experimental’ religion, the handbook contains surprisingly little direct focus on doctrines. These early evangelicals seemed much more animated by itinerancy than by inerrancy, by the potentiality of ocean journeys for extending their message than by theological debates over the authority of scripture.
George Whitefield and John Wesley were Church of England clergymen, of course, but the role of their deep Anglican heritage in shaping the transatlantic revival is left unexplored. Indeed, eighteenth-century Anglicanism does not appear in the handbook as much as it might have done. The Southern ‘Bible Belt’ in the United States is usually interpreted as a product of later Victorian revivals, but Samuel Smith argues that this is partly because historians tend to ignore the ‘vibrant if quieter witness’ of earlier generations and thus ‘create an illusion that evangelicalism barely existed in the early colonial South, especially among establishment Anglicans’ (p. 215). On the contrary, Smith maintains, in the old British South – Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia – American revivalism ‘started as an Anglican movement’ (p. 223). Turning to the revival’s ‘second wave’, Grayson Carter surveys the methods by which evangelicals like William Romaine, Henry Venn, John Newton and Charles Simeon brought ‘serious religion’ to the Church of England. They were a disruptive influence, often investing in voluntary societies like the Church Missionary Society to forward their agendas. Instead of throwing their energies into diocesan structures or centralized church bodies, evangelicals found it more fruitful to focus on theological networking with their co-religionists. Carter concludes that these early evangelicals ‘set in motion powerful forces of a spiritual, political, and social nature’, the repercussions of which are still felt today across the Church of England, the wider Anglican Communion, ‘and the world itself’ (p. 306).
