Evangelical Christianity

Evangelicalism has broad denominational, social, and political associations, and the term has been given a myriad of different characterizations in both academic and popular contexts. Though many scholars regard the search for a definition of evangelicalism “one of the biggest problems in American religious historiography,” some cohesive elements exist.

¹ On the most basic level, evangelicalism is not primarily denominationally based but is rather a “transdenominational movement in which many people, in various ways, feel at home," and "built around networks of parachurch agencies.”² Unlike the labels “Methodist” or “Baptist,” which refer to specific branches of the Christian church, the term “evangelical” can be paired with a wide range of denominations including Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Independents, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Restorationists, Congregationalists, Holiness Christians, and Episcopalians.³ More a social ethos or sensibility than a theology, evangelicalism is not a Christian denomination but is rather “a religious fellowship or coalition of which people feel a part.”⁴

Evangelical Christianity’s genesis in America can be traced to the Protestant Revivals of the eighteenth-century American colonies. These Great Awakenings, part of a broader “pietist” revival, emphasized “the individual’s personal relationship with God, a devotional life, a strict discipline of moral piety, and vigorous evangelizing about the necessity of being converted, or ‘born again’ in Christ.”

⁵ Forming a self-conscious community that produced scores of “voluntary societies” for social and moral reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century, historian George Marsden argues that modern evangelical Christianity retains much of its early character.⁶ Charles Finney, a Christian leader in the Second Great Awakening during the first half of the nineteenth century, and Dwight L. Moody, founder of the Moody Bible Institute in the second half of that century, played key roles in fostering an early sense of unity and purpose among evangelicals.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, conflict and tension arose among “fundamentalists” and “modernists” within the evangelical movement. Fundamentalists, represented by publications like The Fundamentals, gravitated toward a militant evangelicalism that battled against the modernist accommodation of the Gospel toward a liberal theological and cultural agenda.

⁷ Modernists “abandoned the essentials of evangelicalism,” Marsden explains, and effectively split from the evangelical camp and moved into the realm of liberal Protestantism.⁸ Both sociologist Christian Smith and George Marsden place the birth of modern evangelical Christianity squarely in the mid-twentieth century. Anthropologist Susan Harding agrees that “the very category of ‘evangelical’ as opposed to ‘fundamentalist’ was invented during the 1940s and 1950s.”⁹ Harding describes the modern evangelical reaction against the fundamentalists’ total separation from mainline churches, as the “postfundamentalist mindset.”¹⁰

Thus, with such key players as Carl Henry, Billy Graham, and Charles Fuller, a modern evangelical Protestantism that emphasized effective evangelism, intellectual engagement, and social and political activity was born. The “overriding motive” of the movement was still to convert non-believers to Christ, but in such a way that would regain respectability in the eyes of leaders like Billy Graham, move toward the ecclesiastical center, and inject intellectual sophistication into evangelical Protestant thought.

¹¹ Organizations and institutions like the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the Fuller Theological Seminary, Youth for Christ, and publications like Sojourners and Christianity Today inaugurated a new generation of evangelical Protestantism that gave birth to the politically and socially engaged evangelicalism of modern America.

 During the 1960s and 1970s, some scholars predicted that evangelical Christianity represented a type of short-lived but luminescent meteor that would “streak across our skies in a blaze of right-wing frenzy, only to fall to the earth cold and exhausted, consumed by their own passionate heat.”

¹² However, as Michael Lienesch and Marsden illuminate, the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, the construction of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and evangelical rallying around political issues of the family, sexuality, and anticommunism, have thrust the evangelical movement into the public sphere.¹³ Since the 1980s, it has become even more apparent that the evangelical movement is not at risk of fading away, as an estimated quarter of the U.S. population currently identifies as evangelical Protestant. With great numbers and political power, evangelicalism is labeled by scholars like Christian Smith as “the strongest of the major Christian traditions in the United States today.”

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In terms of belief, modern Evangelical Christianity can be recognized not so much as a theologically rigid position but rather, as a “dynamic movement, with common heritages, common tendencies, an identity, and an organic character.”

¹⁵ The word “evangelical” comes from Greek, ευαλλελιον, which translates as “good news,” specifically good news given to a messenger.¹⁶ True to the meaning, evangelical Christians share a basic urgency to spread and share their faith. George Marsden points to five basic elements that designate “evangelicalism” with conceptual unity. First, evangelicals are Christians who emphasize the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of Scripture. Second, evangelicals see the real, historical character of God’s saving work recorded in Scripture. Third, evangelical Christians see eternal salvation only through personal trust in Christ. Fourth, evangelicals emphasize the importance of evangelism and mission, and lastly, evangelicals promote the importance of a spiritually transformed life.¹⁷ Despite the broadly shared religious convictions of most evangelicals, both Smith and Marsden present the caveat that evangelicalism encompasses “so many ecclesiological, denominational, theological, ethnic, and political differences” that to pin-point a singularly cohesive theological or religious framework in which evangelicalism can comfortably rest is impossible.¹⁸

*Learn more here about the megachurch movement in the U.S.