A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The industrial revolutions were as important as the French Revolution in challenging aristocracies whose wealth and power were based mainly on land and agriculture.

It was a leading Pentecostal Church founder, the swashbuckling Aimee Semple McPherson, who hurled handbills for God from an aeroplane in 1920, and presided over the first-known Church radio station.

Throughout all the Anglican Communion’s centuries of involvement with politics and social change, its role in the liberation struggle in South Africa should perhaps give it most pride. It is a story of heroic individuals who turned what was often a personal singularity and craggy awkwardness into a stubborn refusal to compromise with evil.