The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain. By Joseph Stubenrauch

Abstract

This study of the interaction between the secular culture of modernity and the faith commitment of those Christians formed in the Evangelical Revival brings together aspects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century often seen as in tension, the one hostile to the other. Thus Joseph Stubenrauch argues that Evangelicalism was partly shaped by the secular culture of an emerging urban industrial world, as in part it helped to mould it, as evangelical activists exploited ‘means’ and ‘instruments’ within the new world to spread evangelical influence; hence the title of this study, in which the author argues that evangelicals, far from fearing the radical changes overtaking society, ‘eagerly sought to capitalize on them and to contribute to them’. Declaring their own era to be ‘the age of ingenuity’, they harnessed commerce, decorations, mass print, and urbanization to the work of salvation (p. 2). Evangelicalism is seen not merely as an instrument of class, race, jingoism, and social control (functions which from time to time it did serve) but as an empowering agent enabling many from the working classes to achieve more control over their destinies.