2016/08/04 by Joseph Stubenrauch · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Religious Tourism and Spaces #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment #Ingenuity #Faith #Modernity #Consumerism #Gospel #Industrialisation #Sociology #Aesthetics #Art #History #Religious studies #Political science #Law #Literature #Theology #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198783374.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2016/08/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain argues that British evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries invented new methods of spreading the gospel as well as new forms of personal religious practice by exploiting the era’s growth of urbanization, industrialization, consumer goods, technological discoveries, and increasingly mobile populations. While evangelical faith has often been portrayed standing in inherent tension with the transitions of modernity, this book demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure were fruitfully linked with theological shifts and changing modes of religious life. The book makes its case by analyzing a vibrant array of religious consumer and material culture produced during the first half of the “long” nineteenth century. Mass print and cheap mass-produced goods—from tracts and ballad sheets to teapots and needlework mottoes—were harnessed to the evangelical project. So too were souvenirs, the tourist industry, steamships, the telegraph, and even the Great Exhibition itself. By examining ephemera and decorations alongside the strategies of evangelical publishers and benevolent societies, this book considers often overlooked sources in order to take the pulse of “vital” religion during an age of upheaval. The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity explores, then, why and how evangelicals turned to the radical alterations of their era to bolster their faith and why “serious Christianity” flowered in an industrial age that has usually been deemed inhospitable to it.