Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States ed. by George Rawlyk, Mark Noll (review)

174 Canadian Review of American Studies George Rawlyk and Mark Noll, eds. Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia , Britain, Canada, and the United States. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Pp. 429. This collection of essays explores evangelicalism in a cross-cultural context. The editors, George Rawlyk of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and Mark Noll of Wheaton College in Illinois, eschew the most general meaning of evangelicalism-Christianity's message of redemption-in favour of one which insists that "the immediate experience of God's grace" is at the very core of evangelicalism. The collection opens with an assessment of John Newton, the author of the popular hymn "Amazing Grace," and then ranges from an essay on Methodists in Ireland to a comparative study of Methodists in France, Canada, and the United States, to essays on Calvinism in Scotland and America and Pentecostalism in Australia. These essays trace common experiences of conversion and revivalism that flowed freely from one culture or nation to another. D. W. Bebbington's comparison of evangelicalism in Britain and America is the centrepiece of the book. He shows that there were many similarities in evangelicalism between these countries throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For readers interested in Canadian-American relations, there are many essays comparing the religious history of Canada with the United States. Rawlyk and Noll make the exaggerated claim that the collection "represents the most significant concentration of scholarly work to date on Canadian evangelicalism, 11 by overlooking the many fine monographs recently published in Canadian religious history. The editors echo a very traditional model of comparative North Atlantic triangle history. The history of evangelicalism in Canada, they argue, falls somewhere in the middle ground between Britain, where evangelicalism has been thrust to the margins of society, and the United States, where evangelicalism has been a defining and dominant influence. Moreover, the contributors to the Canadian section each argue that British evangelicalism was a moderating influence in Canadian religious life, while American influences were very divisive. Barry Mack credits Principal George Grant of Queen's University with steering the Presbyterian church in Canada away from the bitter divisions over modernism that split apart Presbyterian churches in the United States. Some of Grant's diplomatic talents, he argues, were rooted in his awareness of the moderate liberal evangelicalism in Scotland. By contrast, George Rawlyk attributes the schisms within Maritime Book Reviews 175 Baptists in the 1880s to the influence of the American Holiness movement inspired by Phoebe Palmer. Rawlyk also suggests that "most Maritime Methodists ... continued to be obsessed with British respectability and order and were increasingly embarrassed when they read about any 'new baptism of fire"'(300). Robert Burkinshaw's ground-breaking study of religion in British Columbia suggests that British immigration to the province was a major factor in making a strong conservative evangelicalism that was distinct from the militant temperament of American fundamentalists. Drawing on Bebbington's characterization of British evangelicalism, he suggests that the focus of British Columbia's evangelicals was winning the next generation for Christ instead of disputing modernist's heresies. There are tensions in this collection. David Elliott challenges the notion that fundamentalist activity in Canada was imported from the United States. He traces the Canadian background and activities of A. B. Simpson, W. H. Griffith Thomas, P. W. Philpott, Aimee Semple Macpherson, T. T. Shields, Oswald J. Smith, and Perry F. Rockwood, all of whom went on to become leading fundamentalists in the United States. The Canadian-American border, in terms of the fundamentalist movement, virtually did not exist accordmg to Elliott. But then in a manner more consistent with the overall thesis of the collection, Elliott argues that these Canadian fundamentalists had a much greater impact "on the American religious scene ... than ... on the Canadian churches because of the freer cultural and religious atmosphere in the United States"(374). But Elliott fails to consider the social, religious, and cultural influences in Canada that fostered the emergence of so many influential fundamentalists. Indeed, there is considerable hesitation among religious historians of Canada, as reflected in John Stackhouse's essay, to recognize or explore fundamentalist activity. There is also sharp disagreement about the...