Nuclei, nodes, and networks. These three interlocking terms frame David Hempton’s Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 2021, and his capstone book, Christianity at the Crossroads. Hempton wields his alliterative triad to present the six lectures/chapters as a “Natural Theology”—in keeping with Lord Gifford’s vision—and social history of how Christianity has changed and spread over the past 500 years. By nuclei, Hempton has in mind core ideas or “memes” (p. 2), images, and practices at the heart of a movement. Hempton describes nodes as points of intersection or “junction boxes” (p. 7), where ideas from different traditions meet, and the encounter generates something new. Finally, networks refer to transnational groups or systems of people, ideas, or spaces through which influences travel.
Hempton employs the nuclei-node-network framework to shift historiography from its traditional (over)emphasis on national, denominational, and institutional hierarchies to recognize contributions from a wider range of historical actors and activities. This shift yields a deeper understanding of the dynamics of change over time, especially “change from below” (p. 44) that cannot be easily tracked purely through traditional sources. The book engages in an intentional act of recovery of the beliefs, motivations, and practices of people outside dominant power structures who left few archival records.
The book focuses in particular on how Christianity has adapted to each communications revolution. In Hempton’s telling of the story, Christianity traveled through the everyday activities of all sorts of people, including printers, Jesuit missionaries, merchants, schoolteachers, and enslaved people. Hempton identifies a nucleus of Christocentric, biblicist, experiential piety; nodes of mission conferences, Bible colleges, revivals, and Twitter evangelism; and transatlantic networks of traveling texts and peoples. Finally, the book forecasts “continued weakening of traditional denominational Christianity,” alongside “greater indigenization in the religious cultures of the Global South and increasing homogenization produced by transnational networks” (pp. 204–205). Chapter one explains terminology and theoretical scaffolding, drawing metaphors from nature (underground mycorrhizal fungi and wild plants) and British literature (George Eliot’s Middlemarch) to illustrate the power of hidden webs to shape individual destinies. The four middle chapters apply the triple-n theory to a series of case studies: Reformation-era religious networks of European discoverers, conquerors, missionaries, and print cultures; Catholic and Protestant missions in New Spain and West Africa; the “Protestant International” (p. 8) of Pietism, premillennialism, and Pentecostalism; and women’s religious networks. The final chapter turns to the digital era, asking whether “directional flows of power and influence have begun to change from a North/South trajectory to the reverse” (p. 10).
Christianity at the Crossroads signals its ambitious scope with its subtitle: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era. It is the kind of synthetic, explanatory book that only a historian who has spent decades reading widely and thinking both particularly and expansively can write. Hempton’s previous scholarship—including such fine-grained examinations as Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005)—laid a solid foundation.
A book like Christianity at the Crossroads cannot be, and should not be faulted for not being, comprehensive or the only possible way of narrating history. It can nevertheless be fruitful to consider alternative approaches. The decision to start with Europe’s print revolution centers the narrative’s angle of vision on Europe. As a point of comparison, consider Thomas Tweed’s similarly career-capping magisterial narrative: Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025). Although Tweed’s scope is in a certain sense narrower, the purview is more expansive. Tweed traces his story back to human migrations from Africa via eastern Asia into the Americas at least 15,000 years ago and, like Hempton, ends with digital networks. Tweed fills gaps in the documentary record by drawing on archaeological and biological evidence, thereby decentering the European and American elites who remain at the heart of Hempton’s narrative.
The idea of using network analysis to interpret Christianity’s spread is not original to Hempton. Andrew Walls—who founded Edinburgh’s Centre for the Study of World Christianity—offered a cognate framework nearly 30 years earlier in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Orbis Books, 1996), in which the gospel’s translation across cultures, transmission along missionary networks, and serial progression through shifting heartlands prefigure Hempton’s framework. Scholars of World Christianity, to which Hempton notes his debt, have extensively employed network approaches. For a book on the “Global Church,” Christianity at the Crossroads cites relatively few Global South scholars and treats the last century’s wildfire, worldwide spread of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity rather briefly. Although Hempton acknowledges that “historians located in Europe or North America are simply better at understanding flows of religious influence and energy moving from North to South and East to West than the reverse” (p. 10), the book could arguably have done more to incorporate sources originating from and/or focused on the Global South. Hempton might, for instance, have productively engaged scholarship by J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Musa Dube, Kwok Pui-lan, Wonsuk Ma, Samuel Escobar, and Maria Clara Bingemer.
Hempton’s impulse to recover hidden contributions of women’s religious networks is commendable. However, relegating this material to a separate chapter, indeed the second-to-last chapter, has the unfortunate effect of decentering women from the main narrative. The source materials did not require this approach. Given Hempton’s emphasis on print revolutions, he might, for instance, have dwelt longer on women’s contributions as writers and readers. Doing so might also have provided one fruitful strategy for going beyond the book’s brief nod to “lived religion” (p. 41)—a field that has generated much scholarship that transcends national-denominational-institutional boundaries—to provide more illuminating examples of how Christians (a majority of them women) have gone about practicing their beliefs.
Christianity at the Crossroads is a monumental achievement, a worthy culmination of an eminent career. For scholars of modern Christianity in particular, it offers a useful conceptual toolkit. It also serves as a reminder that the full organism of Christian history is always larger than any single institutional mushroom visible above the surface.
