John Song (also John Sung, Song Shangjie) was a famous Chinese evangelist popular in the 1930s, known for his unique background and charismatic preaching. The son of a Methodist pastor in Fujian, Song went on to do three chemistry degrees in Ohio, culminating in a PhD at Ohio State. He began a programme at Union Theological Seminary, the liberal flagship, but had a mental breakdown and was hospitalised before returning to China. In China, he was one of the most famous of a new band of evangelists who travelled throughout China and south-east Asia. Until now, most work on Song has been piecemeal or has been largely uncritical. Ireland's ability to dive deep into the archives and to place Song's life against the backdrop of major movements makes for a moving study of Song and a notable contribution to the field. The book is well written, drawing the reader along.

I had once considered writing a dissertation on Song. While I was able to track down some interesting materials about his time in Ohio and his hospitalisation, I ultimately surrendered in the face of so many missing, incomplete or sometimes conflicting accounts. Ireland has succeeded in tracking these down. As he explains, Song's autobiographies were dictated orally and his diaries were only made available for research recently. Add in sermons, the accounts of contemporaries, institutional records and immigration documents, missionary letters and other records, and the volume of materials is daunting. Ireland's ability to eventually locate Union Theological Seminary's materials, unearthed after ninety years, and the diaries, is significant. He put together what he calls an 11,000 ft paper trail. Song's stories can also, as Ireland says, seem ‘fuzzy’. Ireland comments that Song never tells the same story the same way twice. Song often exaggerates, embellishes and reinvents his story. Much of this book involves matching what the records show against Song's own accounts.

Ireland gives the basic thesis of his book in the preface: ‘In the 1930s, [Song] pioneered a style of Christianity that delivered to China what its urban inhabitants most desperately wanted: a way to be different, a chance to be new. This book examines how Song initiated an alternative path to China's modernization’ (p. xv). John Song consists of an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The core seven chapters are interestingly named. The first is ‘The dissolution’, followed by six ‘news’: new man, new means, new location, new audience, new woman and new body. Song was a ‘new’ man post-conversion, and he also returned to a China that was fascinated with newness and modernity. Coming of age during a period in China concerned with revolution and social change, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and the birth of the charismatic movement, Song is often seen as providing a new Christianity that spoke free of the nation, scientific modernity or traditional Christianity.

Highlights of John Song include a better study of Song's US period, a rich interpretation of Song's evangelistic career and the contextualisation of Song's work in national and religious contexts. The chapters that look at women's groups and at faith-healing are especially compelling. Song's revivalism was not static. Instead, his approach changed over time, increasingly emphasising faith-healing. Ireland is able to place Song's faith-healing against the dual trends of foreign and national (‘Chinese’) medicine. Song was an innovator, developing a message that made him immensely popular, even in the face of competitors and sceptics.

Ireland concludes John Song with a brief reflection on Christianity's revival after Mao and its contemporary popularity. He notes several trends: the significance of charismatic leaders, faith-healing, evangelism and urbanisation. Ireland writes that ‘even as the Protestant establishment broke apart, there was another Christian tradition ready to take its place. Formed in the decades following May Fourth, this type of Christianity was not primarily worked out in periodicals or reform programs, but in the furnace of revivals’ (p. 206). Ireland calls the features that characterised Song the ‘fundamental building blocks of contemporary Chinese Christianity’. Ireland has done painstaking, exacting work to trace Song's development, and is among the first to offer something like a redaction criticism of Song's life story. Along with works like Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye's China and the true Jesus (Oxford–NY 2018), this period may be part of a reevaluation of pre-PRC Chinese Christianity. These scholars are concerned with Christian movements on their own terms, while also marshalling strong historical and social science methodologies to study religious change.

How, if at all, will this change popular Christian approaches to Song's legacy? That is harder to know. The hope is that other scholars will pursue some of these lines. For instance, Song's family is only discussed in passing. John Song gives little space to Song's wife and none to his children or to a sibling he lost in childhood. Learning more about certain periods such as his time in Ohio or to his campaigns outside China would also be of interest. John Song movingly describes Song's illness and death but Song's last years are a blur. This book also contributes to scholarly discussions around which there may not be consensus. Ireland largely leaves Song's mental illness back in the US after he returns to Asia, but I wonder whether Song's bi-polar disorder might help explain the arc of his relentless ministry, the constant travel and the struggles with contemporaries. Among scholars, Song's independent Christianity and Evangelical-fundamentalist theology, informed by charismatic leaders and faith-healing, have grown in influence; however, they are not universally lauded.

Part of Baylor's Studies in World Christianity series, edited by Joel Carpenter, John Song is a major contribution to the study of Christian history. Archival strengths combined with a clear narrative and helpful analysis make it a great introduction to early twentieth-century Chinese Christianity. Inclusion of immigration history, the growth of the charismatic movement and the body and healing make it even more informative.