Historians have long acknowledged the indebtedness of American evangelicalism (especially fundamentalism) to John Nelson Darby, whose new scheme of biblical interpretation and dispensational premillennialism, dramatically reoriented nineteenth-century evangelicalism away from postmillennialism in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Darby himself, despite his importance, is relatively less well known, and is someone who needs a biographer.

Donald Harman Akenson, professor at Queen's University, Ontario, is not that man. The author protests time and again throughout Exporting the Rapture that this meticulous and painstakingly researched study is not a biography of Darby. It is instead a history of the Brethren movement in nineteenth-century Britain and the role Darby played at the center of that movement. (The corpus of Darby's writings, Akenson insists, is simply too vast and scattered.) Akenson sees this book as a follow-up volume to his earlier work, Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016). Taken together, the author insists, these books point to the centrality of Ireland as a seedbed for American evangelical ideas. He makes a compelling case.

Darby was born in London into a life of privilege; his family's holdings centered on Leap Castle in King's County, Ireland. Following his conversion in 1820 or 1821 (he forgot the exact date), Darby resolved to become a clergyman, studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and was eventually ordained in the Church of Ireland. Darby's idiosyncratic reading of the Bible eventually pushed him in a different direction. He fell in with a decidedly anticlerical group that came in the later 1830s to be known as the Plymouth Brethren.

Sometime in these years, Darby began developing his interpretive scheme, which entailed seeing all of the Bible, Old and New Testaments, as prophetic and delineating which parts of the New Testament pertained to the Jews and which to the church. Akenson points out the brazenness of Darby and his confreres: “The immodest claim of the radical evangelicals was that they were the only ones to understand the true meaning of the ancient scriptural documents” (43).

Akenson largely avoids the weeds of dispensational logic—he insists that Darby abhorred the notion that his theology was systematic—and focuses instead on the internecine battles within the Brethren. Darby emerges as a martinet, ruthlessly destroying his enemies, real or perceived, within the movement. When Darby was accused of something that sounds a lot like sexual misconduct with a young girl, he managed somehow to turn the charges against the girl's family. (The original complaint is reproduced as an appendix.)

At times, despite (or perhaps because of) the prodigious research, the narrative bogs down a bit and meanders into misbegotten missionary sorties and arcane maneuverings within various congregations. Eventually, what the author calls the “Open Brethren” and the “Exclusive Brethren” emerged. Darby, not surprisingly, was part of the latter, something that Akenson calls a “cult,” stipulating that his use of the term is descriptive, not pejorative.

The book's subtitle, John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism, is more than a little misleading. North America makes its first real appearance in the conclusion, and even then only briefly. Akenson argues that the close-knit religious society that Darby and others constructed in Britain, one that tolerated little dissent, prepared the Brethren for their foray to North America. Darby made his first visit in 1862, initially focusing his efforts in Ontario and then to states surrounding the Great Lakes: “the single most important reason that American fundamentalist evangelicalism emerged strongly first in the northern states of the USA (not the South, as is often assumed) is because that is where the premillennial dispensationalism of the Brethren, most especially that of Darby, was initially presented with serious and continuous effort” (432).

The truncated coverage of Darby's perambulations in North America suggests that yet another volume (aside from a biography), one truly focusing on Darby in America, is in order—and Akenson is more than qualified to undertake the project. What were the social and political conditions that predisposed American evangelicals to Darby's scheme? How did Darby and his colleagues construct their argument against postmillennialism? How was someone with such an apparently abrasive personality able to woo large audiences? At the very least, it would be worth pointing out that Darby provided a template for fundamentalists decades later. Not only did they baptize his dispensationalist interpretations, they adopted his contentious, take-no-prisoners persona.