Review of Hugh Chilton, Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Religion, Australia, and the Crises of the 1960s

Abstract

Because the progress of research is normally incremental, it is unusual for an academic book to transform the subject it treats. Yet this is the achievement of Hugh Chilton’s Evangelicals and the End of Christendom: Religion, Australia, and the Crises of the 1960s. Religious historians recognised the importance of ‘the long 1960s’ at the turn of the 21^st century as they looked back on the previous 100 years and there followed a succession of important books on the subject. In Australia the matter was taken up principally by David Hilliard whose numerous articles retain their authority as the starting point for all subsequent research on the era. However, originating as a University of Sydney PhD thesis which resulted in a well-earned doctorate, Chilton’s is the first book length treatment of the experience of Australian evangelical Christians in the 1960s and 1970s. Its impact is such that this subject must now be viewed differently.