The Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism

Abstract

Relatively neglected before the late 1980s, the historiography of evangelicalism, one of the world's largest religious movements, has burgeoned over the last three decades. Given the proliferation of articles, collections, and monographs on the subject, an enterprise that seeks to chart the field and set out proposals for future lines of enquiry is particularly welcome. The volume comprises a total of sixteen essays, mostly by established scholars, grouped in broad thematic sections with the first five concerned with key features of evangelicalism: evangelical identities, the Bible, the cross, spirituality, and revival and revivalism. This is followed by a group of essays on evangelical encounters with the ‘other’: Rome, Eastern Christianity, Islam, and evangelical mission in both the Atlantic North and the Global South. Finally, there is a group of essays on the relationship of evangelicalism to a range of social and cultural themes: the end of the world, race, gender, culture and the arts, money and business, and globalization.All of these essays represent thoughtful contributions to the existing literature. Thus, the essay on identity, for example, seeks not to add a further definition of evangelicalism to an already overcrowded field but to trace the main contours of the debate and analyse some of the reasons why this issue is so often and so fiercely disputed. It concludes by pointing to the explosion of evangelicalism in the Global South as inevitably generative of new questions and new forms of contestation. A number of authors make notably creative use of the opportunities offered by their topics. The essay on the Bible, for example, eschews a rehearsal of the familiar debates around inerrancy in favour of an emphasis on the centrality of the Bible to evangelical faith and its popular appropriation both directly and through the medium of hymns and songs. Similarly, the essay on culture and the arts avoids a catalogue of evangelical attitudes by genre and instead offers an illuminating analysis of evangelical encounters with the arts and evangelical cultural production according to the contexts in which they occurred: the home, the church, in evangelism, and in wider society. If a general theme emerges from this body of work it is the complexity of the phenomena under consideration, the unhelpfulness of the stereotypes by which evangelicalism is commonly interpreted both by insiders and outsiders, and the need to understand its development among multiple axes frequently defying generalization and always demanding nuance in any attempt at characterization.Given the treasure on offer in this volume it may seem churlish to ask for more, but at least two topics are unrepresented here: evangelicalism and politics and evangelicalism and the body have a salience that clearly calls for similarly thoughtful treatment and might be included in a later edition. A more serious reservation concerns the strong North Atlantic focus of the majority of the writing. To some extent this is inevitable given the origins of the movement and the historical approach intrinsic to the volume, but given the transformation of evangelicalism since the mid-twentieth century into a movement principally located in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, it is surprising that essays focused on evangelical complexity should so largely exclude the ramifications of this expansion. In a handful of cases this has a potentially significant impact on the analysis offered. The conclusion, for example, that ‘Wealth for the evangelical is always likely to remain ambiguous’ (266), derived principally from a survey of the British tradition, would surely be subject to reappraisal given the powerful themes of health and prosperity characteristic of much evangelicalism in the Global South. However, these criticisms do not detract from the achievement of this volume, which should be regarded as essential reading for anyone who wishes to think afresh and creatively about the history of this dynamic and protean form of Christianity.