Inochentism and Orthodox Christianity. Religious dissent in the Russian and Romanian borderlands. By James A. Kapaló. (New Religions.) Pp. xviii + 277 incl. 26 figs and 2 maps. London–New York: Routledge, 2019. £120. 978 1 4724 3218 6

Abstract

not achieve its ambitious goal of renewing Church and State in the Netherlands. Earlier explanations argued that poor organisation, diminishing levels of religious practice and internal divisions brought about the demise of this promising movement. The book is impressively rich in its detailed reconstructions of the main arguments that appeared in the leading periodicals and other publications of the day. Though broad in scope, the story concentrates on the second phase of the modernist movement, between \uf644\uf64b\uf64a\uf643 and \uf644\uf64c\uf647\uf643. Because of their common bourgeois background, both leadership and supporters failed to realise the need for a wider process of political modernisation and engagement with the working classes as they fought for democratic rights. Moreover, the weakness of a negative role, that of erasing the dominance of orthodox Calvinism, inhibited the liberal religious reform agenda. A return to loyalty to the traditional church structure, after a period of campaigning for a more open community, drained the movement of its energy and turned it towards internal problems rather than to concentrating upon pursuing a really inclusive goal. This weakness was exacerbated by the fact that most of the movement’s politically progressive allies would not support the practice of religion in public institutions. Hence the movement turned instead into a patronising campaign to ‘civilise’ the less educated classes. Slowly these Dutch modernists adapted to the growing concentration of religious and social activities in exclusive groups based on specific religious or political ideologies and thus forfeited the opportunity to become a truly national force. In a brave final section, the author seeks to compare the Dutch experience of modernist religion with that in a range of other countries. While this is to be applauded, the result is to highlight similarities between them while obscuring the role of specifically national (in this case Dutch) issues. I note this rather to invite an expansion in the scope of comparisons than as a criticism. Work on other liberal Protestant movements now has an impressive study with which to make comparisons. The well-structured general argument, based on numerous periodicals, personal collections and extensive secondary sources, is mostly convincing, though it remains difficult to imagine how the movement could have overcome its social class bias. One may also dispute the claim that the modernists lost the battle, since so many of their ideas entered the mainstream and found appeal among the next generations, and among many more orthodox believers.