Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change

This chapter briefly synthesizes the findings of the volume, considering how evangelical media affected British life and letters more broadly during the long eighteenth century. While evangelicalism itself was, and continues to be, a contested category—reading evangelicalism primarily as part of the history of mediation allows us for a better understanding of the enduring power and influence of the movement. It also troubles narratives of secularization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and better explains the continuing influence of evangelical religion and evangelical media practices today. This chapter reveals that, once a discursive space has been opened up and the outsiders invited in, it can be very difficult to comprehensively close it again.