In the latest fruit of a remarkable career, Donald Akenson has revivified the social and religious worlds of the peripatetic Victorian visionary John Nelson Darby and the Christian Brethren upon whom he powerfully impressed himself. Akenson's previous book, Discovering the End of Time: Irish Evangelicals in the Age of Daniel O'Connell (2016), reconstructed the beginnings of the modern eschatological system known as dispensationalism. Originating, according to Akenson, in the evangelical Anglo-Irish circles within which Darby moved during the 1820s and 1830s, dispensationalism posited that a secret rapture of believers to heaven would occur prior to the tribulations of the apocalypse. This eschatological scheme also involved an innovative mode of reading scripture that presumed that the Bible contained different messages for Jews and Christians. Exporting the Rapture proceeds from these starting points to explore Darby's later role in fostering this new hermeneutic, and the ecclesiology that it underpinned, within the (geographically mislabeled) Plymouth Brethren, who emerged from the Irish Protestant awakening. Akenson's goals are to piece together the history of Darby's tightening grip over the “Exclusive” branch of the movement and to argue for the transformative impact of that realignment on North American evangelicalism. For it was the Exclusive Brethren, Akenson contends, who planted the seeds of the futurist belief in an ultimate rapture that has since become one of American evangelicalism's orthodox tenets. Akenson disclaims the intention to write a biography of Darby (425), although his profusely learned footnotes will be a welcome aid to the scholar who wishes to take on that intricate task. Instead, Akenson brings his deep learning in Irish and wider religious history to bear on the problem of how the theological ideas and religious practice of Darby and his Exclusive followers forged a distinctive and creative “behavioural paradigm” (5) between the separation of the Exclusive from the “Open” Brethren in 1847–1848 and Darby's death in 1882. Even if not every aspect of that paradigm was original to Darby—some scholars place the origins of the rapture construct in Irvingite circles—Akenson argues that the particular tissue of ideas and practices that Darby wove together constituted the crucial vector in transmitting to the North American world a distinctive kind of millennial expectation and anti-formalist conception of the gathered church.

Akenson's powers as a storyteller immerse the reader in the human drama and moral complexities of a subject that might, in the wrong hands, have slipped into prim and grey solemnity. Drawing especially upon Darby's letters and oracular collected works, Akenson depicts him as a case study in the workings of Weberian charismatic authority (324–27). A tornado of religious enthusiasm, Darby roved across Europe and the British Isles, smashing cozy establishmentarian consensuses and readying the sacred remnant to meet their Lord in the air by strengthening their commitment to a “cult” (289) centered on the breaking of bread and active secession from churches insufficiently rigorist in their dispensationalist exegesis. Akenson's treatment of Darby is scrupulously evenhanded, but the figure who emerges from his careful sidestepping of partisan treatments is nonetheless unsympathetic, even disturbing. Reminiscent in some respects of Middlemarch’s Mr. Bulstrode, Darby, convinced that he had discovered the true church, ruthlessly destroyed potential rivals to his leadership (209–17) and, in one troubling instance, the credibility of potential complainants against him in a shadowy case of a possible sexual offence (414–19). In the words of John Betjeman's poem Undenominational (1937), “Undenominational / But still the church of God / He stood in his conventicle / And ruled it with a rod.” Akenson devotes the first two parts of the book to making Darby historically visible through a narration of his spiritual journeys and often stormy relationships with contemporaries, enemies, and acolytes. In the third part, Akenson shifts to a more analytic register. Here he considers the reasons why the Exclusive Brethren became successful. Akenson places particular emphasis on Darby's canny intrusion of his personal authority into an organization that, in principle, refused to recognize that it was something so profane as an “organization.” This process had the effect of guarding his idiosyncratic yet, to its adherents, intensely reassuring mode of scriptural interpretation from external criticism, while simultaneously providing it with a disciplined mode of transnational dissemination.

Akenson's great learning enables him seamlessly to relate the details of Brethren history to the rich textures of Victorian social and intellectual life and to general and recurrent problems in the history of religion. These features mean that the book is never closed in, and they make it an arresting study in the formation and dynamics of a powerful religious network. The larger purpose announced in the book's subtitle, of accounting for “the Victorian conquest of North-American evangelicalism,” could nevertheless have been pursued at proportionately greater length than is accorded to it here. In a work of 438 main pages, Darby's visits to North America, beginning in 1862, are explicitly discussed only from page 430 onwards. Akenson's argument is that it was not so much Darby himself as the particular structure that he created that transferred dispensationalism to the United States and Canada; but this allocation of space still feels somewhat imbalanced. He is not the first historian to have noticed the lines of transference from Brethrenism to wider evangelicalism. In order for this phenomenon to be fully explained, it would be necessary to look beyond the ranks of the Exclusives themselves, to give thorough consideration to the question of the extent to which, and why, other Protestant denominations borrowed from their beliefs and practices. What did Darby's ideas offer to American and Canadian evangelicals that they could not obtain from their own religious resources? This problem demands, in turn, a fully contextual consideration of the reasons why dispensationalism eventually won out against other kinds of contemporary prophetic exegesis, such as historicist premillennialism. In contrast to the dispensationalism that stressed the ruined state of the present world and salvation from its trials through a sudden rapture, historicist premillennialism, growing in more natural affinity to the historical imagination of the romantic era, focused believers on the earthly work of the new creation which the Second Advent would complete and transform. Perhaps some future historian of transatlantic evangelicalism will connect Akenson's researches to the themes of Martin Spence's important study of historicist premillennialism, Heaven on Earth: Reimagining Time and Eternity in Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicalism (2015).

Despite these limitations, Exporting the Rapture deserves to be widely read for the way in which Akenson gives color to the interconnected histories of theology, society, administration, and human genius and frailty in the case of a particular religious group. Its larger target—the seams and striations of the Anglophone prophetic imagination—remains for now a mountain in the mist, albeit one for which Akenson has provided a compass and part of a chart.