Abstract
In light of a long historiographical tradition in which early nineteenth-century British evangelicals have been criticized for having been overly ascetic, anti-intellectual, and mostly uninterested in those areas of life that did not directly pertain to their religious interests, Doreen M. Rosman thoughtfully analyses the accuracy of this depiction of evangelicals’ engagement with the culture of the latter Georgian era in this study and cogently presents a more nuanced assessment than the one offered by the traditional view. A sympathetic, but critical, observer of evangelical Christianity, in both its established and dissenting forms, Rosman demonstrates that evangelicals were not as far removed from the mainstream currents of British culture at this time as some of their most caustic contemporary critics accused them of being. Among Rosman’s most illuminating insights is her recognition of how ‘The tragedy of evangelicalism was that it rightly stressed the importance of applying faith to the whole of life while lacking a theology capable of being so applied in any but the most negative fashion’ (p. 59). Rosman shows how this was so even as evangelicals could be found actively involved in the creation and consumption of the various high and low cultural products of their day Rosman’s study as a whole may be characterized as an elaboration of this statement and examines how evangelicals struggled with the question of how their faith ought to inform their cultural participation. Chronologically, Rosman studies the generation of evangelicals who lived between 1790 and 1833, i.e. the period approximately bounded by the deaths of John Wesley and the Countess of Huntingdon (who both actually died in 1791) and those of William Wilberforce and Hannah More four decades later. After two helpful orientating chapters, whose purpose is to introduce the general reader to the history of the evangelical movement during this formative period and to outline its basic theological distinctives, Rosman turns to her examination of how evangelicals either participated in, or eschewed, particular aspects of their culture in each of the seven ensuing chapters, a discussion that will be of greater interest to specialists. Rosman considers evangelical attitudes towards public amusements, family life, domestic leisure pursuits, music, painting and sculpture, literature, and higher learning and marshals evidences from an impressive array of sources drawn from evangelical periodicals, memoirs, and personal papers in order to support her conclusion that it is plainly not the case that evangelicals were the Philistines as which they were sometimes caricatured. In Rosman’s estimation, while the evangelicals of this time ‘enjoyed non-religious cultural and intellectual pursuits in ways that heretofore have not been adequately recognized, they, nevertheless, ‘were never able confidently to assimilate such worldly activities within the framework of their world-denying theology’ (p. 178). Her scholarship offers a highly complementary picture to other studies that focus on the evangelicals’ theology and their evangelistic and social reform projects and it fairly and persuasively highlights a rather significant deficiency of the evangelical movement at that time.