TRANSFORMING THE WORLD?
The social impact of British Evangelicalism
By David Smith. Paternoster. 146 pages
ISBN 0 85364 819 0
The author here surveys aspects of evangelicalism since the Methodist revival from a particular aspect. He is asking how far has evangelicalism maintained or lost the original vision of the Reformers - and particularly the Calvinist section of it - for a transformation of society and culture?
In the course of this, he traces the frequent captivity of the established denominations, and the evangelicals within them, to many aspects of their surrounding culture. The result has usually been a retirement into a cosy, pious sub-culture of their own. That has alienated and sometimes shocked those outside it by its lack of seriousness about its own inconsistencies with regard to wealth and social inequalities. Inevitably that has made Christianity seem irrelevant to large sections of the population and its practitioners seem to be inconsistent and hypocritical. He holds that the captivity of the churches to the wealthy played into the hands of Marx and Engels when the churches could have made their protests superfluous.
