Historiography gives shape and identity to these myths. Here, Catholicism is richly endowed, with historians of the calibre of Edmund Campion and Patrick O’Farrell, the latter of whose book The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A history (1977) is among the best. The Enlightenment myth has transmuted into Australian secularism with the Bulletin writers of the 1880s looking forward to a non-religious ‘paradise’ that would become increasingly free of dogmatism and cant. Free state education was to be the vehicle of this process.

Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder argue that, historiographically, the role of evangelical Protestantism in the formation of Australian culture and public institutions has been completely neglected. They perceive a secular bias in the history profession and claim that scholarship has been ‘prodigiously negative’ about the role of religion generally, and evangelical Protestantism in particular, in Australian history. Their aim is not just to write a history of the Protestant churches as institutions, but to tell the story of lay and clerical evangelicals in shaping the broad social and political sweep of Australian life up to 1914. A second volume up to 2014 is planned.

The book begins in the 1740s with the evangelical revival in England (the ‘Great Awakening’ in America), because the British officials central to the foundation of Australia were deeply influenced by this religious renaissance. Evangelicals were not just committed to anti-slavery but intimately influenced the highest levels of the British government. Piggin and Linder incisively reinterpret the origins of New South Wales, taking us beyond the utilitarian ‘dumping ground for convicts’ thesis, to seeing the colony as ‘a great reform experiment’ motivated by an ‘Evangelical-humanitarian confluence’. They also claim that many of the values Australians most treasure today derive not from the Enlightenment but from evangelical Protestantism.

Perhaps the most difficult problem is identifying exactly what an evangelical is. Throughout the nineteenth century they were often on opposite sides of public arguments, but they always shared basic values: the need for conversion and transformation of nominal belief into living faith, the centrality of the Bible, and the devotion to Christ crucified. These values found expression through an emphasis on liberty, participatory democracy, capitalism, public morality, freedom of the press, self-improvement, and civic-mindedness.

The book’s great strength is the detailed way in which it restores the centrality of evangelical Christians in the formation of Australian culture and public institutions. They argue that the state education system was perhaps the greatest evangelical achievement of all, so that from the 1880s to the 1960s state schools promoted a kind of civic Protestantism that inculcated Christian values in the community. They also claim that many of the progenitors of Federation were public-minded evangelicals who worked for a ‘Christian commonwealth’, a term borrowed from Oliver Cromwell’s 1650s Britain.

Evangelicals were also strongly committed to the welfare and evangelisation of Aboriginal Australians. The prologue to the book describes the attempt of Lieutenant William Dawes to learn the Eora language and to relate to the local people. Dawes’s evangelical convictions were integral to his sensitivity to the situation of the Aborigines. From the start, evangelicals were also active in missionary work in the Pacific.

This commitment to reaching across the profound cultural divide between black and white in Australia was continued by later evangelicals. It was missionaries who not only protected Aborigines from rapacious and murderous white settlers, but also preserved Aboriginal languages as illustrated by the work of Lancelot Threlkeld in the Lake Macquarie area. It was also evangelicals who denounced from the pulpit and in the press the massacres of Aborigines like Myall Creek, although it was Catholic Roger Therry who prosecuted the convict murderers.

An engraving of priest Samuel Marsden by Fittler James, 1809 (photo via the The Hocken Collections, Te Uare Taoka o Hakena/Wikimedia Commons)All of the early Church of England chaplains like Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden were evangelicals working to evangelise a ‘degenerate’ New South Wales society. This situation changed with the appointment of a high church Tory, William Grant Broughton, as archdeacon in 1829, and then bishop of Australia in 1836. Governor Richard Bourke, a liberal Irish Anglican, supported the other churches, and denominationalism began to emerge with William Ullathorne organising the Catholics, John Dunmore Lang the Presbyterians, and Joseph Orton the Methodists.

Under Broughton, Anglicanism split into evangelical and high church wings. The book says that the high churchmen took over ‘the official Establishment paraphernalia’, allowing the evangelicals ‘to get on with being the third way between the snobs and the rabble’. Despite the growth of separate denominations, throughout the nineteenth century evangelicals maintained strong links among themselves drawing on their shared basic values.

One of the interesting claims the book makes is that ‘the truth is that the early Labor Party owed more to the evangelicals than the Catholics’. This fits into the book’s broader thesis that the role of evangelicals has been consistently underestimated in Australian history. Of the twenty-four members of the first Labor caucus, at least sixteen were Protestants and only three were Catholics.

St Matthews Church, the oldest surviving Anglican church in Australia, in Windsor, New South Wales, 1906 (photo by the Royal Australian Historical Society/Wikimedia Commons)

Reading this very long book (583 pages of text), I was eventually worn down by its remorseless focus on evangelicals; it is as though they were the sole actors in this historical drama. Context is sometimes lacking, with evangelicals seen in a vacuum. For instance, the book claims that the chief critics of the brutality of places of secondary punishment like Norfolk Island were the evangelical chaplains; this overlooks the critique of the Norfolk regime by Catholic Vicar General Ullathorne, and Bishop Robert Wilson in Hobart. There is also something claustrophobically ‘Anglo’ about the book. Perhaps this is understandable, but it means that it lacks a broader, multi-ethnic context, the kind of reality you can’t escape in Catholicism.

At times, you feel overwhelmed with detail. Individual evangelicals multiply, church organisations come and go, and subtle theological distinctions proliferate. Someone, in the end, is an evangelical if they say they are. While I sympathise with the authors’ aim of peopling history with forgotten evangelical high achievers, I am less patient with the confusing complexity that results. Perhaps it reflects the fact that the book has been so long in the writing; Stuart Piggin says it began in 1988. Despite these drawbacks, this is an important book that rebalances Australian historiography and goes a long way to restoring the role Christianity played in our national story.