Joseph Stubenrauch. The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain

Evangelical Christianity enjoyed its greatest popularity and influence in Britain in precisely the period when that country was undergoing its transition into “modernity”—or, at least, the dramatic material transformations that historians once meant by that term. From the 1780s to the 1860s, Britain urbanized and pioneered forms of mass production, literacy, mobility, and consumerism. During the same decades, evangelical Protestant religion rose to unprecedented—and unrepeated—cultural prominence in Britain. Historians tend to think it their business to explain such chronological correlations. Marxist scholars once viewed evangelicalism as just the kind of culture that an emergent middle class generates to maintain the “base” means and relations of production that created itself. Emphasizing patriarchy, sobriety, work discipline, and individualism, Evangelicalism seemingly legitimized middle-class claims to political power and social control. However, widespread evidence that evangelicals were never limited to one class has long encouraged alternative explanations for their influence and appeal. Many have since assumed evangelicalism to be a popular religious reaction against modernity, with biblical literalism and stress on divine agency in the world clearly opposing more modern, rational worldviews. Yet recent cultural studies have suggested that evangelical “heart religion” provided its adherents with a conception of their own agency and empowerment in the world that was distinctly modern—that to be evangelical was a variety of modern “selfhood.” Now, in The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain, Joseph Stubenrauch reaches beyond such interpretations of evangelical interiority to include the “modernity” in the evangelical exterior—Evangelicals’ material methods and outward actions. Stubenrauch’s essential argument is that “being evangelical” was not simply a form of modern identity or a way of understanding the world; rather, evangelical faith and action were “crucial elements of British modernity” itself (5). Evangelicals not only numbered among “the handmaidens of British modernity, they were, in turn, its children” (57)

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