The decay of Christendom and the secularisation of society affected Australia in the 1960s as much as most other English-speaking lands. The sense of disruption, however, was accentuated there by the fading of the nation's bond with Britain, the country from which the Christian denominations of the country derived. Hugh Chilton, Director of Research and Professional Learning at The Scots College, Sydney, depicts the responses in the Australian Evangelical Churches. Unlike many earlier commentators on religion in Australia, but, like Stuart Piggin and Robert Lander in their recent volumes The fountain of public prosperity (Melbourne 2018) and Attending to the national soul (Melbourne 2020), Chilton treats a Christian Australia as a reality in the years before the 1960s. Faith helped to create a sense of identity for the people. Chilton's book is about how Evangelicals, a high proportion of the religious public, addressed the issues arising from the disintegration of that identity. By taking a different response in each of six chapters, the author demonstrates that there was a great variety of understandings of how best to address the crisis that extended into the 1970s.

The first substantive chapter examines what was perhaps the most obvious strategy, resistance. Fred Nile, a Congregational minister who from 1981 was to be a member of the New South Wales legislative council, had been appointed in 1965 the first full-time national director of the Christian Endeavour movement. For Nile its slogan of ‘Christian Citizenship’ meant primarily opposition to the sapping of the moral fibre of the nation and so it was natural that, when the Australian Festival of Light was formed in the following decade to struggle against the decay of public standards, he should become its leading figure. Militant and outspoken, Nile adopted an uncompromising stance against the social changes of the period. The subject of the next chapter is very different. Hans Mol, a post-war Dutch immigrant, generated a reasoned academic approach to formulating a Christian strategy for the era. As a member of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra from 1963 to 1969, he produced two significant studies of Australian Christianity. The first, the Religion in Australia Survey (1966), used empirical techniques to lay bare the true state of the Churches, and the second, Christianity in Chains (1969), urged the Churches not to make futile efforts to be relevant but to accept their minority status and be themselves. Mol provided a measured and urbane Evangelical voice in the debates over secularisation. Billy Graham, whose highly successful mission to Australia in 1959 opens the book, came again to preach his arresting version of the Gospel in 1968–9. In his third chapter Chilton asks whether Graham represented an American solution to the difficulties facing the Australian Churches. Graham was criticised for the introduction of big business methods from the United States and for hypocrisy in coming to preach in another land when his own government was killing innocent victims in Vietnam. Chilton shows, however, that the evangelist used methods that were not particularly American, admitted the weaknesses of his country and afterwards deployed his experience of Australia in missions back in the United States. Australia welcomed Evangelical speakers from other countries and so, the author concludes, the Graham mission was not an exercise in Americanisation but an episode in the experience of global Evangelicalism. A later chapter shows that Australians played a particularly influential role in that international movement when, in 1974, it held its equivalent of the Roman Catholic Vatican II at Lausanne in Switzerland. Jack Dean, an assistant bishop in the diocese of Sydney, served as executive chairman of the Lausanne Congress, negotiating adroitly between the differing standpoints of its attenders; and Athol Gill, a Baptist theologian who by contrast was a largely subversive force, ensured that political action against oppression was incorporated in the Congress Covenant, so committing Evangelicals to escape from quietism. The subject of another chapter, Marcus Loane, also wrestled with international questions at the time of his country's dropping of its white-Australia policy. As archbishop of Sydney from 1966 to 1982, he asserted a firm attachment to tradition – he loved the Prayer Book, was devoted to the crown and breathed nostalgia for empire – and so expressed the hope that ‘our Australian population will always have a substantial proportion of people of British descent’ (p. 125). Yet, Chilton shows, Loane also maintained a strong belief in engagement with South-East Asia and so welcomed refugees from that region more eagerly than successive governments. The most radical solution to the conundrum of Australian identity, however, was formulated by the Jesus People. Coinciding with the Labor government of Gough Whitlam that attempted the reinvention of Australia as a free-standing modern nation, the Jesus People emerged in the early 1970s as a group who identified with the youth revolution, loved pop music, looked like hippies and aspired to an indigenous ‘gum-leaf theology’. The author demonstrates that they were to exercise an enduring influence on the Evangelical movement as a whole, injecting novel tastes into its bloodstream.

It would be easy in a volume on this subject to concentrate on Evangelicals without appreciation of other theological strands, to focus on religious events while ignoring the secular context or to write about Australia to the neglect of the rest of the world. Chilton falls into none of these traps. On the contrary, the analysis is deeply embedded in broader theological changes, the socio-political setting and global developments. More perhaps could have been said about the rising force of charismatic renewal, but that would be a quibble. This is a novel, lucid and cogent book that is a distinguished contribution to the growing body of literature on the religious crisis of the long 1960s.