Read this book’s title, and you might guess that David Hempton – perhaps the world’s greatest historian of Methodism – has written a textbook: a survey of Christianity across the past five centuries. Read it again, and you might imagine this book is a thematic history of Christianity’s symbiosis with print and other media during that period. It is neither of those things. Here we have a set of lectures Hempton delivered in Edinburgh in 2021, which did not retell or reinterpret that 500-year history, but set out a framework for thinking about Christianity’s history as a story of ‘networks, nodes and nuclei’.

Hempton’s point is that most traditional narrative Church history takes its shape from formal hierarchies of power, hierarchies which have tended not only to write the first drafts of their own histories but to curate the archives which set the terms for everyone else. But, Hempton argues, actual religious lives – and the dynamic processes of religious change – are more networked than hierarchical. People bypass chains of command and bundle rituals and beliefs together with cultural and economic exchange. Religious change happens out of sight, like a mycorrhizal fungus’ network. Hierarchies and institutions make that change visible, but they are no more the whole story than a short-lived mushroom is the whole organism.

Most of the book consists of the retelling of familiar stories from this unfamiliar angle. How do, say, histories of the Jesuit order, or of Pentecostalism, or of Catholic feminism look when we tell them as networked stories? It is not easy to do. The whole point of networks is that they are non-linear, and can re-route through multiple crossing-points. Written histories consist of linear prose, and human beings are story-telling animals. Narrating a network is hard. Even if you find a meaningful line through it, the complexity is the point.

Hempton is massively learned and a very assured writer, and in places he rises to this challenge brilliantly. For example, he uses this approach to lay bare the pervasive significance of women’s networks in modern Christianity, whether they function within, alongside, against, or entirely separate from male-dominated structures of power. His account of the networks behind the Sierra Leone Colony, which brings together Christians from revolutionary America, Canada, Britain, and multiple regions of Africa, is a virtuoso piece of plate-spinning: read it, and for a few moments you will actually feel that you understand the dizzying complexity of this story.

Perhaps more importantly, careful attention to networks helps to give due prominence to themes that are obviously central to religious life but with which hierarchical narratives struggle. Music, for example: from Luther or Wesley’s hymns to modern evangelical worship, the informal, person-to-person spread of spiritual earworms is frustratingly impossible for the historian to document, but is undeniably essential to how religious cultures propagate. Similarly, Hempton cites the Watergate principle: ‘Follow the money.’ Economics is profoundly networked. Hierarchies try to control money, but it has a way of seeping through their walls. From the debt-fuelled expansion of Jesuit universities to the speculative bubble on which Pietist networks were built, Hempton shows how networks of trade and tribute can be a revealing guide to the actual processes of religious change.

Insights like this could be applied to a great many subjects, but Hempton makes a strong case for their special significance for modern Christianity, especially Protestantism. Martin Luther’s profoundly levelling principle of the priesthood of all believers was, he argues, fundamentally a networked concept – so much so that Protestant hierarchies spent centuries trying to contain it. Yet its potential kept resurfacing, and never more so than in the digital era, when the balance of power between hierarchies and networks has tipped decisively. (Terminally, even?)

And yet, I am left a little unsure as to what we can really do with all this. Not many historians are as adroit as Hempton, and even in his hands some of these accounts simply feel like masterful retellings of stories we know, serving more to prove the networking concept than to add particularly vital new insights. I also worry that we are just swapping one metaphor for another. Against older images of churches, kingdoms, or societies as single organisms, we now have images of them drawn from ecology or from electronics. Humans are also metaphor-making animals, so perhaps the more we have the better, since it will reduce the risk of believing in them. But to be clear: ‘networks’ in this sense are not real. Religious beliefs and practices are not packets of DNA or electrons. They do not propagate themselves. Every ‘node’ in these ‘networks’ is a human being, that is, the most irreducibly complex phenomenon in existence. Writing history of any kind – in fact, thinking about human beings at all – requires a heroic, insolent degree of oversimplification. Which is fine: as long as we remember that that is what we are doing and don’t get entranced by the metaphors with which we do it.

And there is a more specifically religious problem (which, of course, Hempton recognises). Historians’ conceit is that religious change is explicable through the connections between human beings (networked, hierarchical, or a bit of both). But for many – most? – of those human beings, that is less than half the story. For it denies any agency to God, the saints, or indeed to the devil. Historians can of course say nothing about those agents, since they have not left us any archives. Yet it is worth remembering that believers attribute their reformations, revivals, and waves of renewal to God, not to networked complexity. Since even to talk meaningfully about that complexity would seem to require a positively godlike omniscience, perhaps they have a point.

• Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era
  David N. Hempton
  Cambridge University Press, 270pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University.