Evangelicalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Evangelicalism is a worldwide, interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity, and the word at its heart comes from a single Greek term. That word is euangelion, meaning good news, a reference to the message of salvation through Jesus Christ. In 1531 the translator William Tyndale put the adjective into print in English. He wrote that he exhorted believers to proceed constantly in the evangelical truth. A year later Thomas More used it to mark a theological line, calling Barns the evangelical brother of Tyndale.

  From those two writers to the present, the movement has grown into something hard to pin down. The World Evangelical Alliance claims 600 million believers in 2025, roughly one in four Christians. Yet scholars argue about whether the term names a coherent movement at all. One historian, D. G. Hart, has argued that evangelicalism should be relinquished as a religious identity because it does not exist. What four convictions hold this sprawling family together? Why did one ordinary winter in Massachusetts mark its true beginning? And why do some of its own theologians want the word abolished?

• 2. The Quadrilateral

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  Historian David Bebbington gave evangelicalism its most influential definition by naming four priorities. He called them conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism, and described them as a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism. Each word marks a distinct emphasis the movement carries.

  Conversionism is the belief in the necessity of being born again, a constant theme since the movement's beginnings. The central message, to evangelicals, is justification by faith in Christ and repentance from sin. A conversion experience can be emotional, moving through grief and sorrow for sin to great relief at forgiveness. Individuals have testified to both sudden and gradual conversions. What sets this stress apart from other Protestantism is the belief that assurance accompanies conversion.

  Biblicism is reverence for the Bible and high regard for biblical authority. All evangelicals believe in biblical inspiration, though they disagree over how to define it. Many hold to biblical inerrancy, while others hold to biblical infallibility.

  Crucicentrism gives central place to the Atonement, the saving death and resurrection of Jesus. It is understood most commonly as substitutionary atonement, in which Christ died as a substitute for sinful humanity. Activism, the fourth mark, describes the active sharing of the gospel through preaching and social action. That impulse shows today in the proliferation of evangelical voluntary religious groups and parachurch organizations, the seedbed of much that follows.

• 3. The Northampton Winter

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  In the fall of 1734, the Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon series titled Justification By Faith Alone in Northampton, Massachusetts. The community's response was extraordinary. Signs of religious commitment increased among the laity, especially among the town's young people. Bebbington locates the very emergence of evangelicalism in this first revival.

  The revival spread to 25 communities in western Massachusetts and central Connecticut before it began to wane by the spring of 1735. Edwards was so shaped by Pietism that one historian stressed his American Pietism. One borrowed practice was the use of small groups divided by age and gender, meeting in private homes to conserve the fruits of revival.

  That same spring of 1735 brought parallel events across the Atlantic. On May 25, the Welsh schoolteacher Howell Harris had a conversion experience during a communion service, describing assurance of God's grace after fasting and despair over his sins. Around the same time George Whitefield was converted at Oxford University after a prolonged spiritual crisis. Whitefield later said that God was pleased to enlighten his soul and bring him into the knowledge of His free grace.

  What differentiated this movement from what came before was a changed doctrine of assurance. The Puritans had held that assurance is rare, late, and the fruit of struggle. The evangelicals believed it to be general, normally given at conversion. Bebbington called the result a metamorphosis in the nature of popular Protestantism, and traced from it a chain of converts that ran straight to the Wesley brothers.

• 4. Wesley And The Moravians

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  Two years before his conversion, John Wesley sailed to the colony of Georgia as a missionary for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He shared the voyage with a group of Moravian Brethren led by August Gottlieb Spangenberg. Their faith deeply impressed him, especially their belief that assurance of salvation was a normal part of Christian life.

  On the 7th of February 1736, Spangenberg pressed Wesley with questions. He asked whether the Spirit of God bore witness that Wesley was a child of God, then asked, Do you know Jesus Christ. Wesley paused and said he knew Christ was the Savior of the world. True, Spangenberg replied, but do you know he has saved you. Wesley answered that he hoped Christ had died to save him, and later feared they were vain words.

  Wesley finally received his assurance in 1738 at a religious society in London. While someone read Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed. He felt he did trust in Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given that Christ had taken away his sins, even his. Charles Wesley had reported his own evangelical conversion in the same week.

  Pietism kept working on John Wesley after that night. He translated 33 Pietist hymns from German into English, and numerous German Pietist hymns entered the English Evangelical repertoire. By 1737 Whitefield had become a national celebrity in England, his preaching drawing large crowds in London, and he would soon carry the fire to America.

• 5. Crossing The Atlantic

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  In 1739 and 1740 Whitefield joined forces with Edwards to fan the flame of revival in the Thirteen Colonies. Soon the First Great Awakening stirred Protestants throughout America. Evangelical preachers emphasized personal salvation and piety more than ritual and tradition, and printed sermons crisscrossed the Atlantic to encourage the revivalists.

  The Awakening made Christianity intensely personal for the average person. It fostered a deep sense of spiritual conviction and redemption, encouraged introspection, and pushed a new standard of personal morality. It reached people who were already church members, changing their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness.

  By the 1790s the Evangelical party in the Church of England remained a small minority, though not without influence. John Newton and Joseph Milner were influential evangelical clerics, and clergy networked through societies such as the Eclectic Society in London. Among the Old Dissenter denominations, the Baptists were the most affected by evangelical influence and the Quakers the least.

  Methodism, the New Dissent, was the most visible expression of evangelicalism by the end of the century. The Wesleyan Methodists counted around 70,000 members across the British Isles, still nominally affiliated with the Church of England. They would not completely separate until 1795, four years after Wesley's death, their Arminianism setting them apart from the Calvinist evangelicals around them.

• 6. The Reform Century

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  The 19th century opened with a surge in missionary work, and many of the major missionary societies were founded around this time. The Second Great Awakening, which actually began in 1790, was primarily an American revivalist movement that grew the Methodist and Baptist churches. Charles Grandison Finney was an important preacher of the period.

  In Britain the revivalist movement reached for a universal appeal, hoping to include rich and poor, urban and rural, men and women, with special efforts to attract children. Evangelicals treated activism in government and the social sphere as essential to eliminating sin. The Clapham Sect included William Wilberforce, who successfully campaigned for the abolition of slavery.

  John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren, a 19th-century Irish Anglican minister, devised modern dispensationalism. Cyrus Scofield spread its influence further through the notes to his Scofield Reference Bible. Dispensationalism expected the imminent return of Christ to rapture His saints, with a focus on apocalypticism and premillennialism.

  The century also gave rise to the megachurch, defined as a church with more than 2,000 people. The first evangelical megachurch was the Metropolitan Tabernacle, with a 6000-seat auditorium, inaugurated in 1861 in London by Charles Spurgeon. Dwight L. Moody founded the Illinois Street Church in Chicago, while the Princeton theologians, including Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield, supplied an advanced conservative theology from the 1850s to the 1920s.

• 7. Fundamentalists And New Evangelicals

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  After 1910 the Fundamentalist movement dominated Evangelicalism, rejecting liberal theology and emphasizing the inerrancy of the Scriptures. Fundamentalism arose among evangelicals in the 1920s, primarily an American phenomenon, to combat modernist theology in mainline Protestant churches. Failing to reform those churches, fundamentalists separated and made separatism a true test of faith. After the Scopes trial in 1925, Christian Century wrote of Vanishing Fundamentalism.

  Evangelicalism reasserted itself in the second half of the 1930s, helped by the radio. When Charles E. Fuller began his Old Fashioned Revival Hour on the 3rd of October 1937, he sought to avoid the contentious issues that had made fundamentalists seem narrow.

  In April 1942, 147 representatives from 34 denominations met in St. Louis, Missouri, for a National Conference for United Action among Evangelicals. The next year 600 representatives in Chicago established the National Association of Evangelicals, with Harold Ockenga as its first president. Those founders had come to view the name fundamentalist as an embarrassment instead of a badge of honor. In 1947 Ockenga coined the term neo-evangelicalism to name a movement distinct from fundamentalism.

  The strongest impetus came from Billy Graham. He had begun with the support of conservatives, but in his 1957 New York crusade he accepted backing from denominations they disapproved of, and they withdrew their support. A magazine, Christianity Today, was founded with Carl F. H. Henry as its first editor. Graham wrote that it would plant the evangelical flag in the middle of the road, taking a conservative theological position but a liberal approach to social problems.

• 8. A Global Family

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  In Nigeria, the Evangelical Church Winning All is the largest church organization, with five thousand congregations and over ten million members. It sponsors three seminaries, eight Bible colleges, and 1600 missionaries serving in Nigeria and abroad through the Evangelical Missionary Society. Since 1999 there have been serious confrontations between Muslims and Christians over the expansion of Sharia law in northern Nigeria, which has radicalized and politicized the Christians.

  Protestant missionary activity in Asia was most successful in Korea, where American Presbyterians and Methodists arrived in the 1880s and were well received. When Korea was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, Christianity became in part an expression of nationalism. South Korea has been called an evangelical superpower, and stands second only to the United States in missionaries sent abroad, with 13,000 men and women serving across the world. The 2015 South Korean census recorded 9.7 million Protestants, or 19.7 percent of the population.

  In Latin America the term Evangelical is often simply a synonym for Protestant. In Brazil, the Scottish missionary Robert Reid Kalley founded the first Evangelical church among the Portuguese-speaking population in 1856. By 1914 churches founded by American missionaries had 47,000 communicants served by 282 missionaries, and there were 700,000 Protestants by 1930. The 2010 census found 22.2 percent of Brazilians were Protestant.

  In China, French researcher Sebastian Fath has estimated 66 million evangelicals as of 2020, though a 2023 survey counted only 18 million Protestant adults. That gap between claimed and counted believers runs through the whole movement. The World Evangelical Alliance projects 600 million in 2025, Operation World projects 700 million, and the World Christian Encyclopedia, counting evangelicals in the broad sense, projects 937 million.