Standing against the whirlwind

About this book

Standing Against the Whirlwind is the only contemporary account of a little-studied aspect of nineteenth-century evangelicalism - the Evangelical party in the Episcopal Church in America. A revisionist account of the church's first century, it reveals the surprising 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 Hochstedt 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. The result is a fascinating picture of the struggle and ultimate failure of the movement - a loss, Butler shows, not to the ritualist opponents against whom they struggled for the better part of the century, but to the liberal forces of the secularized twentieth century.