Geoffrey Treloar's impressive survey of early twentieth-century evangelicalism in the English-speaking world follows the movement from the turn of the new century to the outbreak of World War II. Employing a spectrum approach, he focuses on the manner in which liberal, centrist, and conservative evangelicals both invigorated and destabilized the movement through their interactions with each other and the major external forces of the era: war, economic depression, and cultural modernism. As a result, Treloar argues that the social, political, and cultural impact of evangelicalism was diminished in comparison to the ascendant “evangelical coalition” of the late-Victorian era. While he largely adheres to a definition of evangelicalism based on David Bebbington's quadrilateral of priorities, the imbalance of those priorities is critical to his thesis. One of his main contentions—based on the work of Rob Warner in Reinventing English Evangelicalism, 1966–2001: A Theological and Sociological Study (Paternoster Press, 2001)—is that the ethos and energy of evangelicalism shifted after World War I from an ecumenical focus on conversion and activism to a more divisive concentration on the Bible and the cross. As the subtitle implies, the thesis is illustrated variously through the lives and work of the American revivalist R.A. Torrey, the American missionary statesman J.R. Mott, the Canadian-American Pentecostal pioneer Aimee Semple McPherson, and the Irish-Australian evangelical leader T.C. Hammond.

The content of the book is helpfully divided into three parts corresponding to the pre-war, war, and post-war state of Anglophone evangelicalism. The first part focuses on the pre-war years in the context of the fin de siècle of the “long” nineteenth century. Chapter 1 provides a sweeping assessment of the state of evangelicalism in 1900 along with definition and direction for each consecutive chapter. Crucially, it also describes the diversity of evangelicalism as the conservative, liberal, and centrist reactions to the forces of modernization. Chapter 2 describes the state of revivalism and missions prior to 1914. Chapter 3 focuses on the everyday faith of evangelicals during the period. Chapter 4 readdresses the spectrum of evangelicals with particular regard to theology. Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which the period between 1900 and 1914 was something of a high watermark for evangelical social and political influence, despite a general nervousness about the strength of the movement around 1910. The second part of the book focuses on evangelicalism during World War I. Chapter 6 explores the attitudes of evangelicals toward the Great War and argues that evangelicals’ general support for British and American imperialism led to a conceptualization of the conflict as “a holy war for Christian civilization.” (132) Chapters 7 and 8 consider the impact of the war on the individual and corporate faiths of evangelicals on the front lines and their coreligionists at home. The third and final part of the book examines evangelicalism between 1919 and 1940. Chapter 9 deals with the rise of fundamentalism, along with the various intra-evangelical debates that developed in reaction. Chapter 10 provides an overview of the spiritual and devotional landscape during the same period, with particular reference to millennialism and Pentecostalism. Chapter 11 describes the “conversionist impulse” (227) as it related to home and foreign missions. Chapter 12 examines social, political, and economic roles played by evangelicals in the interwar years and argues that the period saw no “great reversal” in evangelical social impact. According to Treloar, that impression is more a result of the dominance of evangelicalism prior to the war than any monumental post-war shift. The epilogue briefly considers the role of evangelicals in and immediately after World War II and summarizes the main arguments.

There is much to be admired in this book. Treloar's comparative and chronological methodology lends itself to both nuanced argumentation and general readability. This is perhaps most evident in chapter 9, which focuses on fundamentalism and its discontents. Here, he proves highly adept at simplifying the complex nature of interwar evangelical divisions without producing caricatures or dualisms. A foundational reliance on primary sources—specifically periodicals, popular literature, and theology—also undergirds the major points of the work. For example, in chapter 5 he challenges previously held ideas regarding the timeline of twentieth-century evangelical social abandonment by engaging with a range of contemporary publications. Yet it is nearly-impossible to write a survey of such breadth without relying on previous scholarship. In this, too, Treloar excels, evincing an exhaustive familiarity with the work of both seminal figures in the field (David Bebbington, George Marsden) and exceptional younger scholars (Timothy Gloege, Matthew Sutton). The book is well-written throughout; and the individual chapter conclusions provide helpful summative assessments. Finally, a repeated examination of gender and race during the era in question provides a refreshing alternative to the underrepresentation of women and people of color within ecclesiastical historiography.

Though lacking little, two criticisms of the work must be addressed. First, certain portions of the Anglophone evangelical world are largely unrepresented. Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain receive near total attention to the neglect of South Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Second, the four representative figures (Torrey, Mott, McPherson, Hammond) of the period are picked up and discussed somewhat haphazardly throughout the book. While the first chapter implies that they will be central, the (justifiable) focus on larger trends within the movement relegates them to the periphery. Yet neither of those issues takes away from the overall achievement of the book. Broad in scope and winsomely developed, The Disruption of Evangelicalism is an indispensable addition to the ever-expanding canon of evangelical historiography. The last in a series of five on the history of evangelicalism to be published, Treloar's tour de force was worth the wait.