“The final decades of the twentieth century saw a significant change within evangelicalism in the West, reflecting and responding to wider shifts in society at large, including attitudes to gender roles,” writes Linda Wilson in her chapter in The Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism (225). “The most significant theme in the history of Christianity over the past century has been the huge expansion of the faith worldwide, and the decisive shift of its centre of gravity outside Europe,” writes Philip Jenkins in his (267). Unfortunately, this volume frequently universalizes white, male, northern Atlantic perspectives, undermining its claim to be “an authoritative and state-of-the-art review of current scholarship” on evangelical history (i).

The paucity of women in this text is striking. Wilson is the only female contributor (out of sixteen), and her chapter on “Evangelicals and Gender” is the only place in the book where either women as scholars and historical actors or gender as an analytical category receive sustained attention. The editors’ opening essay on battles to define the term “evangelical” includes one hundred forty-four footnotes in which only seven women's names appear. Just one woman is named or quoted in the text of the chapter, and it is not Molly Worthen, whose 2014 book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press) marked an important intervention in this debate. (Worthen is not cited at all, nor is her book listed on the eleven-page bibliography at the back of the book.) The main theology chapter, which oddly restricts its purview to consideration of substitutionary atonement, names just one woman in its one hundred three footnotes. The chapter on spirituality claims that “[t]he piety of evangelical women is just one under-researched area” (71), a statement that discounts the work of such scholars as Edith Blumhofer, Ann Braude, Catherine Brekus, Betty DeBerg, Sally Gallagher, R. Marie Griffith, Nancy Hardesty, Julie Ingersoll, and Lynn Neal, among many others. To call this topic an “unexplored pathway” for scholars is simply not true.

The book is stronger in addressing the global reach of evangelicalism. In addition to Jenkins's concluding chapter on globalization, there is a chapter on mission in the global South, which includes some post-colonial critique of the project but fails to note that, by the late nineteenth century, the majority of American missionaries were women. (That fact is pointed out by Wilson on page 221.) Chapters on revivals and evangelical relations with Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam increase geographical breadth. The essay on “Evangelicals and Rome,” however, stays within an Anglo-American context rather than engaging the conflicts between evangélicos and Catholics in Latin America. The essay on evangelicals and race attends only to transatlantic abolitionism and the American Civil Rights movement, plus a brief comment on South Africa. The chapter does helpfully point out that recent scholarship identifies “the evangelical tradition as a cause, rather than simply a reflection, of wider racist attitudes or practice” (212). Broader application of this insight throughout the volume would have made for a stronger book.

In general, the essays admit their limitations in scope, and they certainly cannot all be expected to span centuries and continents. But the book suffers from a belief that the theological concepts summarized in the famous Bebbington quadrilateral capture the essence of evangelicalism, while (to quote a hymn) the things of earth—politics, demographics, geography, change over time—grow strangely dim. The most extreme example of this perspective arises in the chapter on “Evangelicals, Culture, and the Arts.” Author Peter Webster analyzes the uses and feared abuses of various art forms in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and the United States, such as staged oratorio, religious fiction, and guitar-backed worship music. These art forms and the tensions they provoked were all specific to their cultural contexts, but Webster's analysis “makes a claim to be applicable to the evangelical movement in all its geographical diversity and temporal spread” (234). The touchstone Bible passages he cites as structuring evangelical engagement with the created world might be read in any time and place, but it is simply not plausible that debates about African textiles or South Pacific dances or Middle Eastern poetry would unfold at all like debates about playing the part of Jezebel in Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah (236). These art forms and the people who produced and consumed them—even if those people shared something that distant observers could call a common faith—are not the same. They cannot be lumped together in a discussion of “evangelicals and culture” without their most salient and interesting characteristics being lost.

In sum, this book is not a comprehensive review of scholarly literature on the history of evangelicalism, broadly conceived. It mostly surveys the history of a tradition that hangs portraits of Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, William Wilberforce, and Billy Graham on its walls, then spends hours looking for family resemblances among them. (These are the names with the longest entries in the index, along with David Bebbington, who is cited in nearly every chapter.) The evangelicals in this book read their Bibles, ponder the cross and the apocalypse, and try to convert other people at home and abroad. Sometimes they sing hymns or attend revival meetings. They do not, however, vote, rear children, eat, seek physical healing, migrate, or wage war. They do not abuse others or suffer abuse. The more complicated, context-bound evangelicals who do these things must be sought out in other books.