Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals

A book review of David Bebbington, Victorian Religious Revivals: Culture and Piety in Local and Global Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

In just about every sense of the term, David Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals is a good history book.  It is well-researched, clearly written, and consistently to the point.  It makes an important contribution to its field by offering new insights built on a thorough grasp of "the literature" in that field.  This is solid journey-men's history, which demonstrates how the craft should be done.  Admittedly, not everyone is going to pick up this specialist's work, but then it is not written for everyone.  It is written for those who have an interest in subjects and fields related to nineteenth-century Protestant revivalism in the English-speaking world.  For those who do have such an interest, it is a fun and informative read.

Bebbington pursues a number of themes and topics built around the premise that nineteenth-century revivals in Britain, North America, and Australia reflected both local and global elements.  Each was its own event built on local conditions and factors.  By that same token, however, each revival drew on a common international pool of forms, techniques, and ideas.  As the book's subtitle puts it, all of these revivals drew on local and global cultures and pieties.  Bebbington proves his point by describing and analyzing seven specific revivals spanning the years 1841 to 1880 and taking place in the Republic of Texas, England, North Carolina, Scotland, South Australia, and Nova Scotia.

Victorian Religious Revivals begins with two general chapters before it moves on to its seven local portraits.  In Chapter 1, Bebbington provides an introductory overview of nineteenth-century revivals in the English-speaking world, which includes a description of the various patterns of revivals in that era.  The particular patterns he identifies include Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, combined, and "modern" approaches to revivalism.  It should be noted that Bebbington begins Chapter 1 precisely where he should with an overview review of definitions of the terms "revival" and "awakening."  Chapter 2 follows with a review of the literature, which concludes with the author's own perspective.   He writes of revivals that revivals, "...ought to be considered in a global framework and as local events.  When a revival is investigated in its locality, its specific characteristics are open to discovery.  The most important features fall into the categories of culture and piety." (p. 52)

From this base, Bebbington marches through his seven investigations of Victorian revivals beginning in Texas in 1841 and concluding in South Australia in 1880.  Each chapter is a well-written description of the events of the particular revival it recounts followed by detailed analysis, which is sensitive to local factors and concerns but also teases out the larger and more global themes embedded in the particular awakening.  I read this book because one of his seven studies involves a Presbyterian revival that took place in Union Church, Moore County, North Carolina, in 1857, which was led by the Rev. Daniel McGilvary, a recent graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary.  I know McGilvary from my research on the history of the church in Thailand.  He served as a Presbyterian missionary in Siam and then in the northern state of Chiang Mai for over fifty years down to 1911.  In the course of my research, I became familiar with the events in Moore County.  Bebbington's treatment of those events is impressive.  He describes the background to the 1857 revival, the personalities involved, and its particular nature as a classic example of an emotionally restrained, Calvinistic Presbyterian revival.  The McGilvary he describes is recognizably the same Daniel McGilvary who so capably pursued his long missionary career in Southeast Asia.  Bebbington's chapter on the Moore County revival and McGilvary (Chapter 6), in fact,  makes a contribution to the study of Thai church history because it provides important background material locating McGilvary in his own home cultural context.  This is good stuff.

One of the things that is especially helpful in Victorian Religious Revivals is the way in which Bebbington organizes his analyses so that one can actually enumerate factors involved.  In Chapter 8 on an 1875 revival in South Australia, for example, he describes at least seven (by my count) factors in the "spiritual culture of Methodism" (pp. 205-212) that contributed to the revival and then, later on, six (again by my count) elements in the style of that revival (pp. 216-227).  (Bebbington doesn't do the "first, second, third, etc." routine very often, but his clear writing style facilitates identifying elements that can be enumerated).  Through all of his analysis and attention to details, Bebbington never loses sight of his main interpretive framework, which is the interplay of local and global, cultural and religious (generally denominational) forces and factors.  Thus Chapter 9 is even entitled, "The General and the Particular: Baptist Revival in Nova Scotia, 1880."

The book ends, as it must, with a summary chapter that describes the dozen or so (by my count) "reasons for revival" (pp. 263-269) and the roughly six "characteristics of revival" (pp. 269-274).  Bebbington's conclusion (pp. 274-275) to his last chapter could serve as an overview of the book for a review of it.  The final sentence of the book—"Local revivals illustrate global developments."—is itself a good summary of the whole book.

It should also be noted that Victorian Religious Revivals is an academic work and all of the paraphernalia that goes along with such work are present.  There is a very good bibliography, and I was esp. pleased to see real and actual footnotes (rather than endnotes or no notes), something rarely seen anymore.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles.  The maps are not particularly helpful.  They are too narrowly focused on the locality of each revival and very barebones.  For my money, Bebbington dismisses too quickly the leadership role of the clergy in the revivals he describes.  For him, the revivals were marked by a prominent role for the laity (p. 271), which is true but does not necessarily mean as he seems to assume that the clergy did not also play a prominent role.  He himself points to the important role clergy played in the revival(s) in Nova Scotia in 1880 (see pp. 250, 253, 255) without picking up on it as a key theme in his analysis of those events.

Frequently in the reviews I've done for this website, I have observed that the reader of a particular books has to want to read it in order to get through it.  That is most certainly not the case with Bebbington's Victorian Religious Revivals.  It is a specialist's academic work, and the reader will surely want to read it before buying it (esp. because it is pricey), but having begun the reader will not find it a hardship to continue.  Like all good history, it is a specialist work that does not indulge in the gibberish and jargon that makes so much academic writing unnecessarily difficult to read for a general audience.  Good history clears away all of that so that general audiences can participate fully in the joy of discovering the past.  This book is good history.  Its prose is not flashy but it is well-written, easy to follow, and facilitates the stories Bebbington tells.  If you have even a passing interest in its subject, I highly recommend Victorian Religious Revivals to you.

Lewis, God's Crucible

A book review of David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

In spite of the subtitle, Lewis' history of Muslim Spain (al Andalus) and Catholic Frankland (later Francia and still later France) is about an epic clash of civilizations—or, better, the clash of Islamic civilization with European barbarism.  It is an old-fahioned history that chronicles the rise and fall of dynasties and kingdoms and the many battles and wars that liter the history of both Islam and Europe.  Only in passing does Lewis point to the profound influence that Andalusian Islamic culture had on the development of Western Europe, and the reader who wants to discover what Europe learned from the Muslim East through Spain should look elsewhere.

In fact, God's Crucible is two histories, Islamic Spain and Christian Europe, that are united only by the immense episodic dislocations caused by their rubbing against each other like two gigantic, restless tectonic plates.  The Muslim East, including a variety of tribes from West Asia and North Africa, and Catholic Europe, also including a variety of peoples, pushed and shoved against each other from the invasion of Spain in 711 until the final eviction of Islam from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492.  Lewis concentrates on the first three centuries or so of the struggle, and makes a number of important observations in the midst of his chronicle.  He makes it clear, for example, that the Jews were a third presence in this history and, although much smaller in numbers, important actors in their own right.

God's Crucible is also an old-fashioned book in the attitudes it contains about Europe in the era after the fall of Rome.  While revisionist historians have discovered in early medieval Europe a dynamic world that made many advances in learning and technology, for Lewis post-Roman Europe was what previous generations of commentators believed it to be: a barbaric world trapped in the Dark Ages.  He emphasizes repeatedly that in comparison with Andalusian civilization with its great wealth and grand urban centers, Europe east of the Pyrenees was a cultural wasteland, ignorant and violent.  Almost never in this book do the Europeans come out looking good by comparison to the Arabs and other Islamic peoples on the western side of the mountains.  Most notable is the contrast between the way in which Andalusian Muslims and Catholic Europeans treated people of other faiths.  By-and-large, the Muslims were relatively tolerant of at least Judaism and Christianity and left Jews and Catholics to their faith so long as they paid their taxes and remained loyal to their rulers.  Euorpean Catholics behaved in the opposite manner with respect to Islam.  More largely, the Christians contributed little to Andalusia other than their skills at and penchant for war while Muslim Spain made important contributions to the development of Catholic Europe.  Whether or not one wants to go so far as to charge Lewis with harboring a bias that distorts the realities of the past, he certainly leans strongly in the direction of Islamic Spain and away from Catholic Frankland.

Given his pro-Andalusian perspective, Lewis argues that the Christian victory at the famous Battle of Poitiers (732), in fact, did not save Europe from Islam.  Rather it was developments in the Islamic world that conspired to halt the Arab advance into Europe.  He agrees, that is, with Muslim historians of the time who he says rightly blamed "their own internecine preoccupations as the real reason for Christian Europe's survival." (p. 178)  He also speculates that Europe was actually worse off for its victories over its Muslim invaders and their failure to conquer the continent.  Lewis writes, for example, "An ironic intelligence from another planet might have observed that if Carolingian Europeans believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers made their world possible, then it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been preferable."  He continues, "The European shape of things to come was set for dismal centuries following one upon the other until the Commercial Revolution and the Enlightenment molded new contours." (p. 286)

That being said, for the general reader who exercises a healthy caution concerning Lewis' interpretation of past events, God's Crucible is still a helpful book—never mind all of the names, which can become a jumble at times.  He captures the complexity of the events he recounts and shows how various factions on both sides of the Pyrenees played off of each other.  The Muslim invaders of Spain, in particular, turned out to be a patchwork of ethnicities and social groups.  To a degree, he makes the case that Islamic rule of Spain was generally enlightened by the standards of the day, more humane than that later imposed on it after the reconquista by Christian forces.  Charlemagne also comes across well in Lewis' account of events.  But he seems to have been more of an anomaly than anything else, a brief interlude in the darkness as it were.

If not a great book, this is certainly not a "bad" book either.  There are a few nuggets scattered through it as well.  Lewis, for example, describes the work historians as that of being "prophets in reverse" (p. 314) by which he means that historians are able to see the budding of the future in events that the participants in those events simply did not see.  Thus, what was a period of prosperity still contained the seeds of future calamity, a fact clear only with the hindsight of a "reverse prophet."  The point here is that historians benefit from hindsight only to the extent that they carry out their research with due diligence and insightfully.  What they discover is often not obvious even to others in their own time, let alone to those in the era under study.  The true prophet is inspired to see what others do not see, which is not a bad description of the historian's craft at all.

As old-fashioned political and military chronicles of the past go, in sum, God's Crucible is a reasonably good read.  It contains some interesting insights.  It does the historian's task of revising previous accounts.  It exposes the main contours of the past.  And to the degree it is a one-sided account, its bias is reasonably clear and consistent.  It also contributes to an understanding of the history of European learning and science by placing post-Roman Empire cultural developments into their larger regional history.  In that context, the Byzantine Empire lurks on the fringes appearing from time to time as events unfold and trends develop.  This is not a great book, but it is also not a bad one.