Tradition · 1735

Evangelical

A movement across Protestant denominations that stresses personal conversion, the authority of the Bible, the saving death of Christ on the cross, and active sharing of the faith.

History

Roots

Evangelicals claim the Reformation as their ancestor. The word itself comes from the Greek euangelion, “good news,” and in the sixteenth century “evangelical” simply meant Protestant: Martin Luther’s followers still use it that way in Germany. The movement that now carries the name is younger. It drew on Puritan teaching about conversion and assurance, on German Pietism’s small groups and heart religion, and on a long Protestant habit of reading the Bible for oneself under Sola Scriptura.

The awakenings

The movement’s birth is usually dated to the revivals of the 1730s and 1740s. In 1734–35 Jonathan Edwards saw a wave of conversions in Northampton, Massachusetts, and described it in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737, Archive.org). Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland began field preaching in Wales in 1735, the date the vault gives this tradition. George Whitefield’s open-air preaching drew huge crowds on both sides of the Atlantic from 1739 on.

John Wesley, an Anglican priest, recorded his own turning point at a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, on 24 May 1738: “I felt my heart strangely warmed” (Journal, CCEL). He spent the next fifty years riding through Britain, preaching and organizing converts into societies and classes that later became the Methodist churches. Wesley taught an Arminian view of grace; Whitefield and Edwards were Calvinists. That split, between Methodist and Reformed streams, has run through evangelicalism ever since without dividing it.

Causes

Historians give several reasons the revivals caught fire when they did. Established churches in Britain and New England had grown formal, and many people felt them distant. A mobile, commercial society made room for itinerant preachers and voluntary societies. Print let sermons and revival reports circulate quickly. David Bebbington also argued that the movement bore the mark of the Enlightenment: its stress on the experience of assurance matched an age that valued evidence and feeling over inherited authority (Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 1989, publisher page; Archive.org).

The nineteenth century

In the century after Wesley, evangelicals were close to the Protestant mainstream in Britain and America. The Clapham Sect, a circle of evangelical Anglicans around William Wilberforce, campaigned against the slave trade, which Parliament abolished in 1807 (overview, secondary). The Second Great Awakening in the United States made Baptist and Methodist churches the largest in the country. Charles Finney’s “new measures” turned revival into a technique, a legacy that still shapes altar calls and the debate over Lordship Salvation. Missionary societies carried the movement to Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Evangelical Alliance, formed in London in 1846, gave the movement its first cross-denominational body.

Late in the century, John Nelson Darby’s dispensationalism and the prophecy conferences spread premillennial expectation through American evangelicalism, while the Holiness movement prepared the ground for the Azusa Street Revival (1906) and Pentecostal Christianity.

Fundamentalism and the new evangelicals

Higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolution split American Protestantism in the early twentieth century. The Fundamentals (1910–15, vol. 1 on Archive.org), a set of twelve booklets sent free to pastors, defended the Bible’s reliability, the virgin birth, the atonement and the resurrection. The “fundamentalists” lost control of the main northern denominations in the 1920s (overview, secondary) and largely withdrew into their own schools and churches.

A younger generation wanted out of that retreat. Carl F. H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947, Archive.org) charged fundamentalists with abandoning the world’s social problems and the life of the mind. The National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Fuller Theological Seminary (1947), Billy Graham’s crusades and the magazine Christianity Today (1956) gave the “new evangelicals” their institutions (CT on Graham). In Britain, John Stott at All Souls, Langham Place, led a parallel renewal inside the Church of England.

Influence

From the 1960s evangelicalism became a global movement. The Lausanne Congress (1974), called by Graham and chaired in its drafting by Stott, brought almost 2,700 evangelical leaders together, drawn from about 150 nations (overview, secondary). Its Lausanne Covenant (text) affirmed Scripture “without error in all that it affirms” and committed evangelicals to both evangelism and social responsibility. Latin American theologians René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pushed that second commitment into what they called integral mission (overview, secondary). The Charismatic renewal spread evangelical practice into older churches, and the fastest growth since has been in Africa, Latin America and Asia, much of it Pentecostal.

In the United States the movement also became a political force. From the late 1970s the Moral Majority and later the “religious right” tied white evangelicals closely to the Republican Party, a link that has shaped both the movement’s public image and its internal quarrels.

Key ideas and contributors

Four marks. The most used definition is Bebbington’s “quadrilateral”: conversionism (lives need to be changed), activism (the gospel must be shared and lived), biblicism (a particular regard for the Bible), and crucicentrism (stress on Christ’s sacrifice on the cross). The National Association of Evangelicals adopts it (NAE, “What is an Evangelical?”; overview, secondary). In 2015 the NAE and LifeWay Research turned the same four marks into survey statements for identifying evangelicals by belief, not by self-label (NAE research definition).

Conversion. Evangelicals hold that each person must personally turn to Christ and be “born again” (John 3:3). Belonging to a church or being baptized as an infant is not enough. Wesley’s Aldersgate account and Edwards’s analysis of genuine and false religious feeling in Religious Affections (1746, CCEL) set the pattern. This is one reason many evangelicals practice Believer’s Baptism, though evangelical Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists keep Infant Baptism.

The Bible. Evangelicals treat Scripture as the final authority for faith and life (2 Timothy 3:16). Many American evangelicals express this as Biblical Inerrancy, defined by the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy (1978); others, especially in Britain and the Global South, prefer to speak of infallibility or authority. The NAE statement of faith calls the Bible “the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”

The cross. Christ’s death for sinners is at the center of evangelical preaching (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Most evangelicals understand it as Penal Substitution. Stott’s The Cross of Christ (1986) is the standard modern statement.

Mission. Evangelicals read the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20) as a command to every believer. Activism has meant evangelism and missions, and also abolition, Sunday schools, temperance, relief agencies and, after Lausanne, a renewed concern for justice.

A network, not a church. Evangelicalism has no creed, head or headquarters. It lives in parachurch bodies: mission agencies, student movements, seminaries, publishers and alliances. Its members are Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Reformed, Pentecostal, Charismatic and independent. The vault’s other evangelical figures include Wayne Grudem, John MacArthur, Clark Pinnock and John Wimber.

Key controversies

Who counts as evangelical. The definition is itself disputed. Historians like Thomas Kidd (Who Is an Evangelical?, 2019) argue for a theological definition centered on the new birth. Others, including D. G. Hart (Deconstructing Evangelicalism, 2004), argue the category is too loose to describe a real tradition. In American polling the word now often marks a political and ethnic identity more than a set of beliefs, which is why the NAE built its belief-based research definition. Black Protestants mostly share evangelical beliefs but often reject the label because of its political associations; see Black Theology.

Separation and cooperation. Fundamentalists attacked Billy Graham in the 1950s for working with mainline churches in his crusades. In Britain, Martyn Lloyd-Jones called evangelicals in 1966 to leave mixed denominations; Stott, chairing the meeting, publicly disagreed, and the rift between separatist and Anglican evangelicals lasted for decades. The same question returned with “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (1994, First Things; overview, secondary), which Reformed critics said blurred justification by faith alone; compare the later Joint Declaration on Justification between Lutherans and Catholics.

Inerrancy. In the 1970s Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible (1976) accused Fuller Seminary and others of giving up inerrancy. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy was the response. Limited Inerrancy, which limits the Bible’s freedom from error to matters of faith and practice, remains a live alternative, and the dispute connects to Creation and Evolution: Henry Morris’s Young Earth Creationism on one side and Francis Collins’s Evolutionary Creation on the other.

Evangelism and social action. Lausanne affirmed both, but the 1974 congress argued over their order. The covenant said evangelism is primary; Padilla, Escobar and others objected that this split the gospel. The debate continues between those who stress conversion and those who stress justice; see Liberation and Justice.

Boundaries of doctrine. Open Theism, argued by Clark Pinnock and others, led the Evangelical Theological Society to vote in 2003 on expelling Pinnock and John Sanders; members voted overwhelmingly to keep Pinnock, and the motion against Sanders fell 25 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed (overview, secondary). Stott’s tentative case for Annihilationism in Evangelical Essentials (1988, with David Edwards) and Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011), read by critics as Christian Universalism, tested how far evangelicals could move on Hell.

Women and sexuality. Evangelicals divide between Complementarianism, set out in the Danvers Statement (1987), and Egalitarianism; see Women in Ministry. On Sexuality and Marriage, the Nashville Statement (2017, CBMW) restated the Traditional Marriage Ethic, while a minority of evangelicals now hold Affirming Theology.

Politics and culture. The close tie between white American evangelicals and the Republican Party, especially after 2016, provoked sharp criticism from inside the movement. Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994, Eerdmans) had already charged that populism weakened evangelical thought. John Fea’s Believe Me (2018) and Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne (2020, Norton) argued that fear and a cult of masculine power had displaced the gospel. Defenders reply that these accounts confuse a voting bloc with a theological tradition, and that most evangelicals now live outside the United States. The Prosperity Gospel raises a parallel worry in the Global South.

What remains unresolved

Evangelicalism has always held together through shared emphases, not a shared church. That has made it adaptable and fast-growing, and also hard to define and easy to split. The open questions are whether its center is theological or cultural, whether American politics will keep defining the word, and whether the movement’s future lies with the Global South churches that now make up most of it.