Evangelicalism has been much studied in recent decades, but this pioneering volume opens up an important and original theme – Evangelicals’ engagement with their own history. All of the contributors have earned doctorates. Most of them, however, are examining the works of popular writers, some of whom never went to university. Occasionally there is a faint whiff of Saul Lieberman's dictum: ‘Nonsense is nonsense, but the study of nonsense is scholarship.’ Mark Noll observes: ‘For the neo-evangelical community, history writing did exist, but it was characterised by shallow research, nuance-swamping apologetics, uncritical providentialism, disengagement from academic history and a combative spirit.’ Still, the recriminations go both ways. Iain H. Murray – the author of an influential biography of Martyn Lloyd-Jones – has been a frequent critic of academic historians. In his chapter about Murray, David Ceri Jones is forced to concede by way of full disclosure that ‘The present author's work on the early Welsh Methodist revival, for example, was criticised for adopting language in reference to the beginnings of the revival that would never have been used by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles.’ In the introduction by the editors, the rise of the academic study of religious history is charted, and therefore this Journal finds its place in that story: ‘However, the launch of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History in 1950 and the formation of the Ecclesiastical History Society in 1961 were evidence of a renewed public confidence amongst historians of religion. Both institutions encouraged cutting-edge research on the whole history of the church, eschewing any denominational or confessional bias.’

The one fault that the popularisers have not usually been guilty of is a lack of industry. They are generally true ‘amateurs’, often pursuing their subjects with an obsessive love that many waters cannot quench. They are masters of the primary-source exhaustive, multi-volume biography or study. Luke Tyerman's account of John Wesley offered a separate chapter on every year of his life from his Aldersgate experience to his death fifty-three years later; Geraldine Taylor's work on Hudson Taylor did not even get to the founding of the China Inland Mission until volume iv. Nevertheless, the amateurs are generally found guilty of leaving out their subject's faults. They also often gave free rein to their theological assumptions: Erasmus Middleton was such a strong Calvinist that he did not seem willing to accept Wesleyans as true Evangelicals.

Another fault is a strong gender bias. It seems that these historians believed that in the beginning of the Evangelical movement, God created men. John Piper gave a biographical address for twenty-seven years in a row and in all that time never chose a woman subject. Worse, those who did choose to write about a woman often did so as a foil. G. R. Balleine's study of Joanna Southcott was a cautionary tale. J. C. Ryle not only wrote exclusively about men, he attacked the historian Agnes Strickland. Noll muses: ‘Does the overwhelmingly male focus of most traditional evangelical history, along with the tendency of women historians to write about day-to-day religiosity, instead of doctrine, organisations and disputes, mean that “evangelicalism” matters for the history of men, but not of women?’ Alas, this volume perpetuates the problem by having only male contributors. To its credit, however, it does examine women historians, including the contemporary academic historian Dana Robert (who reminded readers that ‘world Christianity is a woman's movement’). Geraldine Taylor's gender made a real difference in who she could see as a worthy subject – not only missionaries such as Margaret King and Betty Stam, but even a girl who died at the age of eight (Pearl's secret, 1920).

One of the more surprising chapters is on G. R. Balleine (by Andrew Atherstone). Balleine's A history of the Evangelical party in the Church of England (1908) became a classic work, beloved by Anglican Evangelicals down the decades. Yet Balleine himself was a long way from being a stereotypical Evangelical. He was a purist pacifist who, even in the fight against the Nazis, insisted that Christians could not even perform non-combatant roles such as serving as military chaplains. He was also an ardent and active Socialist who thought of capitalism as ‘AntiChrist’ and Soviet Russia (because of the practical good it was doing) as ‘the most Christian Government in the world today’. Leaving the Evangelical fold, late in life he even denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Another striking chapter is about the Nigerian scholar Ogbu Kalu (by Richard Burgess). Kalu is unquestionably an important historian yet – at least at the time this review was written – he does not even have a Wikipedia entry, making Atherstone and Jones more inclusive of non-western voices in this regard than the culture in general. Kalu was a prominent figure in the effort to write African church history in a way that emphasised African agency.

Delightfully, the last two chapters have their authors as subjects in the other one. Thus, Mark Noll writes, ‘Timothy L. Smith, George Marsden, David Bebbington and Anglo-American Evangelicalism’, and David Bebbington, ‘Andrew Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Noll and global Evangelicalism’. One almost wishes that Noll had added Harry Stout to his dramatis personae, as this book at times feelings like it is edging towards being a history of biographers of Whitefield, from the opening chapter by David Ceri Jones on John Gillies (who also served as Whitefield's publicist), to Martin Wellings on Luke Tyerman, and most of all, Ian Hugh Clary's ‘Arnold Dallimore: Whitefield's champion’; but Whitefield also has his place in the works of Erasmus Middleton (Darren Schmidt), David Bogue and James Bennett (Robert Strivens), J. C. Ryle (Andrew Atherstone), G. R. Balleine and Iain H. Murray. Bebbington's chapter, as the last one, is fittingly about world Christianity. In another connection between chapters, he observes that Ogbu Kalu's African Christianity: an African story (2005) was dedicated to Andrew Walls and Brian Stanley.

Making Evangelical history illuminatingly fosters a vital conversation regarding how Evangelicals have studied and perceived their own past.