This powerful and provocative book challenges the legacy of some of evangelicalism’s heroes. Smith’s thesis is that the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening was, what he calls, ‘world-transformative Christianity’. The lordship of Christ over all of life meant both personal conversion and social transformation. This biblical vision, inherited from the Reformation and Puritans, was the reason behind its success. And it is the persistent abandonment of this vision that has led to decline of Christianity in Britain.

The evangelicalism of the eighteenth century revival thrived among the poor. The Victorian evangelicalism of Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce sought to extend its appeal to the ecclesiological and political establishments. This, says Smith, led to the eclipse of its world transforming tradition. Wilberforce, for all his social reform, argued against any change in the structure of British society. The Clapham Sect set out to ensure both the form and content of the message were inoffensive to the privileged. The second generation of Methodist leaders followed the same route. Moves for political change within Methodism were suppressed in pursuit of social respectability.

A growing theological entrenchment characterised by fundamentalism and apocalyptic eschatology led to widespread social disengagement or political conservatism. Evangelicals tried to reach the working classes with meetings in secular buildings or emotion-led revivalism. But, divorced from any world-transforming vision or an apologetic that engaged with modern thought, such attempts only touched the already converted.

In a key paragraph Smith says: ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the form it took at Clapham, evangelicalism came perilously close to being a religious ideology in the Marxist sense of that term. If this conclusion is correct it has serious implications in relation to secularisation: in its Wilberforcian form evangelicalism may have achieved the success it sought in renewing the Establishment, but a high price was paid for this if, by identifying the Gospel with an élite culture and a deeply conservative approach to domestic politics, it alienated the growing numbers of people who were now challenging the patriarchal structures of British society and calling for radical social reforms. Without intending it, the movement associated with the Clapham Sect may have been a significant factor in the long-term decline of religion in the United Kingdom’ (19).

Smith identifies other voices within the tradition—often now neglected. Evangelicalism had a profound impact on political dissent. But these voices did not prevail and often turned in frustration to the secular labour movement.

The best history is often polemic and Smith is no mere chronicler of the past. What he perceives as the growing crisis of Western culture offers evangelicalism an opportunity for the renewal of mission, but only if it can regain its world-transformative vision. The Lausanne Congress of 1974 was a watershed, but evangelicalism faces other temptations: to retreat into an irrelevant fundamentalism or the easy triumphalism which mistakes numeric growth for genuine discipleship.

As we grapple with the challenges of postmodernity there are those who suggest that evangelicalism is inescapably a modernist expression of Christianity. What Smith shows is that, while much of evangelicalism has been high-jacked by the modernist relegation of religion to the private sphere, evangelicalism’s authentic voice offers a challenge to modernism and a biblical alternative to the vagaries of postmodernity.

If there is a disappointment in the book it is that Smith asserts rather than proves his claim that the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening was world-transforming. He fails to show the intentiality of its profound social impact. Indeed he acknowledges John Wesley’s deep political conservatism and anti-democratic sensibilities. Wesley’s opposition to Calvinism, argues Smith, was motivated by his suspicion of the social transformation to which its all-embracing view of life led.

---