Read more
This book is the first major study of the constellation of evangelists, mission halls, tent revivals, children's clubs, Bible institutes, musicians, advertising strategies, publishing enterprises, and philanthropic activity that constituted a vibrant substratum of British Evangelical Christianity between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This populist Protestant subculture has been well-charted in North America but virtually ignored in Britain. This lacuna is part due to a common assumption that secularization? corroded traditional religious communities during this era. By contrast, this book argues that this panoply of pan-denominational affinities and endeavours in fact represented an adaptation of the British Evangelical Protestant tradition to the age of mass democracy. In exploring the beliefs, worship and spirituality, gender roles, mission networks, revival events, material culture, and social protocols and taboos of popular Evangelicalism, the book presents a religious movement well-attuned to an age of popular politics, metropolitan culture, demotic advertising, and mass entertainment.
About the author
Martin Spence is Associate Professor of History at Cornerstone University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches World and European history. Originally from Suffolk, England, he pursued his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has taught church history at a Christian college in Scotland and British history at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of Evangelical Christianity in modern Britain. He has published on this theme in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and 20th Century British History. His book, Heaven on Earth: Reimagining Time and Eternity in Nineteenth-Century British Evangelicalism, will be published by Wipf and Stock in 2015.
Summary
This book is the first major study of the constellation of evangelists, mission halls, tent revivals, children’s clubs, Bible institutes, musicians, advertising strategies, publishing enterprises, and philanthropic activity that constituted a vibrant substratum of British Evangelical Christianity between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. This populist Protestant subculture has been well-charted in North America but virtually ignored in Britain. This lacuna is part due to a common assumption that secularization corroded traditional religious communities during this era. By contrast, this book argues that this panoply of pan-denominational affinities and endeavours in fact represented an adaptation of the British Evangelical Protestant tradition to the age of mass democracy. In exploring the beliefs, worship and spirituality, gender roles, mission networks, revival events, material culture, and social protocols and taboos of popular Evangelicalism, the book presents a religious movement well-attuned to an age of popular politics, metropolitan culture, demotic advertising, and mass entertainment.
