Popular Evangelicalism in the Age of Mass Democracy

2017 | History & Politics

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.

Martin Spence (Author)