Background Modern evangelicalism emerged in the 18th century, first in Britain and its North American colonies. Nevertheless, there were earlier developments within the larger Protestant world that preceded and influenced the later evangelical revivals. According to religion scholar
Randall Balmer, Evangelicalism resulted "from the confluence of
Pietism,
Presbyterianism, and the vestiges of
Puritanism. Evangelicalism picked up the peculiar characteristics from each strain – warmhearted spirituality from the Pietists (for instance), doctrinal precisionism from the Presbyterians, and individualistic introspection from the Puritans". Historian
Mark Noll adds to this list
High Church Anglicanism, which contributed to Evangelicalism a legacy of "rigorous spirituality and innovative organization." Historian Rick Kennedy has identified
New England Puritan clergyman
Cotton Mather as the "first American Evangelical". During the 17th century, Pietism emerged in Europe as a movement for the revival of
piety and devotion within the
Lutheran church. As a protest against "cold orthodoxy" or against an overly formal and rational Christianity, Pietists advocated for an experiential religion that stressed high moral standards both for clergy and for lay people. The movement included both Christians who remained in the
liturgical,
state churches as well as
separatist groups who rejected the use of baptismal fonts, altars, pulpits, and confessionals. As
Radical Pietism spread, the movement's ideals and aspirations influenced and were absorbed by evangelicals. When
George Fox, who is considered the founder of
Quakerism, was eleven, he wrote that God spoke to him about "keeping pure and being faithful to God and man." After being troubled when his friends asked him to drink alcohol with them at the age of nineteen, Fox spent the night in prayer and soon afterwards he left his home in a four-year search for spiritual satisfaction.
18th century ''. In the 1730s, Evangelicalism emerged as a distinct phenomenon out of religious revivals that began in Britain and New England. While religious revivals had occurred within Protestant churches in the past, the evangelical revivals that marked the 18th century were more intense and radical. Evangelical revivalism imbued ordinary men and women with a confidence and enthusiasm for sharing the gospel and converting others outside of the control of established churches, a key discontinuity with the Protestantism of the previous era. It was developments in the doctrine of assurance that differentiated Evangelicalism from what went before. Bebbington says, "The dynamism of the Evangelical movement was possible only because its adherents were assured in their faith." He goes on: The first local revival occurred in
Northampton, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Congregationalist minister
Jonathan Edwards. In the fall of 1734, Edwards preached a sermon series on "Justification By Faith Alone", and the community's response was extraordinary. Signs of religious commitment among the
laity increased, especially among the town's young people. The revival ultimately spread to 25 communities in western Massachusetts and central Connecticut until it began to wane by the spring of 1735. Edwards was heavily influenced by Pietism, so much so that one historian has stressed his "American Pietism". One practice clearly copied from European Pietists was the use of small groups divided by age and gender, which met in private homes to conserve and promote the fruits of revival. At the same time, students at
Yale University (at that time Yale College) in New Haven, Connecticut, were also experiencing revival. Among them was
Aaron Burr Sr., who would become a prominent Presbyterian minister and future president of
Princeton University. In New Jersey,
Gilbert Tennent, another Presbyterian minister, was preaching the evangelical message and urging the
Presbyterian Church to stress the necessity of converted ministers. The spring of 1735 also marked important events in England and Wales.
Howell Harris, a Welsh schoolteacher, had a conversion experience on May 25 during a communion service. He described receiving assurance of God's
grace after a period of
fasting, self-examination, and despair over his sins. Sometime later,
Daniel Rowland, the Anglican
curate of Llangeitho, Wales, experienced conversion as well. Both men began preaching the evangelical message to large audiences, becoming leaders of the
Welsh Methodist revival. At about the same time that Harris experienced conversion in Wales,
George Whitefield was converted at Oxford University after his own prolonged spiritual crisis. Whitefield later remarked, "About this time God was pleased to enlighten my soul and bring me into the knowledge of His free grace, and the necessity of being justified in His sight by
faith only." es,
John Wesley began
open-air preaching. Whitefield's fellow
Holy Club member and spiritual mentor,
Charles Wesley, reported an evangelical conversion in 1738. In the same week, Charles' brother and future founder of Methodism,
John Wesley was also converted after a long period of inward struggle. During this spiritual crisis, John Wesley was directly influenced by Pietism. Two years before his conversion, Wesley had traveled to the newly established colony of Georgia as a missionary for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He shared his voyage with a group of
Moravian Brethren led by
August Gottlieb Spangenberg. The Moravians' faith and piety deeply impressed Wesley, especially their belief that it was a normal part of Christian life to have an assurance of one's salvation. Wesley recounted the following exchange with Spangenberg on February 7, 1736: Wesley finally received the assurance he had been searching for at a meeting of a religious society in London. While listening to a reading from Martin Luther's preface to the
Epistle to the Romans, Wesley felt spiritually transformed: Pietism continued to influence Wesley, who had translated 33 Pietist hymns from German to English. Numerous German Pietist hymns became part of the English Evangelical repertoire. By 1737, Whitefield had become a national celebrity in England where his preaching drew large crowds, especially in London where the
Fetter Lane Society had become a center of evangelical activity. Whitfield joined forces with Edwards to "fan the flame of revival" in the
Thirteen Colonies in 1739–40. Soon the
First Great Awakening stirred Protestants throughout America. Evangelical preachers emphasized personal salvation and piety more than ritual and tradition. Pamphlets and printed sermons crisscrossed the Atlantic, encouraging the revivalists. The Awakening resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep personal revelation of their need of salvation by Jesus Christ. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made Christianity intensely personal to the average person by fostering a deep sense of spiritual conviction and redemption, and by encouraging introspection and a commitment to a new standard of personal morality. It reached people who were already church members. It changed their rituals, their piety and their self-awareness. To the evangelical imperatives of Reformation Protestantism, 18th century American Christians added emphases on divine outpourings of the Holy Spirit and conversions that implanted within new believers an intense love for God. Revivals encapsulated those hallmarks and forwarded the newly created Evangelicalism into the early republic. By the 1790s, the
Evangelical party in the Church of England remained a small minority but were not without influence.
John Newton and
Joseph Milner were influential evangelical clerics. Evangelical clergy networked together through societies such as the
Eclectic Society in London and the
Elland Society in Yorkshire. The Old
Dissenter denominations (the
Baptists, Congregationalists and
Quakers) were falling under evangelical influence, with the Baptists most affected and Quakers the least. Evangelical ministers dissatisfied with both Anglicanism and Methodism often chose to work within these churches. In the 1790s, all of these evangelical groups, including the Anglicans, were Calvinist in orientation. Methodism (the "New Dissent") was the most visible expression of evangelicalism by the end of the 18th century. The
Wesleyan Methodists boasted around 70,000 members throughout the British Isles, in addition to the
Calvinistic Methodists in Wales and the
Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, which was organized under George Whitefield's influence. The Wesleyan Methodists, however, were still nominally affiliated with the Church of England and would not completely separate until 1795, four years after Wesley's death. The Wesleyan Methodist Church's
Arminianism distinguished it from the other evangelical groups. At the same time, evangelicals were an important faction within the Presbyterian
Church of Scotland. Influential ministers included
John Erskine,
Henry Wellwood Moncrieff and
Stevenson Macgill. The church's
General Assembly, however, was controlled by the
Moderate Party, and evangelicals were involved in the
First and
Second Secessions from the national church during the 18th century.
19th century The start of the 19th century saw an increase in
missionary work and many of the major missionary societies were founded around this time (see
Timeline of Christian missions). Both the Evangelical and
high church movements sponsored missionaries. The
Second Great Awakening (which actually began in 1790) was primarily an American revivalist movement and resulted in substantial growth of the Methodist and Baptist churches.
Charles Grandison Finney was an important preacher of this period. was a politician, philanthropist and an evangelical Anglican, who led the British movement to
abolish the slave trade. In Britain in addition to stressing the traditional Wesleyan combination of "Bible, cross, conversion, and activism", the revivalist movement sought a universal appeal, hoping to include rich and poor, urban and rural, and men and women. Special efforts were made to attract children and to generate literature to spread the revivalist message. "Christian conscience" was used by the British Evangelical movement to promote social activism. Evangelicals believed activism in government and the social sphere was an essential method in reaching the goal of eliminating sin in a world drenched in wickedness. The Evangelicals in the
Clapham Sect included figures such as
William Wilberforce who successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery. In the late 19th century, the revivalist
Wesleyan-Holiness movement based on
John Wesley's doctrine of "
entire sanctification" came to the forefront, and while many adherents remained within mainline Methodism, others established new denominations, such as the
Free Methodist Church and
Wesleyan Methodist Church. In urban Britain the Holiness message was less exclusive and censorious.
Keswickianism taught the doctrine of the
second blessing in non-Methodist circles and came to influence evangelicals of the Calvinistic (Reformed) tradition, leading to the establishment of denominations such as the
Christian and Missionary Alliance.
John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren was a 19th-century Irish Anglican minister who devised modern
dispensationalism, an innovative Protestant theological interpretation of the Bible that was incorporated in the development of modern Evangelicalism.
Cyrus Scofield further promoted the influence of dispensationalism through the explanatory notes to his
Scofield Reference Bible. According to scholar Mark S. Sweetnam, who takes a cultural studies perspective, dispensationalism can be defined in terms of its Evangelicalism, its insistence on the literal interpretation of Scripture, its recognition of stages in God's dealings with humanity, its expectation of the imminent return of Christ to rapture His saints, and its focus on both apocalypticism and
premillennialism. During the 19th century, the
megachurches, churches with more than 2,000 people, began to develop. The first evangelical megachurch, the
Metropolitan Tabernacle with a 6000-seat auditorium, was inaugurated in 1861 in London by
Charles Spurgeon.
Dwight L. Moody founded the
Illinois Street Church in Chicago. An advanced theological perspective came from the
Princeton theologians from the 1850s to the 1920s, such as
Charles Hodge,
Archibald Alexander and
B. B. Warfield.
20th century After 1910 the
Fundamentalist movement dominated Evangelicalism in the early part of the 20th century; the Fundamentalists rejected liberal theology and emphasized the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Following the
1904–1905 Welsh revival, the
Azusa Street Revival in 1906 began the spread of
Pentecostalism in North America. The 20th century also marked by the emergence of the
televangelism.
Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the megachurch
Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, used radio in the 1920s to reach a wider audience. After the
Scopes trial in 1925,
Christian Century wrote of "Vanishing Fundamentalism". In 1929 Princeton University, once the bastion of conservative theology, added several modernists to its faculty, resulting in the departure of
J. Gresham Machen and a split in the
Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Evangelicalism began to reassert itself in the second half of the 1930s. One factor was the advent of the radio as a means of mass communication. When
Charles E. Fuller] began his "Old Fashioned Revival Hour" on October 3, 1937, he sought to avoid the contentious issues that had caused fundamentalists to be characterized as narrow. One hundred forty-seven representatives from thirty-four denominations met from April 7 through 9, 1942, in
St. Louis, Missouri, for a "National Conference for United Action among Evangelicals." The next year six hundred representatives in Chicago established the
National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) with
Harold Ockenga as its first president. The NAE was partly a reaction to the founding of the
American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) under the leadership of the fundamentalist
Carl McIntire. The ACCC in turn had been founded to counter the influence of the
Federal Council of Churches (later merged into the
National Council of Churches), which fundamentalists saw as increasingly embracing modernism in its
ecumenism. Those who established the NAE had come to view the name fundamentalist as "an embarrassment instead of a badge of honor." Evangelical revivalist radio preachers organized themselves in the
National Religious Broadcasters in 1944 to regulate their activity. With the founding of the NAE, American Protestantism was divided into three large groups—the fundamentalists, the modernists, and the new evangelicals, who sought to position themselves between the other two. In 1947, Harold Ockenga coined the term
neo-evangelicalism to identify a movement distinct from fundamentalism. The neo-evangelicals had three broad characteristics that distinguished them from the conservative fundamentalism of the ACCC: Each of these characteristics took concrete shape by the mid-1950s. In 1947
Carl F. H. Henry's book
The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism called on evangelicals to engage in addressing social concerns: In the same year
Fuller Theological Seminary was established with Ockenga as its president and Henry as the head of its theology department. in
Duisburg (
West Germany, 1954) The strongest impetus, however, was the development of the work of
Billy Graham. In 1951, with producer Dick Ross, he founded the film production company
World Wide Pictures. Graham had begun his career with the support of McIntire and fellow conservatives
Bob Jones Sr. and
John R. Rice. However, in broadening the reach of his London crusade of 1954, he accepted the support of denominations that those men disapproved of. When he went even further in his 1957 New York crusade, conservatives strongly condemned him and withdrew their support. According to William Martin: A fourth development—the founding of
Christianity Today (
CT) with Henry as its first editor—was strategic in giving neo-evangelicals a platform to promote their views and in positioning them between the fundamentalists and modernists. In a letter to Harold Lindsell, Graham said that
CT would: The postwar period also saw growth of the
ecumenical movement and the founding of the
World Council of Churches, which the Evangelical community generally regarded with suspicion. In the United Kingdom,
John Stott (1921–2011) and
Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) emerged as key leaders in Evangelical Christianity. The charismatic movement began in the 1960s and resulted in the introduction of Pentecostal theology and practice into many mainline denominations. New charismatic groups such as the
Association of Vineyard Churches and
Newfrontiers trace their roots to this period (see also
British New Church Movement). The closing years of the 20th century saw controversial
postmodern influences entering some parts of Evangelicalism, particularly with the
emerging church movement. Also controversial is the relationship between spiritualism and contemporary military metaphors and practices animating many branches of Christianity but especially relevant in the sphere of Evangelicalism.
Spiritual warfare is the latest iteration in a long-standing partnership between religious organization and
militarization, two spheres that are rarely considered together, although aggressive forms of prayer have long been used to further the aims of expanding Evangelical influence. Major moments of increased political militarization have occurred concurrently with the growth of prominence of militaristic imagery in evangelical communities. This paradigmatic language, paired with an increasing reliance on sociological and academic research to bolster militarized sensibility, serves to illustrate the violent ethos that effectively underscores militarized forms of evangelical prayer.
worship service at
Lakewood Church, Houston, Texas, in 2013 ==Global statistics==