Given that it has been thirty years in the making, it is striking that Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder’s two-volume history of evangelicals in Australia has appeared at such a time as this. Following on from The Fountain of Public Prosperity: Evangelical Christians in Australian history, 1740–1914 (Monash University Publishing, 2018), which was reviewed by Paul Collins in the October 2018 issue of ABR, Attending to the National Soul takes the story up to the present. It is a story of a diverse movement of ‘biblical experientialist’ Christians engaged in the making of modern Australia and shaping the global evangelical movement in far-reaching ways. It was long overdue but worth the wait. It is among the most significant works of both Australian history and global religious history in decades, and shows how being an evangelical in Australia has meant, and does mean, very different things from those in America.

This is a work of rare scale. When combined with the first volume, it runs to more than one thousand pages, supported by hundreds of references. The lens moves across the continent, around the world, and across time. While Sydney Anglicanism and Australian evangelicals’ experiences in wartime are its two deepest foci, the book demonstrates a commanding grasp of all parts of the movement across denominations, locations, and issues. From Japanese prisoner-of-war camps to heresy trials, from mainstreaming multiculturalism to pushing for the criminalisation of child pornography, evangelicals appear everywhere.

This is, after all, a history of evangelical Christians in Australian history, not just evangelicalism as a movement. One of the great strengths of the book is its interweaving of a huge number of personalities to illustrate the larger concerns of the movement and the nation. Some are well known. Alan Walker was a household name as leader of the Methodist Mission to the Nation in the early 1950s (forerunner of the hugely influential 1959 Billy Graham Crusade), founder of telephone counselling service ‘Lifeline’ at Sydney’s Central Methodist Mission (now the Wesley Centre), and one of the most outspoken critics of Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. Governor-General Bill Hayden called him the ‘conscience of the nation’. The serious evangelical commitment of Reverend John Flynn, the Royal Flying Doctor Service founder whose face adorns the $20 note, appears alongside that of Aboriginal inventor David Unaipon, who features on the $50 note.

Others have long been missing from the story. Though well aware from Piggin and Linder’s first volume of the key role of evangelicals in the formation of the union movement and the Labor Party, I was surprised to learn about several of its evangelical postwar leaders, such as lay preacher Norman Makin, federal member of Parliament for long periods between 1919 and 1963, first Australian ambassador to the United States, and first president of the United Nations Security Council.

In a movement often derided as patriarchal, women feature prominently throughout Piggin and Linder’s account, not just in the extensive treatment of the female-ordination debates of the 1970s to 1990s. The prologue traces the life and activism of Mary Bennett, tireless champion of Aboriginal rights and lately hero of first-wave feminism. As they did with their study of First Fleet astronomer William Dawes in the prologue to their first volume, the authors show how historians have flattened Bennett (and so many others) by being deaf to the critical role of evangelical faith in motivating and mobilising her ‘dynamic altruism’.

Those familiar with Piggin and Linder’s considerable output of articles and books (the former’s 1996 Evangelical Christianity in Australia seeing three editions) will appreciate the wider mountain range across which this work, detailed as it is, traverses. Their patronage of a generation of scholars in Australia and their cultivation of transnational networks, chiefly through the Evangelical History Association, formed in 1987, via its journal Lucas and the print and digital Australian Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, is reflected in the range of studies drawn on. Many are by the dozens of students Piggin supervised before his retirement from Macquarie University in 2018 – including several insiders to the movement. The authors’ own archival and oral history work over three decades is also substantial. Thoroughly researched and highly readable, this is first-rate scholarship.

Beyond its scale and sensitivity to its subjects, the most significant contribution of Attending to the National Soul lies in its title. Piggin and Linder address foundational questions about what it has meant to be Australian and what part evangelicals have played in defining and nourishing both the conscience and the consciousness of the nation. They argue that the assumption of Australians’ innate secularity is just that, an assumption, and they show how, even after the shocks of the 1960s, the ‘Australian soul is a very “Christianised” one’. They complicate the negative view of evangelicals’ role in the nation that Manning Clark did so much to establish. Far from being ‘cretinous puritans’ inimical to the ‘lively, interesting and creative’ society Australians might forge, they were always engaged in the life of the nation. Withdrawal was no option. Their challenge, entering the twenty-first century, was to avoid fighting so much with one another and to unite in a common response to the challenges of secularism.

For all the faults of Clark’s approach, its attraction to so many beyond the academy lay in his bold thesis about the forces animating Australia and Australians across their Aboriginal and European pasts. He told a big story, a human story, and provoked a response. Piggin and Linder’s masterful work gives a fresh account of evangelicals’ engagement in the Australian story across the last century. Like Clark, their big claims invite disagreement and debate. The authors do not refrain from bracing judgements, especially about the tensions between ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ forms of Anglican evangelicalism in recent decades and the consequences for the global church. The diversity of the movement, a theme throughout the book, shows how crude it would be to assume that the identity concerns of contemporary American evangelicals are those of Australians.

Whatever one makes of their arguments and evidence, Piggin and Linder’s definitive study ought to stimulate much more attention to the crucial influence of religion in Australian history and encourage historians to look beyond the standard categories of race, class, and gender. It ought to encourage them to attend more to the national soul in their own questions, looking for how actors have aimed to ‘sensitise its conscience, strengthen its moral energy, inform its consciousness, and fire its imagination with a vision for the future’.