It is now nearly four decades since three books published in the late 1980s brought a new focus to the study of evangelicalism in Britain and provided convincing evidence of its wider historical significance. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987) highlighted the role of religion in general, and evangelicalism in particular, in forming the culture and values of “the English middle class,” while Boyd Hilton's Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism in Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (1988) explored its impact on social and economic thought and the consequences that followed for business and politics.Footnote ¹ Then, in 1989, these two studies of the perceived pivotal period from the 1780s to the mid-nineteenth century were complemented by D. W. Bebbington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s, which provided a survey covering the two-and-a-half centuries of the movement's existence. Bebbington also offered a definition of evangelicalism, in terms of four qualities: “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.”Footnote ² Although there are other approaches to defining evangelicalism, and it has even been questioned whether a definition is possible without anachronistic distortion of historical realities, the clarity and conciseness of Bebbington's approach has secured it an enduring influence.Footnote ³

These three books challenged a dominant historiography that in the 1960s and 1970s had marginalized religious factors, and gave renewed credibility to the work of earlier historians who had emphasized the importance of evangelicalism. G. M. Young wrote in 1936 that the Victorians were shaped by “the imponderable pressure of the Evangelical discipline,” and in 1962 G. Kitson Clark explored the substantial long-term impact of the religious “ferment” of the Evangelical revival.Footnote ⁴ In 1961, Ford K. Brown argued that evangelicals, especially the Clapham Sect group around William Wilberforce at the turn of the nineteenth century, were the cultural and religious as well as biological “fathers of the Victorians.”Footnote ⁵ E. P. Thompson's treatment of the popular Methodist variety of evangelicalism in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was famously hostile, but he also made a compelling case for its profound impact.Footnote ⁶

Although recognition of the importance of evangelicalism as a formative influence in British history was therefore nothing new, the combined impact of Bebbington's, Davidoff and Hall's, and Hilton's work was to give the field a coherence and rigor that it had hitherto lacked and a momentum that was sustained by numerous other books that appeared in the subsequent decades. As the primary purpose of this article is to review some more recent publications, this is not the place to discuss these earlier books in detail or even to attempt to list them comprehensively, but two overall trends are worthy of note.

First, while definitions are often left implicit, there has been recurrent interest in establishing the distinctive features and boundaries of evangelicalism as a religious movement that lacks a single institutional location. In part this has been a matter of exploring its origins, building on a seminal essay by J. D. Walsh published in 1966.Footnote ⁷ There has been an explicit, if sympathetic, critique of Bebbington's characterization of evangelicalism as a new form of Protestantism that emerged in the 1730s by scholars who have explored its continuities with the Reformation and Puritan eras.Footnote ⁸ W. R. Ward's work set the British movement within a much wider continental European context and in so doing traced its origins back to the pietism of later seventeenth-century Germany.Footnote ⁹ Subsequently Bruce Hindmarsh has provided a detailed exploration of the intellectual and cultural context of early evangelicalism, demonstrating its affinity with contemporary developments in science, law, and art.Footnote ¹⁰

The publication in 1995 of the Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography was a landmark in mapping the leading membership of the international movement that included numerous British figures. The principle of selection was to apply the Bebbington criteria, augmented with individuals who were known to self-identify as evangelicals or to be recognized as such by other evangelicals. Inevitably, over the years, inclusion in the dictionary has itself become a perceived test of a subject's evangelicalism, an approach that can be treacherous, given the potential for differing judgments in marginal cases. Moreover, despite the inclusion of over 3,500 entries, its editor did not claim that coverage was comprehensive and acknowledged that lack of evidence had led to the exclusion of numerous more obscure figures.Footnote ¹¹

Alongside tracing the origins of evangelicalism and endeavoring to identify evangelicals, a related approach has been to explore the religious essence of the movement through studies of its spirituality. Bruce Hindmarsh led the way with his 1996 study of John Newton (1725–1807), whose archetypal conversion experience was the pivot of his transformation from hard-living slave trader to revered spiritual counselor.Footnote ¹² In a subsequent book, Hindmarsh explored a range of conversion narratives across Moravian, Methodist, Scottish Presbyterian, and Anglican strands of evangelicalism.Footnote ¹³ Linda Wilson contributed a study of the spirituality of mid-nineteenth-century Nonconformist women, while John Coffey has edited a collection of essays on “heart religion” that spans the period from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ Most recently, Michael McMullen has produced an edition of William Wilberforce's hitherto unpublished spiritual journals.Footnote ¹⁵

Second, much analysis of evangelicalism since the 1990s has adopted an international rather than specifically British frame of reference, a natural approach to the study of a movement that proclaimed a global vision and inspired its adherents to cross oceans and continents in their zeal to spread the gospel. The trend was set by the two volumes of papers delivered at a seminal conference on “Evangelicalism in Transatlantic Perspective” at Wheaton College in Illinois in April 1992Footnote ¹⁶ and by the genuinely global scope of The Dictionary of Evangelical Biography. It was confirmed by the five-volume series “History of Evangelicalism” from Inter-Varsity Press that appeared between 2004 and 2016; by David Hempton's 2005 survey of Methodism as an international movement; by Mark Hutchinson's and John Wolffe's 2012 single volume Short History of Global Evangelicalism; and by subsequent syntheses of research.Footnote ¹⁷ Other more narrowly focused studies have highlighted the significance of British evangelical interactions with continental Europe during the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Students of British evangelicalism will gain much essential insight from engaging with the international context explored in this literature.

Against this wider historiographical background, it is timely to review several significant books concerned with British evangelicals that appeared between 2019 and 2023. These include two monographs that offer fresh insights into the so-called “age of Wilberforce;” a study of evangelical social action over the entire timespan from the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth century; a collection of essays that explore the relationship between evangelicalism and Nonconformity over the same period; and the first volume (in two parts) of David Brown's edition of the diaries of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later 7th earl of Shaftesbury, covering the years from 1825 to 1845.Footnote ¹⁹ Together, these books are indicative of a variety of lenses through which evangelicalism can be viewed.

Between them the monographs by Gareth Atkins and Roshan Allpress bring an invaluable updating and enhanced sophistication to the exploration of evangelical networks in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was pioneered many decades ago by Ernest Marshall Howse and Ford K. Brown.Footnote ²⁰ Unlike Brown and Howse, they both make extensive use of manuscript as well as printed sources, thus achieving a much-enhanced understanding of the mechanisms of evangelical networking and influence. Some of their material overlaps and their approaches to it are stimulatingly complementary. For Atkins, as his title Converting Britannia implies, the central issue is the extent to which the Anglican evangelicals of William Wilberforce's generation between the 1770s and the 1830s succeeded in their ambitious agenda for the dissemination of their distinctive brand of Christianity around the British world. He pursues his analysis through an account of evangelical “spheres of influence” (the title of chapter 1) among the clergy of the Church of England; through an exploration of the lay evangelical familial and business networks associated with the City of London; and through tracing the development of a discernible evangelical church party during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The second half of the book then assesses the mechanisms and extent of evangelical influence in three key areas of activity: the Sierra Leone colony as a case study of overseas expansion, the Royal Navy as an instrument of Britain's perceived providential global destiny, and the East India Company as the institutional basis for fulfilling their missionary vision in South Asia.

Atkins concludes that “in some senses,” evangelicals did indeed succeed in “converting Britannia.”Footnote ²¹ They had a strong influence over the early nineteenth-century Colonial Office, despite the ignominious failure of their own initial colonizing enterprise in the Sierra Leone Company. Evangelicals held leading roles in the Royal Navy, notably Charles Middleton, Lord Barham, as Comptroller of the Navy and later as First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). They were also prominent in the administrative and educational East India Company establishment in Calcutta (Kolkata). In Atkins's view, the secret to the effectiveness of evangelicals in this period lay in their capacity to accommodate themselves to the religious, social, and political environment rather than overtly to confront it with the hard-edged Calvinism of an earlier generation or the bleak pre-millennialism of a later one. They could, therefore, find common ground with other non-evangelical promoters of religious and moral reform. Moreover, they demonstrated themselves capable of sometimes resorting to a ruthlessness characteristic of their less pious contemporaries.Footnote ²²

Allpress's work complements Atkins's in a variety of significant ways. Whereas Atkins focuses on the evangelical impact on public institutions such as the Royal Navy and the East India Company, Allpress's organizing lens is that of philanthropy rather than evangelicalism as such. His starting point is usefully a generation earlier, focusing particularly on the role of John Thornton (1720–90), the father of Wilberforce's close friend and collaborator Henry Thornton (1760–1815), his associates in the Russia Company, and his other mercantile and religious networks in London and Yorkshire. Allpress is more systematic in his analysis of networks. Whereas Atkins effectively uses several contemporary images to introduce and illuminate his argument, Allpress's illustrations are a series of diagrams and maps that offer striking visual representations of philanthropic and evangelical connections. The central chapters of the book explore the contribution and ethos of the Clapham Sect, which Allpress characterizes as “the hinge” between the commercial networks that shaped late eighteenth-century philanthropy and the evangelical ones that came to the fore in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²³ He highlights their conception and articulation of trust as providing important moral and intellectual underpinning of the subsequent philanthropic endeavors. In the final section of the book, Allpress, like Atkins, looks beyond Britain, through case studies of the philanthropic networks operating in relation to Bengal, Sierra Leone, and New Zealand, and documenting the global scope of the correspondence and circulation of the evangelical Christian Observer magazine. He also describes the development in the later decades of this period of increasingly professionalized structures of philanthropy, organized by salaried officials, that maintained nationwide networks of local auxiliaries, thus offering fewer opportunities for the active involvement of the busy merchants and bankers who had shaped the less formalized philanthropy of the earlier pre-Clapham generation.

Both Atkins and Allpress concentrate on the elite metropolitan Church of England strands of evangelicalism, with little reference to Methodism or Dissent,Footnote ²⁴ or indeed to Scotland or Wales, despite the “British” scope of the titles of both books. The limitation is understandable in terms of the manageability of their projects, which are both revised doctoral theses, and legitimate insofar as it reflects the nature of the groupings and networks with which they are concerned. Both authors contribute much to understanding the global reach of the Clapham Sect and their predecessors, associates, and successors, and it is therefore natural that, like the subjects of their studies, they had little opportunity for engagement with other forms of evangelicalism much closer to home.

Nevertheless, if read in isolation, the lenses on evangelicalism provided by these two works give only a partial picture of the wider movement, in a period that saw exponential growth in Methodism, substantial renewal among Baptists and Independents under evangelical influence, the emergence of Calvinistic Methodism as a major Welsh denomination, and the development of a strong evangelical party in the Church of Scotland. Thomas Chalmers's innovative ministry in Glasgow in the 1810s was influential south as well as north of the border, and he would eventually lead the evangelical party into the Disruption that split the Kirk in 1843. Many of these developments are well-documented in older scholarship, but there remains a need for an integrated interdenominational, transnational approach to the history of evangelicalism in the British Isles in this period of its perceived greatest influence.Footnote ²⁵ Such a history would also need to give substantial attention to Ireland, where evangelicalism became a major force in Ulster society, and where the aspirations of evangelicals to promote a “Second Reformation” to convert the rest of the island contributed significantly to sectarian tensions.Footnote ²⁶

Two of the other books under review make useful contributions both to a broader understanding of evangelicalism in the period studied by Allpress and Atkins and to setting it within a longer chronological perspective. A collection of essays edited by David Bebbington and David Ceri Jones is focused explicitly on the nuances of the changing relationships between evangelicalism and Dissent.Footnote ²⁷ Although the word “Dissent” in the title reflects eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century usage, the case studies between them span the whole period from the early eighteenth century to the later twentieth, so also covering later eras in which the usual terminology shifted to “Nonconformity” and eventually to “Free Churches.” The editors’ substantial introduction provides a useful survey of the existing historiography on both movements and the interactions between them. Robert Strivens then explores the origins of the evangelical revival, arguing that while leading Dissenters such as Philip Doddridge and Isaac Watts shared the evangelical characteristics outlined by Bebbington, more specific theological and ecclesiological differences meant that they maintained a critical distance from the revivalist activities of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and others. David Ceri Jones then examines the relationship from Whitefield's perspective, showing that he enjoyed the friendship and support of Dissenters, notably the Baptist poet and writer Anne Dutton, but that his own expansive vision for revival meant that he tried to avoid aligning himself with any particular grouping. Martin Wellings offers an overview of Wesleyan Methodist endeavors to maintain a middle position between the Church of England and Dissent, tracing a gradual shift in alignment from the former to the latter. Grayson Carter provides a useful overview of his own earlier work on evangelical seceders from Anglicanism to Dissent in the first half of the nineteenth century, noting their formation of small but influential new denominations and their contribution to boosting activity and confidence in Nonconformity as a whole.Footnote ²⁸

The book is especially insightful in exploring the complex changes and continuities in evangelicalism in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Wellings, Methodism's convergence with the Free Churches coincided with an internal pluralization that weakened its initial characteristically evangelical identity. Conversely, Timothy Larsen shows that leading figures in Congregationalism, often perceived as less distinctively evangelical than Methodism, retained a strong crucicentrism throughout the period. Sarah Williams explores the growth of Christian feminism during the interwar period, arguing that this was a significant solvent of a more conservative evangelical theology that had been grounded in a tradition of biblical exegesis that legitimated the subordination of women.

The final two chapters explore the recovery and realignment of evangelicalism in the later twentieth century. Alister Chapman argues that despite the success of John Stott (1921–2011) in leading evangelical resurgence in the Church of England, evangelical numbers and dynamism were greater among Nonconformists, especially Pentecostals. John Maiden rounds off the volume with an analysis of Black Majority Churches, highlighting their importance as a new strand of Nonconformity and their gradual integration into wider multiethnic evangelical cooperation.

The cumulative contribution of these excellent essays is to highlight the complexities of evangelical organizational and theological crosscurrents across an extended period of time. In contrast to Allpress's and Atkins's work, however, they view evangelicalism primarily through a church historical lens that offers little scope for assessing its wider social and political impact. There are nevertheless some significant insights, for example in Wellings's recognition of the political importance of the convergence of Methodism and Dissent for the Gladstonian liberalism of the later nineteenth century and in Williams's suggestion that the Christian feminism of interwar liberal evangelical women was a significant precursor to the religious and sexual transformations of the 1960s. It is important to draw out such broader historiographical implications of research on evangelicalism.

Ian Shaw's wide-ranging survey of evangelical social engagements indicates some of the potentialities of locating evangelicalism in the wider context of social history.Footnote ²⁹ Like Bebbington and Ceri Jones's Evangelicalism and Dissent, Shaw's book covers a long chronological span from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth, albeit with a predominance of nineteenth-century material. It contains some of the author's original research combined with an impressive command of secondary literature. The main body of the book consists of a series of case studies of evangelical involvements in different spheres of social action, including responses to poverty and bad working and housing conditions, the promotion of education and care for vulnerable children, campaigns against slavery and to advance racial equality, medical missions and efforts to address alcohol and drug addiction, and care for prostitutes and prisoners. Each chapter concludes with a biographical sketch of an individual active in the particular field under discussion. Many of these are well-known figures such as John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, and Josephine Butler, but there is also useful coverage of some less prominent exemplars, such as David Hill (1840–96), a Methodist missionary who led famine relief in China, and Andrew Reed (1787–1862), a pioneer of orphanages and of care for children with learning difficulties. The book gives a welcome prominence to some women as leaders of evangelical social action, although it falls short of full equality, as they comprise just six of the eighteen biographical sketches. Shaw is most at home with British, and especially English, material, but he also includes some coverage of the United States, India, and China.

Shaw's main target audience is present-day evangelicals, with a view to mediating a knowledge of history to inform contemporary discussion of social activism. It is therefore a valuable exercise in accessible scholarship directed at this particular constituency. From the perspective of academic history, it is easy to criticize the book for its celebratory and sometimes uncritical tone and for the way in which the focus on evangelical social reformers can obscure the role of non-evangelicals. For example, it seems anomalous to discuss prison reform without mentioning Jeremy Bentham or public health without mentioning Edwin Chadwick.

Nevertheless, despite its distinctive lens, this is a book that deserves to be taken seriously by historians. Shaw's scholarship is generally sound, despite a few minor inaccuracies, such as confusing the date of the passing of the bill to abolish slavery (1833) with the date of its implementation (1834).Footnote ³⁰ Still, he makes a convincing argument for the breadth and depth of evangelical social impacts, not only in the classic Wilberforce era, but across the long nineteenth century. There is a challenge here, both for secularly minded historians liable to neglect the religious dimensions and motivations behind such activity and for historians of evangelicalism itself who are preoccupied with the internal theological and organizational dynamics of the movement, and with accounting for its perceived decline after the mid-nineteenth century. Allpress's and Atkins's works on an earlier period point to the potential value of a similarly close analysis of evangelical and philanthropic networks during the reign of Victoria and beyond as a basis for a rounded assessment of the significance of the evangelical contribution to ongoing social reform.

An important source for such analysis are the diaries of the most prominent lay Anglican evangelical of the Victorian era, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, styled Lord Ashley until he succeeded his father in 1851. The diaries span sixty years of his life, from 1825 until shortly before his death. Copious extracts were included in Edwin Hodder's contemporary biography,Footnote ³¹ and the main sequence of the manuscript diaries has been readily accessible to researchers at the University of Southampton Library since 1989. Nevertheless, David Brown, in collaboration with the British Academy and the university presses of Oxford and Liverpool, is providing an invaluable service to scholarship in undertaking the herculean task of editing a complete annotated text, which also includes further travel and parliamentary journals still in the possession of the present Earl of Shaftesbury at St. Giles House in Dorset. The first volume, in two parts, covering the period from 1825 to 1845, was published in 2023, and a further volume covering 1845 to 1856 appeared in July 2026. Work on the remaining two volumes covering the last thirty years of Shaftesbury's life is already well under way.Footnote ³²

The first volume (the one currently available for review) contains a substantial introduction to the whole edition and nearly 900 pages of annotated diary text.Footnote ³³ The introduction surveys Shaftesbury's life and character, examines the history of the diaries and their use by previous biographers, and explores the nature of his diary-keeping. Brown defends his decision to publish the entire voluminous extant text on the grounds that omission of material that might seem “banal” to the editor would be to “prejudge the reader's interest and approach to the material.”Footnote ³⁴ Brown's introduction is accompanied by useful maps illustrating the then-Lord Ashley's travels, some images of diary pages, a chronology of his life up to 1845, a list of his immediate family, and a note on the text and the editorial principles adopted. The copious annotations to the main text of the diary identify most individuals named, providing brief biographical information and, where applicable, directing the reader to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for more detailed information. The identifications of more obscure figures are particularly helpful to the reader. While it is inevitable that some individuals cannot be identified, commendably few people have escaped Brown's assiduous investigations. Where necessary, he is careful to qualify his identifications and to admit defeat rather than resort to unhelpful speculation. Ashley's reading and his frequent biblical allusions are also identified, while the travel diaries are supplemented by quotations from contemporary guidebooks. More substantial footnotes quote related documentation in his correspondence and provide contextual information on political and parliamentary events.

For the historian of evangelicalism, the particular interest of this first volume lies in its detailed documentation of Ashley's transformation from the pious and ambitious but rather directionless young man of the 1820s to the mature, committed evangelical reformer and staunch Protestant of the 1840s. The inclusion of the diaries still at St. Giles is especially helpful in this respect, filling in some substantial gaps in the sequence at Southampton and thereby yielding new insights into Ashley's responses to his continental travels and the political events of the later 1830s.

Ashley's diary provides a significantly different lens from Allpress and Atkins on Anglican evangelicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. He moved in very different circles from the cousinhoods and philanthropic networks mapped out in their work. For example, the diary for 1829 records his passionate and eventually successful pursuit of Lady Emily (“Minny”) Cowper, daughter of the decidedly unevangelical Countess Cowper and, quite probably, her lover and subsequent second husband, Lord Palmerston. On the other hand, although William Wilberforce was still alive during Ashley's early years in public life, the only mention in his diary of this central lay evangelical figure of the previous generation was a recollection of attending his funeral in August 1833.Footnote ³⁵ While in his very first diary entry, Ashley recorded reading a discourse by the leading Scottish evangelical Thomas Chalmers, his other reading and spiritual reflections during this period were expressive rather of a pre-Tractarian moderate High Church piety.Footnote ³⁶

There are few entries in the diary for four years after October 1829. When more continuous entries resume during a continental journey in October 1833, Ashley had already been married to Minny for more than three years and was the father of two young sons. Whether it was attributable to his new role as paterfamilias or some undocumented influence or encounter, the diary entries now assume a more clearly evangelical tone. Ashley often records reading the Bible with Minny, expresses a distaste for traveling and other secular activity on Sundays, and comments frequently on his perception of the spiritual emptiness of the Roman Catholic worship he observed in continental Europe. Moreover, while staying in Rome in the winter of 1833–34, he was critical not only of the “grand” Christmas ceremonies at St. Peter's, which he perceived to be lacking in true “worship, & love and humility…warm and deep religion” but also of the preaching of the minister at the English church that he thought almost entirely lacking “anything to distinguish it from the moral Essay of a Heathen.”Footnote ³⁷ “As yet,” he continued, “I have heard nothing in the ‘evangelical’ style, as it [is] termed, nothing to enforce the true doctrines of the Gospel, the intense and universal corruption, generally & individually, of the whole human race, the atonement, & its consequent necessities upon all mankind.”

The publication of the entire text thus enables one to document with greater precision and depth than hitherto Ashley's adoption of a distinctively evangelical religious outlook. His evangelicalism, however, remained very much an individual personal commitment rather than an engagement with wider networks. Whereas Shaw presents him as a representative evangelical in his campaigns to improve working conditions in factories and elsewhere, the diary evidences a different reality in which his activities divided evangelical opinion.Footnote ³⁸ Ashley agonized over the extent to which he was supported by “infidels or non-professors” and opposed by “Religionists,” who it seemed had different notions of “right and wrong” from his own.Footnote ³⁹ Such entries indicate the importance of Brown's achievement in making this key text readily accessible to support the ongoing research task of documenting and interpreting the complex dynamics of British evangelicalism in the pivotal early Victorian years.Footnote ⁴⁰

Before concluding, two particularly fruitful avenues of ongoing and future research can be identified. First, despite some significant recent work, the role of women in British evangelicalism still merits substantially more attention, especially because they almost always made up much more than half of the membership of evangelical communities. Alongside Davidoff and Hall's influential book, there are Deborah Valenze's and Jennifer Lloyd's studies of female preachers in Methodism and Linda Wilson's and Bruce Hindmarsh's work on women's spirituality.Footnote ⁴¹ Anne Stott's two books are also important: her biography of Hannah More (1745–1833) documents the complex and substantial influence of a major female figure, while her study of the Wilberforce, Thornton, and Macaulay family circles rescues wives and daughters from undeserved obscurity.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, there is scope for much more: elite women such as the 6th Duchess of Beaufort and Lady Olivia Sparrow played key roles in the early nineteenth-century networks documented by Atkins and Allpress, and late Georgian and Victorian popular female evangelical writers such as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Catherine Marsh, and Frances Ridley Havergal merit closer attention than they have yet received. Lloyd's and Wilson's works have highlighted the potential for using religious periodicals to give insights into the lives of more obscure evangelical women.

Second, since the turn of the millennium, the twentieth century has received increasing attention from historians of evangelicalism, especially as the movement's capacity for resilience and adaptation in the face of rapid social and cultural changes offers an important qualification and counter-narrative to accounts of secularization. Significant contributions include Rob Warner's study of English evangelicalism in the later twentieth century and Alister Chapman's biography of one of its most influential leaders.Footnote ⁴³ John Maiden's study of the 1927–28 Prayer Book crisis demonstrates that evangelicals still had the potential to have a major impact on national politics, as had been noted even in A. J. P. Taylor's otherwise emphatically secular survey of the period.Footnote ⁴⁴ More recently Maiden has turned his attention to the post-Second World War period with a study of charismatic renewal, which places this important aspect of later twentieth-century British evangelicalism in both an interdenominational and global context.Footnote ⁴⁵ The period is further mapped by two collective volumes, one exploring evangelicalism in the Church of England and the other its relationship to fundamentalism in the United Kingdom, and by David Goodhew's edited volumes on recent church growth in Britain in which evangelicals feature prominently.Footnote ⁴⁶ Running through much of this work is the endeavor to delineate interactions between evangelicalism and other closely related religious institutions and movements, historic denominations on the one hand and newer Pentecostal, charismatic, and Black-led expressions of Christianity on the other.

To date, however, research on the twentieth century has focused primarily on evangelicalism as a religious movement, with relatively little attention being given to investigation of its cultural, political, and social influence. While it is reasonable to assume that such wider impacts were less substantial than in the early nineteenth century, they were by no means negligible. It is again relevant to refer to Allpress's and Atkins's work on evangelical networks and Shaw's on evangelical social action to suggest that there remains significant scope for research on similar lines in relation to more recent periods. Potential approaches might include studies assessing the networks associated with prominent evangelical laypeople such as the Conservative home secretary William Joynson Hicks (1865–1932), the Labour minister Albert Victor Alexander (1885–1965), the industrialist John Laing (1879–1978), and the businessman, author, and pro-European activist Fred Catherwood (1925–2014). There is also scope for investigation of the impact of the numerous evangelical organizations founded and revived during the twentieth century. Similarly, the influence of major evangelical churches, such as Holy Trinity Brompton and Westminster Chapel, merit closer attention than they have yet received from historians. As demonstrated in the aforementioned studies on the Wilberforce era, it is important that such work explores evangelical influence and associations, rather than limiting itself to the activities of demonstrably committed members of the movement.

British evangelicalism is thus a vibrant field of historical research that offers many potentialities for future fruitful investigation. Moreover, it has a wider significance that goes beyond the preoccupations of its specialist and “in-house” historians. While it is probably true that its influence peaked during the early nineteenth century, narratives of subsequent decline are exaggerated and simplistic and need to be reassessed in the light of ongoing research. Through their different lenses, the books reviewed and referenced here have all made substantial contributions to that process.