Manning Clark, the author of the six-volume The history of Australia (1962–87), presented his story in the earlier volumes as a struggle for the soul (a term he employed) of the land between Catholicism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment. In the present book, the authors, Stuart Piggin, formerly of Macquarie University, and Robert Linder of Kansas State University, follow Clark in his quest for the religious sources of Australian identity. The book, they say, is ‘a study of the role of the Gospel in nation-building’ (p. 559). The title is taken from an address by Peter Jensen, who when he became archbishop of Sydney in 2001 declared that the problems of Australia were chiefly spiritual but that the Church had ‘ceased to attend to the national soul’ (p. 513). The authors have set out to investigate the role of Evangelicals, the great majority of the Protestant population down at least to the 1930s, in addressing the issues of Australian culture and politics from the arrival of British convicts in the eighteenth century onwards. Volume i, published in 2018, argued that parallel empires, British and Evangelical, existed during the long nineteenth century. This second volume depicts the decline of British imperial identity and the rise of a distinctive Australian self-image. Both volumes aim to show that previous historical work has seriously underestimated the contribution of Evangelical Christians of all denominations to the developing life of the Australian people.

The second volume opens with two thorough chapters on the experience of the First World War. Evangelicals, they show, shared in the national support for the war and the empire, but, buffeted by the shock of Gallipoli, felt a degree of disillusion with both, so fostering the beginnings in Australia of its own civil religion (a subject which in previous writing Robert Linder has made his own). In the interwar years Evangelicals became less keen on the Labor party than some of them had been at its origins, though, remarkably, one of them was a founder of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920. Their churches responded widely to the needs of the victims of the Depression. Meanwhile Modernism was creeping into their theology, leading to a sustained crisis over the teaching of Samuel Angus at the Presbyterian college in Sydney. The Anglican diocese of Sydney, by contrast, was turning under its archbishop, Howard Mowll (1933–58), into ‘the Protestant Vatican’, with the redoubtable T. C. Hammond as the principal of its Moore College. The Second World War, covered in another two chapters, was a time of the strengthening of faith rather than its decay and the 1950s the most religious decade in Australian history. The Billy Graham crusade in Sydney of 1959 was an astonishing success: some 130,000 Australians professed to accept Christ. In the following year 41 per cent of the population attended church at least once a month.

Thereafter the story was more mixed. The multiple challenges of secularisation faced Evangelicals, but in general they responded energetically. The new vigour of charismatic renewal took over the Pentecostal churches in 1977, leading to phenomenal church growth. In 2000 the Assemblies of God combined with other charismatic bodies to form the Australian Christian Churches. Its Hillsong megachurch became the world leader in Christian music. Sydney diocese likewise became a leader on a global scale, though in its case of Reformed Christianity. Broughton Knox, principal of Moore College from 1959 to 1985, was renowned for his combative insistence on the Bible as propositional revelation. When he encountered a position that he considered unscriptural, he had the habit of declaring ‘no’ seven times over. This uncompromising version of Evangelicalism became a force on the world stage when, in the early years of the new century, Archbishop Jensen, with a number of African colleagues, threatened to split the Anglican communion on the homosexual issue, refused to attend the Lambeth Conference and inaugurated a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Sydney stood firm against the ordination of women to the priesthood even though other Evangelical Anglicans based in Melbourne were its advocates. At the same time a section of Evangelical opinion, with the Baptist Tim Costello prominent in its ranks, asserted the responsibility of Christians to stand up for social engagement. The Evangelical movement was divided into three camps – charismatic, Reformed and progressive – which, though showing signs of moving closer together by the terminal date of 2015, were very different in outlook.

This account is remarkably fair-minded. The authors, though displaying a predilection for the theology of Jonathan Edwards and the politics of William Wilberforce, are able from time to time to extend sympathetic treatment to Anglo-Catholics. They give a great deal of attention to the Indigenous Australians, recognising the weaknesses of Evangelical paternalism even while chronicling the unflagging efforts of internal missions to reach and serve them. The phraseology is often cleverly constructed, with terse antitheses making points vividly – such as that the gospel of the Uniting Church was thought to be ‘of the age, not of the ages’ (p. 554). Towards the end of the book the topics sometimes appear in more than one section, there are a couple of mistakes relating to Britain – St Stephen's, Bishopsgate, should be St Helen's (p. 370) and Britain entered the EEC not in 1961 but in 1973 (p. 560) – and the word ‘white-anted’ (p. 291) still leaves this reviewer scratching his head. The internal life of the Churches is little developed, but that is an inevitable consequence of the focus of the book. It is about the religiosity of the nation. In the future nobody will be able to suppose that Australia has been predominantly secular. Manning Clark's second force, Protestantism in its Evangelical form, has been given its voice.