Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States

T.D. Regehr is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
the author of The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Entrepreneurship and
Politics.

Evangelicalism in the 18th-century English-speaking world was a
religious movement characterized by “revivals” conducted by
charismatic evangelists, who emphasized the importance of a conversion
experience, the ultimate authority of the Bible in matters of faith and
life, and an intense, often emotional and legalistic, style of personal
piety. Evangelicals exerted great influence in the 18th and early 19th
centuries, but their influence and credibility underwent a serious
decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in part as a result
of the theological battles between “modernists” and the most
militant elements in the evangelical movement. Dogmatic insistence on
the literal acceptance of the biblical creation account and complete
rejection of all evidence supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution
brought Evangelicalism into serious disrepute, particularly in scholarly
communities.

During the last two decades new scholarship has sought to rehabilitate
Evangelicalism, often by disassociating it from the more disreputable
early–20th-century fundamentalists, as well as from more recent
scandal-plagued teleevangelists. These essays represent some of the best
of that new scholarship. They seek to identify some of the common
strands in Evangelicalism in different parts of the English-speaking
world, while also acknowledging the impact of differing regional
conditions.

Ten of the 16 essays in this volume were first presented at a
conference at Wheaton College, Illinois, in April 1992, which examined
“Evangelism in Transatlantic Perspective.” The book is divided into
four main sections. The first deals with the origins of Evangelicalism.
The next three deal, respectively, with Evangelicalism in the modern
United States, Australia, and Canada. An excellent introduction draws
together the common themes and identifies differences in the evangelical
experience in these three regional contexts. There is also a concise but
helpful bibliographic essay at the end.