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Over the twenty-five years since its publication in 1989, David Bebbington's Evangelicalism in Modern Britain has achieved an enviable status. It is simultaneously a venerable standard in scholarly conversations about British religious history, yet also fresh and provocative enough to incite the kind of lively debate evidenced in this roundtable. In Evangelicalism in Modern Britain Bebbington examines the contours of British evangelical religion over more than two centuries, finding that the character of the movement developed and changed over time in response to shifts in British high culture. He further outlines a quadrilateral of traits common to evangelical religion through these centuries, making it possible to identify connections and make comparisons between evangelicals across time. Conversionism, crucicentrism, activism, and biblicism might look quite different in Jonathan Edwards's eighteenth-century guise than in John Stott's twentieth; nevertheless, these four characteristics stand out as markers that identify a core faith.1
This essay follows the Bebbington quadrilateral out of Britain and into the Empire as evangelical missionaries carried it abroad, beginning in the late eighteenth century. In the imperial mission field, evangelicalism encountered new influences and took on a variety of forms. Yet the four most central characteristics of the faith remained, and culture continued to influence the shape of evangelical religion. If one reframes Bebbington's original argument within the context of recent scholarship of British imperialism, which has focused particularly on the interactive and mutually constitutive nature of metropolitan center and imperial periphery, the question that naturally arises is: How did British evangelical religion change over time in response to the changing assumptions, not only of Western and British civilization, but also to the cultures and complex interactions of the foreign mission field?
The Baptist Missionary Society's work, begun famously at Serampore in Bengal by William Carey in 1795, unfolded in a new cultural context, very different from the British environment in which evangelical religion had grown. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the particular problems and complexities of the Indian mission field deeply shaped the character of missionary evangelicalism. The Baptist mission in Bengal and the Indian Christian churches that formed there tested the cohesiveness of evangelical religion as it jostled against many of the central assumptions of British imperialism. In particular, the activism of colonial...