Standing Against the Whirlwind

Book excerpt: Standing Against the Whirlwind is a history of the Evangelical party in the Episcopal Church in nineteenth-century America. A surprising revisionist account of the church's first century, it reveals the extent to which evangelical Episcopalians helped to shape the piety, identity, theology, and mission of the church. Using the life and career of one of the party's greatest leaders, Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the second bishop of Ohio, Diana Butler blends institutional history with biography to explore the vicissitudes and tribulations of evangelicals in a church that often seemed inhospitable to their version of the Gospel. This gracefully written narrative history of a neglected movement sheds light on evangelical religion within a particular denomination and broadens the interpretation of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism as a whole. In addition, it elucidates such wider cultural and religious issues as the meaning of millennialism and the nature of the crisis over slavery.