Exporting the Rapture: John Nelson Darby and the Victorian Conquest of North-American Evangelicalism by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

In this entertaining and informative book, Donald Akenson tells the story of a small collection of radical Protestant evangelicals, originating in the southern part of early nineteenth-century Ireland, who developed a theology and organizational structure, he suggests, that allowed their newfangled ideas to influence the development of North American evangelicalism. At the centre of this tale stands John Nelson Darby and the Brethren: a group that, like any evangelical body worthy of the name, set out to convert the world. But, as was the case with many Protestant evangelicals of the Victorian period, when not cultivating God's grace, the Brethren spent a great deal of time warring with other groups and with each other. It is a complex history, but Akenson is a sure guide through its potentially baffling highways and byways.

Turning over the final pages of Exporting the Rapture, the thought nevertheless came to me that, in a way, this is a book that the eighteenth-century author Laurence Sterne would have appreciated. In Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Ann Ward, 1759–67), the narrator does not manage to get himself born until deep into the third volume. Similarly, in this book, despite its subtitle, Akenson does not get John Nelson Darby to the western shores of the Atlantic until the conclusion, and then the brief discussion of his influence on North American evangelicalism ends on the anticlimactic note that this "twisting, half secret tale . . . requires a full study in the future" (437). As Tristram Shandy's frazzled mother might have remarked "L--d! what is all this story about, if it is not about the way that Mr. Darby's queer ideas were freighted from Britain and Europe to America?" Well, essentially, Akenson offers his readers not a transatlantic intellectual and cultural history but, rather, a fascinating narrative and analysis of how some of the key concepts later associated with Protestant fundamentalism–including biblical literalism, Jesus Christ's physical return to the earth at the time of the millennium, and the secret rapture that would accompany that world-ending event–first arose among Anglo-Irish gentry in southern Ireland in the years before the famine, were exported to Britain and western Europe, and then corralled by John Nelson Darby with disastrous institutional consequences for the Brethren. Akenson demonstrates that the schism that shattered the Brethren in the 1840s, dividing the group into open and exclusive factions, was caused largely by Darby's centralizing zeal. In experiencing such a division, however, the Brethren briefly rejoined the Protestant mainstream, as larger churches, particularly the Wesleyan Methodists of Britain, were shaken to their foundations at the same time by growing opposition to similar forces of denominational centralization. Though largely overlooking that wider context, Akenson provides in his analysis of the Brethren's mid-century time of troubles a template for understanding the factors at work in such episodes of feral denominational politics, including the importance of personality clashes within the church leadership, disputes over how the church should be governed and by whom, debates over what constituted true or acceptable doctrine, and the fact that all of these issues were ultimately tied up with the pursuit and attainment of salvation and life eternal.

In providing a history of the Brethren, Exporting the Rapture does more than reinsert this little-studied movement into the crowded tapestry of Victorian religion or suggest how they might have influenced later religious developments. Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Akenson does for Darby and his people what Richard Cobb did for the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary misfits of France–he brings them vividly to life, treating them with both bemusement and affection. To take just one example of many, Akenson introduces readers to Anthony Norris Groves, a man of "almost suicidal innocence" (71) who led a contingent of Brethren to Baghdad...