This volume is the last to be published in the magisterial five-volume History of Evangelicalism series, which provides scholarly but accessible overviews of the movement from the early eighteenth century to the present, from five of the world’s leading experts. It offers a stimulating synthesis of the latest literature, with excellent bibliographies for researchers who want to dig further, while also charting some important new pathways for our understanding of evangelicalism between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.

Geoffrey Treloar’s work is a fitting capstone to the series, examining a period usually neglected in evangelical historiography though it is now thankfully beginning to attract scholars at last. In standard interpretations, evangelicalism entered the doldrums in the interwar years, disengaged from popular culture, obsessed by anti-modernism, in retreat from the academy, and generally ineffective in its witness. After the death of Charles Spurgeon in 1892 and Dwight Moody in 1899 there were no leaders of equivalent global stature until John Stott and Billy Graham spearheaded the neo-evangelical resurgence from the 1940s. Because older evangelical histories tend to gravitate towards heroic figures, they neglect this period as a painful aberration and embarrassment – unless studying the birth of Pentecostalism or Fundamentalism.

Something of that jarring dissonance is seen by comparing the titles for this series. The other four volumes speak of the ‘Rise’, ‘Expansion’, ‘Dominance’ and ‘Globalization’ of evangelicalism, but here we read of its ‘Disruption’. It was an era when the foundations were shaken by traumatic crises like the Great War and the Great Depression, and evangelicals like most of their contemporaries struggled to find their feet in this disorientating new context. They also fragmented into rival camps, fighting to control both the future strategy and the nomenclature of the movement. This has classically been portrayed as an internecine war between entrenched polar opposites – conservative evangelicals versus liberal evangelicals – but Treloar shows that the reality was far more complex and fluid, even amorphous, with some surprising areas of commonality and unlikely alliances. His narrative ranges widely, from Cambridge to California and Aberdeen to the Antipodes, taking in colourful personalities like John Mott, the missionary statesman and evangelical ecumenist, and Aimee Semple McPherson, the flamboyant divorcée and single mother who evangelized interwar Los Angeles with all the latest tricks of media, marketing and self-promotion straight from the Hollywood playbook.

Treloar’s overall assessment is strikingly positive and thus may help to jolt the historiography in new directions. He argues that far from the doldrums, evangelicalism in the early twentieth century showed much evidence of dynamism, creativity, diversity, and intellectual and cultural engagement. Most importantly, he sets out to demolish the popular ‘great reversal’ thesis by successfully demonstrating that interwar evangelicals continued their serious commitment to social renewal and political activism pioneered by the Victorian generation. Yes, they may have been eclipsed by other Christian thinkers like William Temple and Reinhold Niebuhr, and may not have won lasting political reforms, but evangelical commitment to social transformation (when faced, for example, by rising levels of poverty and unemployment) went hand-in-hand with their missional priorities.