Religion

Attending to the National Soul: Evangelical Christians in Australian history 1914–2014 by Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder

Item: Attending to the National Soul
Author: Hugh Chilton

March 2020, no. 419

Monash University Publishing, $49.95 hb, 656 pp

Religion

Attending to the National Soul: Evangelical Christians in Australian history 1914–2014 by Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder

by Hugh Chilton •

March 2020, no. 419

Eighty-one per cent of American evangelicals are said to have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and, with little variation, plan to do so again in November 2020. That number sparked four years of intense debate and a slew of books, signalling the latest chapter in a fascination with evangelicals and politics dating back to at least 1976 when Newsweek proclaimed the ‘Year of the Evangelical’ upon Jimmy Carter’s election. Whatever one wonders about just who counts as an ‘evangelical’ and what might be said about the broader movement in the age of hyper-partisanship, it has certainly been a boom time for histories of evangelicalism in the United States.

Hugh Chilton

Hugh Chilton is an historian and educator. He was awarded a PhD in history by The University of Sydney in 2015, and his first book is Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Religion, Australia and the crises of the 1960s (Routledge, 2020). He has written and spoken in a wide range of settings including being interviewed for ABC Radio National's Soul Search. He is a Conjoint Lecturer in Education at the University of Newcastle, Director of Research and Professional Learning at The Scots College, Sydney, and Vice-President of the Evangelical History Association.