Joseph Stubenrauch argues, against older commentators but in line with more recent historians, that Evangelicalism was bound up with modernity. He takes for examination the period roughly from the 1780s to the middle of the nineteenth century, contending that in this ‘age of improvement’ Evangelical religion in Britain had certain marked characteristics. One was a belief in human agency. Unlike many Calvinists of earlier ages, Evangelicals of this era stressed that deliberate effort was a legitimate part of the divine plan. Instead of waiting for the Almighty to bring in the elect, believers were to be active in spreading the Gospel. Furthermore they were to make use of ‘means’, a word that Stubenrauch is the first to highlight as a key term of the period. They could employ whatever instruments – whether stage coaches or double-entry bookkeeping – that the times furnished for the prosecution of their aims. Again, they adopted a policy of interdenominationalism, not allowing distinctive beliefs to interfere with Christian co-operation in the great enterprises of the day. Next, Evangelicals at this time were overwhelmingly postmillennialists, holding that before the second coming of Christ there would be a millennium of peace and plenty upon earth. Their optimism about the future stimulated them to efforts for bringing in this happy state. And they adopted a version of the contemporary literary convention of sentimentalism. Human beings touched by Christ were to be supreme exemplars of virtuous sensitivity to the wants of a suffering world. The author, a historian at Baylor University, Texas, shows that, moulded by these qualities, the Evangelicals of the epoch displayed great ingenuity in meeting its challenges.

Successive chapters demonstrate the validity of that claim. There was no antithesis, Stubenrauch explains, between Evangelicalism and the material world. For all the otherworldliness of their language, adherents of this form of Protestantism invested the material with meaning – whether graveyards or printed ballads, board games or tourist trails. Discerning the picturesque came naturally to them. Here the author takes an important step forward in our understanding by pointing out that an Evangelical concern with the beauties of nature preceded the rise of Romantic taste and so should be accounted one of its precipitants. Nor was the world of commerce alien to Evangelicals. The Religious Tract Society, one of their flagship organisations, showed entrepreneurial acumen. It exploited, for example, popular occasions for purposes of Christian propaganda: its committee assembled at 8 a.m. on the day of a public execution in order to plan a tract marking the event. There was little or no tension between business sense and religious conviction. Here, by implication, Stubenrauch confirms the views of Boyd Hilton about the Evangelical endorsement of the principles of political economy. Cities, far from being inevitable agents of secularisation, were battlegrounds on which the children of light could carry the day by distributing literature, employing town missionaries and engaging in what Thomas Chalmers called ‘aggression’. The Evangelicals also contributed to the material culture of the day by issuing prints of the Holy Land and decorative wall-plaques. They were part and parcel of a burgeoning consumer culture. So it is not surprising that when the Great Exhibition was mounted in 1851, Evangelicals were among its loudest advocates. It is true that, alongside many High Churchmen, extreme Evangelicals commonly denounced the exhibition as a display of human pride, but the mainstream of the movement expressed great satisfaction in its celebration of industrial progress.

There are inevitably minor flaws in the book. It is acceptable that American spelling and idiom should be consistently employed throughout the book (though surprising in an Oxford publication), but occasionally transatlantic usage creeps into passages quoted from works published in Britain (‘endeavor’, p. 37; ‘Travelers’, p. 138) and Southampton should not be located in New Hampshire (p. 84). But such details do not detract from the argument, which rarely falters. At one point there is a dubious suggestion that the incarnationalism rightly recognised by Boyd Hilton as a feature of the later nineteenth century can be discerned in some mainline Evangelical comments on the Great Exhibition (p. 242), but the point is not pursued. So overall this is a tour de force of intellectual analysis, disputing with existing authorities where appropriate and articulating a distinctive view of its subject on the basis of a thorough trawl of the available evidence. Nor is it dry. The instances cited are often chosen with an eye for their entertainment value. The book, in fact, is as witty as it is reliable.