Evangelicalism

"In his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation. Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.” “Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.” Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation. “The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.” A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “God the Original Segregationist,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.” Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?"

"I think the Democrats should stop thinking about white evangelicals entirely," Burge says. "And I think the Republicans should take them for granted. At some point, it's like, what can you do to make them change — on the Democratic side or the Republican side?"

"During my years in the United States, I met a lot of evangelicals; they comprise a quarter of the American population, and are utterly unlike most Christians you'll encounter in this country. These are the people who paint "JESUS IS LORD" on the roofs of their barns, affix those fish stickers to their bumpers, tell you to have a "blessed day," and make a point of chatting casually about their religious beliefs."

"Look closely. Those are evangelical leaders and pastors — people who represent America's various streams of fundamentalist Christianity — venerating a president who, I think it's safe to say, reflects none of the qualities Jesus is believed to have embodied. It has become almost banal to recite Trump's ugly, vulgar, misogynist, racist mendacity, and yet here he is in an official White House photo, an image clearly meant to invoke the Last Supper, in the midst of an ecstatic laying on of hands. It is no exaggeration to say many evangelicals consider Trump an anointed figure; a clearly venal man somehow chosen by their God to rescue America from venality. Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016."

"There are only two reasonable explanations for this. Trump is the white evangelicals' version of V.I. Lenin's useful idiot, a character who is helping achieve their apocalyptic fever dreams, but who will perish along with the rest of us as the faithful perch in the clouds. Or the white evangelical version of Christianity is a darker, uglier thing than the smiles and the welcoming hugs and the blessings would have you believe. White evangelicals, for example, are in general keenly alert to Trump's white nationalist, nativist leanings. When he orders families separated at the southern border, most white evangelicals are right there with him. When he proposes removing protections from transgender people, surely among the most vulnerable of us, they're A-OK. When he invites children visiting the White House to help build his border wall with their own personalized bricks, his loyal white evangelicals are right there with him."

"Unsurprisingly, the demarcation line for Trump where evangelicals are concerned is racial. Eighty-six per cent of black evangelicals surveyed by PPRI said they disapprove of Trump. So did 72 per cent of Hispanic Catholics, many of whom are evangelical. Now why would that be?"

"I’m a little scared. Yeah. Because I didn’t realize this until recently, and it’s logical, but I didn’t put it together in my own mind in quite the way I have now, which is that in order for Jesus to come back, the world has to end. It has to. So that means there is about 90 to 100 million people that are pretty excited about it. And that’s kind of problematic to those of us who don’t fucking believe that shit. Right? And a lot of those people are in legislative positions. And I’m sitting there thinking, like, “Wait, what’s happening?” Is there any way they’re– they’re crafting policy to accelerate the prophecy? [scattered nervous laughter] Yeah, think about that for a second. Not exactly humorous, but powerful. If you walked up to your state senator or maybe a congressman that was an evangelical, and they were honest, and you said, “I’m a little concerned about global warming. It seems like humans are causing it. We need to do something about it. It’s happening quickly.” They would say, “Not quick enough, to be honest with you. We’re trying to get the flying Jew back. We got coal going, you know, it’s happening. We’re deregulating as fast as we can. We’re gonna make this shit happen.” Problematic, correct?"

"Meanwhile, a wave of Protestant revivals known as the Second Great Awakening swept the country during the first third of the nineteenth century. In New England, upstate New York, and those portions of the Old Northwest above the 41st parallel populated by the descendants of New England Yankees, this evangelical enthusiasm generated a host of moral and cultural reforms. The most dynamic and divisive of them was abolitionism. Heirs of the Puritan notion of collective accountability that made every man his brother's keeper, these Yankee reformers repudiated Calvinist predestination, preached the availability of redemption to anyone who truly sought it, urged converts to abjure sin, and worked for the elimination of sins from society. The most heinous social sin was slavery. All people were equal in God's sight; the souls of black folks were as valuable as those of whites; for one of God's children to enslave another was a violation of the Higher Law, even if it was sanctioned by the Constitution. By midcentury this antislavery movement had gone into politics and had begun to polarize the country. Slaveholders did not consider themselves egregious sinners. And they managed to convince most non-slaveholding whites in the South (two-thirds of the white population there) that emancipation would produce economic ruin, social chaos, and racial war. Slavery was not the evil that Yankee fanatics portrayed; it was a positive good, the basis of prosperity, peace, and white supremacy, a necessity to prevent blacks from degenerating into barbarism, crime, and poverty."

"He (Billy Graham) was not so much "America's pastor" as its greatest evangelical entrepreneur – the man who launched a whole separatist (and lucrative) Christian media culture, who laid the foundations for megachurches and prosperity ministries, who brought Jesus back into American politics. He was a public-relations savant, a shameless sycophant who whispered sweet nothings to power in lieu of hard truths. He demonstrated what fortunes could be made, and what human glory could be attained, by transforming evangelical Christianity into a patriotic corporate entity. If that's not American, by God, what is?"

"Many white Christian evangelicals in the United States have long believed that America has a God-given mission to save the world. Under the influence of this crusading mentality, US foreign policy has often swerved from diplomacy to war. It is in danger of doing so again."

"White evangelicals represent only around 17% of the US adult population, but comprise around 26% of voters. They vote overwhelmingly Republican (an estimated 81% in 2016), making them the party’s single most important voting bloc. That gives them powerful influence on Republican policy, and in particular on foreign policy when Republicans control the White House and Senate (with its treaty-ratifying powers). Fully 99% of Republican congressmen are Christian, of whom around 70% are Protestant, including a significant though unknown proportion of evangelicals."

"In addition to the more personally oriented religious revival in the early nineteenth century, evangelical leaders such as Lyman Beecher initiated campaigns for social reform. Beecher expected the United States to lead the world in moral and political liberation. He hoped that the country would be an example for all others, replacing violence with intelligence and virtue (Gamble 2003, 19). For instance Alexander Hamiltons death in a duel at the hands of Aaron Burr in 1804 precipitated a crusade against dueling, and Christian luminaries took the lead in this movement. Beecher preached a well-publicized sermon against dueling, and Yale president and prominent evangelical Christian Timothy Dwight also spoke out against the practice. Although instances of dueling continued, public opinion began to shift against the increasingly archaic means of resolving personal conflicts. In 1839, after two congressmen participated in a duel in which one of them was killed, Congress finally enacted legislation making dueling illegal in the District of Columbia."

"A major evangelical Christian concern during the 1830s was the preservation of the Christian Sabbath as a day of rest. In 1810, Congress had enacted legislation that required post offices to remain open all seven days of the week. In 1828 evangelicals established the general Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath to oppose this policy. One point of contention was that the federal government, by requiring the mails to run on Sunday, had overruled the state and local ordinances against breaking the Sabbath. In addition, those opposed to the Sunday mails argued that the federal government was violating the right of conscience by requiring employees to choose between keeping their jobs with the post office by working on Sundays and thus violating their conscience or observing the Sabbath according to their own religious beliefs, thereby risking the loss of their jobs. Therefore, the group argued, the First Amendment protection of free religious practice required the federal government to cease Sunday mail delivery. Supporting the compelling state interest standard, evangelicals argued that the government should refrain from limiting th free exercise of religion in the absence of an overriding reason to o otherwise. Those supporting the Sunday mails publicly accused their opponents of attempting to impair republican government and of restricting religious liberty by imposing a particular day of the week on all citizens as an official day of rest (West 1996, 157). Although the attempt to stop the Sunday mails failed, by the 1840s, many Sunday mail routes had been terminated anyway ue to improved systems of communication and transportation."

"Surveys done in the past to examine the political participation of evangelical Protestants found low levels of participation and a tendency for this group to identify themselves as Democrats. However, analysis of denominational data in the process of writing this book indicates that voter turnout among Christian fundamentalists since the 1990s has been largely on part with the rest of the American electorate and that the Christian right has shifted from a propensity to support Democratic candidates toward greater support for Republican candidates."

"The role of religion is important both on the American and Russian side [of the Cold War]. While the position of organized faith was already in decline in Europe (and in many other places, too) by the end of the nineteenth century, Russians and Americans still saw religion as has having a central place in their lives. In a certain sense, there were similarities between American Evangelical Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy. Both emphasized teleology and certainty of faith above what was common in other Christian groups. Being unconcerned with concepts of original sin, both believed in the perfectibility of society. Most importantly, both Evangelicals and Orthodox believed that their religion inspired their politics in a direct sense. They alone were set to fulfill God’s plan for and with man."

"I was going to teach the course on early monasticism to students from Evangelical Christian colleges. We met for the first class in a room spare but replete with beautiful Coptic icons. The texts we were studying was The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the translation of the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum by Benedicta Ward. I opened the first meeting with a question: “When you hear the word monk or monks, what first comes to mind?” One young woman responded, “They’re agents of Satan.” This, I thought, was going to be a tough audience."

"Since Jesus came to the earth the first time 2,000 years ago as a Jewish male, many evangelicals believe the Antichrist will, by necessity, be a Jewish male. This belief is 2,000 years old and has no anti-Semitic roots. This is simply historic and prophetic orthodox Christian doctrine that many theologians, Christian and non-Christian, have understood for two millennia."

"A notable fact in 2016 was that exit polls showed about 80% of white evangelical Christians supported Trump in spite of his unfamiliarity with the Bible, his divorces, his vulgar rhetoric and his association with porn stars. Trump's reputation in moral terms hasn't changed all that much during his time in office, but there is little evidence of slippage among these faith voters. Surveys of early voters and exit polls this year showed between 76 and 81% of white evangelical and "born again" voters supporting Trump, according to the National Election Pool and AP/Votecast. "We essentially have White evangelicals, somewhere around 8 in 10, supporting the president, standing by their candidate, standing by their man," says Jones."

"No evangelical seriously argues that divorce isn’t bad; nor am I suggesting that evangelicals condone divorce. The issue is one of selective literalism. Most evangelicals worry very little about biblical proscriptions against usury or about Paul’s warning that “every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head.” Those admonitions, they claim, are culturally determined and therefore dismissible. But those evangelicals who still oppose the ordination of women, on the other hand, choose to interpret Paul’s instructions to Timothy literally: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” The Religious Right takes similar tack on the matter of divorce. Evangelicals generally, and the Religious Right in particular, chose around 1980 to deemphasize radically the many New Testament denunciations of divorce and to shift their condemnations to abortion and, later, to homosexuality-all the while claiming to remain faithful to the immutable truths of the scriptures. The ruse of selective literalism allowed them to dismiss as culturally determined the New Testament proscriptions against divorce and women with uncovered heads, but they refused to read Paul’s apparent condemnations of homosexuality as similarly rooted in-and, arguably, in terms of application, limited to-the historical and social circumstances of the first century. One way to hart this transition is to look through the pages of ‘’Christianity Today’’, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism and the most reliable bellwether of evangelical sentiments, beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s. Over the course of those years, a remarkable change occurred. During the 1970s, by my count ‘’Christianity Today’’ ran eight articles and editorials decrying the growing rate of divorce among evangelicals; by the 1980s, however, after Ronald Reagan’s election, those denunciations ceased almost entirely as evangelical condemnations shifted to other more elusive targets: abortions and, eventually, homosexuality."

"Initially, I found Weyrich’s admission jarring. He declared, in effect, that the origins of the Religious Right lay in Green v. Connally rather than Roe v. Wade. I quickly concluded, however, that his story made a great deal of sense. When I was growing up within the evangelical subculture, there was an unmistakably defensive cast to evangelicalism. I recall many presidents of colleges or Bible institutes coming through our churches to recruit students and to raise money. One of their recurrent themes was, We don’t accept federal money, so the government can’t tell us how to run our shop-whom to hire or fire or what kind of rules to live by. The IRS attempt to deny tax-exempt status to segregated private schools, then, represented an assault on the evangelical subculture, something that raised an alarm among many evangelical leaders, who mobilized against it. For his part, Weyrich saw the evangelical discontent over the Bob Jones case as the opening he was looking for to start a new conservative movement using evangelicals as foot soldiers. Although both the Green decision of 1971 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 predated Jimmy Carter’s presidency, Weyrich succeeded in blaming Carter for efforts to revoke the tax exempt status of segregated Christian schools. He recruited James Dobson and Jerry Falwell to the cause, the latter of whom complained, “In some states it’s easier open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”"

"The elaborate construction and propagation of the abortion myth, together with the ruse of selective literalism, which diverted evangelicals from their birthright of fidelity to the Bible suggests the perils of pandering for power. What should we read into the fact that evangelical conservatives dropped their longstanding denunciations of divorce about the same time they embraced Ronald Reagan, a divorced and remarried man, as their political savior in 1980?"

""I don't find much that I recognize as Christian" in the religious right, says Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University and contributing editor to Christianity Today. He says blind allegiance to the Republican Party has distorted the faith of politically active evangelicals, leading them to misguided positions on issues such as abortion and homosexuality. "They have taken something that is lovely and redemptive and turned it into something that is ugly and retributive," Balmer says. He argues that modern evangelicals have abandoned the spirit of their movement, which was founded in 19th-century activism on issues that helped those on the fringes of society: abolition, women's suffrage and universal education. "I don't find any correlation in the agenda of the religious right today," Balmer says."

"White evangelicals were conspicuous by their absence in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Where were Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington or on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. and religious leaders from other traditions linked arms on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to stare down the ugly face of racism? Falwell and others who eventually became leaders of the Religious Right, in fact, explicitly condemned the civil rights movement. "Believing the Bible as I do," Falwell proclaimed in 1965, "I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else—including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms." This makes all the more outrageous the occasional attempts by leaders of the Religious Right to portray themselves as the "new abolitionists" in an effort to link their campaign against abortion to the nineteenth century crusade against slavery."

"I listened to a man called Pat Robertson, who runs a right-wing born-again Christian evangelical movement. It was such a hair-raising programme that it undid all the optimism that I had begun to feel when I came to this conference. This guy Pat Robertson, who looked like a business executive of about forty-five with one of those slow, charming American smiles, was standing there with a big tall black man beside him, his side-kick, and he talked continuously about the Reagan administration, about the defeat of the liberals, about Reagan's commitment to the evangelical movement. He had a blackboard showing what in the nineteenth century "liberal" meant. He then wiped that from the blackboard and said that today the liberals are Marxists, fascists, leftists and socialists. Then he showed an extract of Reagan saying, "We want to keep big government out of our homes, and out of our schools, and out of our family life." He went on and on for an hour like this. At the end, he said, "Let us pray", and, his face contorted with fake piety, pleaded with Jesus to protect America, "our country". I couldn't switch it off. It was so frightening, the feeling that we are now entering a holy war between that type of reactionary Christianity and communism. It is a thoroughly wicked and evil interpretation of Christianity."

"The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force. Just as he did in Cairo, Pompeo called on the congregation of a Kansan megachurch three years ago to join a fight of good against evil. “We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at the Summit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight.” For Pompeo’s audience, the rapture invoked an apocalyptical Christian vision of the future, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest will go to hell."

"Evangelicalism is on a collision course with a culture that is rapidly liberalizing on two areas that define evangelical theology: their view of homosexuality and the role of women in the life of the church. Nearly 80% of Americans under the age of 35 support same-sex marriage, and just 8.8% believe that women should not be able to preach. That leaves the white evangelical church a choice. First, it could stand on doctrine and say that fidelity to orthodox evangelicalism is worth the price of potentially shrinking in size. There is integrity in this path. I’ve had many evangelicals tell me, “God does not care about public opinion polls.” As a social scientist who is also a pastor, I’m sympathetic to the view that God can change hearts. Alternatively, evangelicalism could begin to slowly shift its stance on issues like women pastors and same-sex relations. There is some evidence that, on the issue of homosexuality, there has already been some softening. Work by Paul Djupe found that while 90% of evangelicals believed that their house of worship forbade homosexuality in 2007, that has dropped to 65% in 2020."

"Evangelicals, in religious terminology, believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity. They have a long history in America, and include a number of different groups, including Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists and nondenominational churches. After the schism among the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the 1850s over slavery, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptists — who defended slavery through their readings of scripture — came into being. And because the primary schisms between northern and southern denominations was over the issues of slavery, in the pre- and post-Civil War years, African American Protestants formed their own denominations. Evangelical denominations formed from these splits in the South were usually comprised of people who had made money from slavery or supported it. After the Civil War many were more likely to have supported the Ku Klux Klan and approved of (or participated in) lynching The burning cross of the KKK, for instance, was a symbol of white Christian supremacy, designed both to put fear into the hearts of African Americans and to highlight the supposed Christian righteousness of the terrorist act. During the civil rights movement, many white evangelicals either outright opposed Martin Luther King Jr. or, like Billy Graham, believed that racial harmony would only come about when the nation turned to God. in the 1970s, evangelicalism became synonymous with being "born again" and also against abortion and, with the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s, they began to seek not only moral, but political power."

"After 9/11, many evangelicals vilified Islam and created cottage industries and ministries promoting Islamophobia. And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin. Still, evangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. From the racial reconciliation meetings of the 1990s to today, they have dutifully declared racism a sin, and Southern Baptists have apologized again for their role in American slavery — most recently in 2018 via a document outlining their role."

"The study of religion’s role as a political force in American politics presents an intriguing puzzle. Why are conservative Christians perceived as such a potent electoral force when their rates of political participation are often lower than what is observed in the general population? From the writings of both political scientists and pundits, one might be led to believe that white evangelical Protestants are a wildly participatory religious group. For example, the standard account of the recent history of how religion and politics intersect in the U.S. generally includes the assertion that evangelical Christians were awakened from political quiescence some time in the late 1970s (Dionne,1991; Wald, 2003; Wilcox, 1996) In the words of Guth and Green, ‘‘The common view is that clergy and lay activists in theologically conservative Protestant churches represent a large, hyperactive and newly mobilized cadre of traditionalists’’(1996, p. 118). However, while there has indisputably been a rise in the role religiously conservative groups play in contemporary politics, this has simply not been accompanied by an increase in the political participation of individual religious conservatives (Miller and Shanks, 1996, P. 231)."

"While there are many ways to distinguish among America’s myriad religious denominations, one that has been demonstrated to have particular utility is there cognition that there is a sharp divide among Protestants between those who belong to evangelical and mainline denominations. The key differences are described by Steensland et al. (2000):Mainline denominations have typically emphasized an accommodating stance toward modernity, a proactive view on issues of social and economic justice, and pluralism in their tolerance of varied individual beliefs. Evangelical denominations have typically sought to more separation from the broader culture, emphasized missionary activity and individual conversion, and taught strict adherence to particular religious doctrines."

"Mostly forgotten is the fact that, as recently as one hundred years ago, it was American Evangelical Protestants who waged the most aggressive and effective campaigns against the practice of birth control within the United States; Roman Catholics quietly applauded on the sidelines It was evangelicals who-starting in 1873-successfully built a web of federal and state laws that equated contraception with abortion, suppressed the spread of birth control information and devices, and even criminalized the use of contraceptives. And it was Evangelicals who attempted to jail early twentieth-century birth control crusaders such as Margaret Sanger. All the same, by 1973-the year the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states-American Evangelical leaders had not only given a blessing to birth control; many would also welcome the court’s decision in ‘’Roe v Wade’’ as a blow for religious liberty. This book traces the transformation of American Evangelical leadership from fervent foes to quiet friends of the birth control cause. It examines, in particular, the shift in motives for this change over time: from a sweeping culture war against all forms of vice; to a desperate effort to salvage dreams of Protestant world empire; to swelling anti-Catholicism; to fear of “population explosion,” and surrender to a newly dominant culture."

"When I was a kid back in Kentucky, we went to this church where my uncle preached. It was kind of a weird Baptist, full-on kind of place. People kept running up to the pulpit and grabbing his ankles and being saved. Lots of crying. Even then, at six or seven, I questioned how pure the emotion could be if it were on such display."

"In the 1976 election, the Republican candidate, President Gerald Ford, was the relatively pro-choice candidate; the Democratic nominee, Jimmy Carter, was an evangelical Protestant who believed that abortion was immoral. The countermobilizations that Roe helped energize changed all of this. The Christian evangelical movement, which had largely stayed out of politics in the decades before the 1960s, saw abortion as a threat to biblical values and began to organize against Roe. Members of the Republican Party’s New Right, such as Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the ERA, saw an obvious connection between their goals and those of Christian evangelicals. By the end of the 1970s, the two groups had formed an alliance that would dominate the Republican Party and revolutionize American politics. Ronald Reagan welcomed evangelical and fundamentalist Christian voters into the Republican Party and actively courted pro-life leaders. In the 1980 election, many evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians moved squarely into the republican camp and became an important part of the party’s base of support."

"[P]roblems of definition today have been compounded by the rapid rise of evangelical-life movements in many locations where few Protestant believers of any kind has existed until very recently. In 1900 according to the well-considered estimate of the editors of the ‘’World Christian Encyclopedia’’, well over 90 percent of the world’s evangelical Christians lived in Europe or North America. (Their definition is resolutely tautlogical: “A subdivision mainly of Protestants consisting of all affiliated church members calling themselves Evangelicals, or all persons belong to Evangelical congregations, churches or denominations: characterized by commitment to personal religion”.) But now-because of Western missionary activity, cooperative efforts at translating the Bible into local languages, the acceleration of worldwide trade and communication, and especially the dedicated efforts of national Christians in many parts of the world-that earlier situation has been dramatically transformed. Today, according to the same reference work, the number of evangelicals in each of Africa, Latin America, and Asia exceeds the total in Europe and North America combined. Moreover, if the editor’s closely allied categories of “Pentecostal,” “charismatic,” and “neo-independent” were amalgamated under a broad “evangelical” rubric, then Brazil claims more evangelicals than the United States, while China, India, South Africa, the Phillippines, Congo-Zaire, and Mexico each counts more than any European country."

"The worldwide expansion of evangelical-type movements also means renewed focus on practices once common among Western evangelicals, but not current in the recent past, such as visions, dreams, healings, and direct messages from the Holy Spirit. Since debates over such practices are first-order concerns in much of the world today, they too must be taken into account when looking for a definition of evangelicalism."

"The English word “evangelical” comes from a transliteration of the Greek noun euangelion, which was used by the writers of the New Testament to signify the glad tidings-the goods news-of Jesus’ appearance on earth as the Son of God to accomplish God’s plan of salvation for needy humans. Translators of the New Testament into English usually employed the word “gospel” (which means goods news or glad tidings in Old English) for euangelion, as in passages like Romans 1:16-“I am not ashamed of the gospel (euangelion), because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (NIV) Thus, “evangelical” religion has always been “gospel” religion, or religion focusing on the “good news” of salvation brought to sinner by Jesus Christ. Already in the middle ages the word was applied, for example, to Isiah as “the evangelical prophet,” because of how later Christians read this Old Testament book as describing the work of Christ. IT was also applied to the followers of St. Francis, because their abandonment of worldly possessions was regarded as a clear imitation of Jesus’ own life. During the sixteenth century, the word “evangelical” began to take on a more specific meaning associated with the Protestant Reformation. In this usage, the evangelicals were those who protested against the corruptions of the late-medieval Western church and who sought a Christ-centered and Bible-centered reform of the church. Because of these efforts, the word became a rough synonym for “Protestant.” To this day in many places around the world, Lutheran churches reflect this older sense of the term (for example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America or the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil). In contemporary Germany, evangelisch retains the older meaning attached to the Lutheran churches descended from the Reformation, while evangelikal is a new coinage to designate those who are often called “evangelicals” in other parts of the world."

"In this book “evangelical” refers not to Protestants in general but to those Protestant who, beginning more than three hundred years ago, strongly emphasized the redeeming work of Christ, personally appropriated, and who stressed spreading the good news of that message, whether to those with only a nominal attachment to Christianity or to those who had never heard the Christian gospel. The British historian David Bebbington developed a fourfold definition for his own study of evangelicals in the British Isles; it has become a very useful touchstone for discussing other groups in the world that are linked to British evangelicalism or that possess characteristics resembling the groups Bebbington describes. For Bebbington, there are four key ingredients of evangelical religion: *conversion: evangelicals are people who stress the need for a definite turning away from self and sin in order to find God in Jesus Christ; the Bible: evangelicals may respect church traditions in varying degrees and may use schooling, reason, and science to assist in explaining Christianity, but the ultimate authority for all matters of faith and religious practice is the Christian Scriptures; *activism: evangelicals have historically been moved to action-to works of charity, sometimes to works of social reform, but above all to the work of spreading the message of salvation in Christ-because of their own experience of God; *the cross: evangelicals also have consistently stressed as the heart of Christian faith the death of Christ on the cross and then the resurrection of Christ as a triumphant seal for what was accomplished in that death (Evangelicals have regularly emphasized the substitutionary character of this atonement between God and sinful humans whereby Christ receives the punishment due to human sins and God gives spiritual life to those who stand “in Christ”)."

"For the particularly sensitive issue of whether to classify African-American Protestants as evangelicals, there is further complication. The same mid-1990s survey found that more than one-eighth of all Americans who could be identified as evangelicals by the Bebbington characteristics were African Americans. In the United States, white evangelical churchgoers and black Protestant churchgoers affirm just about the same basic convictions concerning religious doctrines and moral practices. But for well-established historical reasons concerning the discriminatory treatment of African Americans, black Protestant political behavior and social attitudes are very different from those of white evangelicals. If, in terms of both historical descent and religious convictions, most black Protestants could also be considered evangelicals, the history of racial attitudes has driven a sharp social wedge between them and white evangelicals. Yet if common sense prevails, the difficulties are manageable. As the historian George Marsden has pointed out, evangelicalism can be described as a series of overlapping constituencies that vary in their self-consciousness, but that are related at least loosely in their shared history and convictions. Relatively small numbers of individuals and agencies, often active in parachurch voluntary societies or nondenominational mission agencies, often active in parachurch voluntary societies or nondenominational mission agencies, self-consciously use the evangelical label. Much larger numbers are associated with churches and other institutions embedded securely in the historical train of evangelical movements. And still larger numbers from the world, who may have only loose connections with Western evangelical organizations, nonetheless share the historic evangelical beliefs and practices and so may be included in wider considerations of evangelicalism as well."

"Later chapters in this book will refine questions of definition and explore the question of boundary marking as experienced throughout the world. The most difficulty in such efforts probably comes from assessing the increasing number of non-Western independent churches. In Africa, these groups are sometimes known as aladura churches, from Yoruba word meaning “praying people,” or they are called African Initiated Churches (AIC). Examples, from literally thousands of possibilities, include the Zion Christian Church of Southern Africa and the Cherubim and Seraphim society of West Africa. But similar churches and movements have also proliferated in other parts of the world, such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, the house church movements in China, and many other rapidly developing church networks in India, the Philippines, Pacific Islands, Africa, and Latin America. As their names suggest, these Christian movements usually exercise a high degree of independence, they are usually well adapted to the religious and social practices of their different regions, and most imitate the supernaturalism of the New Testament. More traditional evangelicals sometimes critique these indigenous groups for exalting the prophetic powers of their leaders or subordinating the work of Christ to the work of the same leaders. And some critics see too much ancestral religion surviving in these groups, as well as a penchant for promoting Christianity as a means to secure health and wealth in this life. Nonetheless, a twenty-first-century conception of evangelicalism must pay considerable attention to such groups, for many of them originated from contact with historic evangelic missionaries, and most of them promote beliefs and practices that overlap with traditional evangelical emphases. Case-by-case analysis is the only way is the only way to discern whether such independent movements are best studied as variants of evangelical Christianity or another species altogether."

"Sketching the early stages of evangelical historical development offers greater clarity about shared beliefs and practices, illustrates some of the complexity of the definition, and provides wider context for the recent world expansion of evangelicalism. The general movement in time of groups usually considered evangelical has passed from an original pan-European phase, through phases dominated first by Britain and then with American leadership coming on, to once again an international phase, but this one taking in the whole world."

"A stellar constellation of books from the English historian W.R. Ward has successfully pushed consideration of evangelical roots back into the seventeenth century and convincingly expanded attention from the British world to Europe as a whole. The importance of this perspective for the tewenty0first century lies in noticing that the beginnings of evangelicalism were as international as contemporary expressions of evangelicalism have become. In this picture, distinctly evangelical beliefs and practices emerged in response to political pressure from European state-church establishments, especially in the Habsburg Empire. These responses led to widely scattered revivals where state authorities, Catholic and Protestant, tried to enforce religious conformity. Protests against this pattern of assimilation, arising first in central Europe, soon displayed a number of common features in defense of “true Christianity” against formulaic, systematic, or imposed orthodoxies. Protestors often relied on small-group enclaves as the best form for encouraging “true Christianity.” They were often led by lay people and witnessed much activity by children and youth. And they regularly expressed their hard-won faith in newly written songs and hymns. By pushing the history back into the seventeenth century, a new set of evangelical pioneers comes into focus, including Johann Arndt (1555-1621), whose much-reprinted True Christianity(1605-1610) moved Lutheran theology toward stressing Christ in his children rather than just Christ for his children. A recovery of this European history also shows clearly how the major elements of Lutheran Pietism heralded common evangelical patterns of alter centuries. Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705), whose Pia Desideria of 1675 is regarded as the beginning of organized Pietism, promoted small-group conventicles as a way to encourage the personal appropriation of faith. His successor, August Hermann Francke (1663-1723), used a complex of institutions associated with the University of Halle to translate renewed personal religion into cross-cultural missions, active social service (especially the famous Halle orphanage), and entrepreneurial creativity in raising money for Christian causes. Under Count Ludwig Nicholas von Zinzendorf (1700-1760), the Moravians carried Pietist emphases into a partial break with Lutheranism and an even more wholehearted commitment to personal holiness, missions, and joyful worship."

"These earliest expressions of reforming, revivalistic, anti-statist, and small-group Protestantism were international from the start. All throughout the seventeenth century, books from spiritual reformers as well as news of their innovations circulated from the outposts of Pietism in Russia to the British Isles and beyond. Puritan literature was read with special avidity on the continent. When the Moravians appeared in the 1720s, they had a particularly strong impact on the English-speaking world. Moravian hymns, Moravian dedication to missionary service, Moravian proclamation of justification by faith as a doctrine to live by-all exerted a great influence, indirectly or directly, on evangelical leaders in Britain, Ireland, and America. As these early leaders moved from spiritual renewal to social reform, they invariably took further guidance from what had gone before in Europe. The continental background to modern evangelicalism is relevant for the twenty-first century in one final way. Early defenders of “true religion” sustained a complex relationship to the historical Protestantism of the Reformation. On the one hand, leading priests like Spencer found precedents in Martin Luther and his generation for much of their program, especially the early Reformers’ stress on the priesthood of all believers and their insistence on the personal appropriation of justification by faith. On the other hand, the continental pietists were surprisingly eager to read the work of Roman Catholic mystics, like Madame Guyon and Francois Fenelon, and to disseminate writings of mystical and spiritual writers from the Catholic Middle Ages. That combination of self-conscious reliance on the Reformation and broad openness to some Catholic influences has been rare in evangelical history, but over the last several decides, since the Second Vatican Council, it has one again become common in some circles."

"[A]mong evangelical Protestants, at least, birth control — and who has access to it — has only recently become a major political issue. Unlike Catholics, whose catechism denounces use of most forms of contraception as a sin, evangelical Protestants by and large do not. (Because of the disparate nature of evangelical Protestantism, which includes hundreds if not thousands of separate denominations, it’s difficult to speak of a “formal stance” in the way we can of Catholics.) But alongside Catholic organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor, it’s evangelical-led companies like Hobby Lobby that have been on the forefront of opposition to the ACA birth control mandate. In this, the evangelical stance on the ACA birth control mandate reflects a wider issue: the increased convergence of Catholics and evangelical Protestants — hardly historical allies — on social issues in the past few decades, as issues like the same-sex marriage debate and abortion have united the two socially conservative groups. As David Talcott, professor of philosophy at King’s College and an expert in Christian sexual ethics, told Vox, “Catholic and conservative evangelicals have become allies of certain kinds,” each defending the interests of other, as theological and philosophical overlap between the two. Recent research supports the idea of overlap between traditional Catholic and Protestant thought. Earlier this fall, a Pew Research Center study found that average Protestants more often than not assert traditionally Catholic teachings about, among other things, the nature of salvation or the role of church teaching, reflecting a cultural crossover — however unconscious — between the two groups. In contrast to the Catholic stance, the current set of evangelical objections to the ACA birth control mandate have less to do with any formal doctrine about birth control per se than they do about wider cultural issues, including the abortion debate, the aftermath of the sexual revolution, and precedents for religious exemptions more generally."

"Another Presbyterian, Samuel Davies, pushed evangelicalism into Virginia, heretofore closed to all except the Anglican establishment. Davies’s impassioned preaching, his deliberate outreach to salves and native Americans, and his extensive use of hymns (from England and those he wrote himself) marked a momentous beginning for the evangelization of the American South. Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts provided evangelicalism with its most extensive theological efforts. Edwards, who could preach effective and whose report on an early revival in his Northampton community became a much-consulted template for latter awakenings, devoted much of his energy to close study of Scripture and contemporary challenges to the faith. His major books defended a Calvinistic picture of divine grace (Freedom of the Will), discriminated carefully between true and uncertain faith (The Religious Affections), and combined, as few later evangelicals have been able to do, the most recondite philosophical speculations with the most intensely God-honoring interpretations of Scripture (Two Treatises: The Nature of True Virtue and The End of Which God Created the World). Within a matter of years, the stress on conversion, holy living, evangelism, and affective public worship that began among awakened Congregationalists and Presbyterians was taken up by Baptists and many other groups. When missionaries sent by the Wesley’s crossed the Atlantic in the late 1760s and early 1770s, the resulting surge of Methodism dramatically expanded the scope and intensity of evangelical religion in America."

"Evangelicalism became a culture-shaping force in North Atlantic societies because of its compelling power in scenes of social disorder and national distress. The disorder and distress were often the result of political revolutions that wracked the Anglo-American world from the middle of the eighteenth century to past the midpoint of the nineteenth. In the wake of these revolutions, evangelical religion flourished. The details were unique in each case, but the general pattern was clear. Different varieties of evangelical Christianity took hold with great force-in the Scottish Highlands after the Stuart (Catholic) invasions of 1745-1746; in the United States after the Revolutionary War, 1776-1783; in the Canadian Maritimes after ‘’rejecting’’ the American Revolution; in lowland Scotland in connection with mobilization for war with France in the 1790s; likewise in England in the wake of the threat of war, and of actual warfare, with France; in the north of Ireland after the failed rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798; in Upper Canada (modern Ontario) after the American invasions of the War of 1812; and in the American South after the devastation of the Civil War. A possible exception to this pattern was the situation in Wales, where the tumult of the French wars did seem to stimulate a turn to evangelicalism, but where the long-standing affinity between preaching in Welsh and practicing evangelical faith was probably more important than any one period of social unrest."

"The key in a remarkably diverse range of social, political, and intellectual circumstances was evangelical resilience defined by Christian experience, personally appropriated, and trust in the Bible above all other authorities. Differ as they certainly did in many particulars, the individuals and groups that were recognized as evangelical possessed a core of common characteristics. First, evangelicals throughout the North Atlantic remained firm Protestants who accentuated the historic Protestant attachment to Scripture. They could differ wildly among themselves on the meaning of the Bible, but the Scriptures remained a bedrock of authority. Second, evangelicals shared a conviction that true religion required the active experience of God. Again, evangelicals prescribed myriad norms for that experience and even more ways for accommodating the experience of God with reason, traditions, and hierarchies. But the experience of God remained a sine qua non for the type of religion that many contemporaries and more historians have labeled “evangelical”. Three more characteristics flowed from this biblical experientialism. First was a bias-it could be a slight prejudice, it could be a massive rejection-against inherited institutions. Since no inherited institution could communicate the power of God’s presence as adequately as Scripture and personal Christian experience, no inherited institution enjoyed the respect according to experience and the Bible. Second, evangelicalism was extraordinarily flexible in relation to principles concerning intellectual, political, social, and economic life. Since such principles possessed primarily instrumental value by comparison with the ultimate realities found in Scripture and the experience of Christ, they could be taken up, modified, discarded, or transformed as local circumstances dictated. Third, evangelicals practiced “discipline,” to borrow a well-considered phrase from Daniel Walker Howe. Their experiential biblicism might lead might lead along many different paths, and with contrasting conclusions, to principles embodied a common evangelical conviction that the gospel compelled a search for social healing as well as personal holiness. In subsequent history, evangelicalism has often expanded in outreach and gone deeper in spiritual depth precisely amid similar scenes of disorder and unrest."

"For much of the nineteenth century, white evangelical Protestants constituted the largest and most influential body of religious adherents in the United States, as also in Britain and Canada. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and some Episcopalians shared broadly evangelical conditions, and evangelical elements were prominent among Lutherans, German and Dutch Reformed, and the Restorationist churches (Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ) as well. Evangelicals often combated each other aggressively on the details of their convictions, but in 1846 delegates from many churches in Britain and North America, as well as substantial representation from the European continent, met in England to establish the Evangelical Alliance, a voluntary interdenominational organization whose doctrinal basis succinctly summarized major points of mutual evangelical agreement. The founding commitments of the Alliance remain central to evangelical movements around the world today. 1. The divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures; 2. The right and privacy of private judgment in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures 3. The Unity of the Godhead and the Trinity of the Persons therein; 4. The utter depravity of human nature in consequence of the Fall; 5. The incarnation of the Son of God, His work of atonement for the sins of mankind, and His mediatorial intercession and reign; 6. The justification of the sinner by faith alone; 7. The work of the Holy Spirit in the conversion and sanctification of the sinner; 8. The immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body; the judgment of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, with the eternal blessedness of the righteous and the eternal punishment of the wicked; 9. The divine institution of the Christian ministry, and the obligation and perpetuity of the ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper."

"Well before 1846, evangelicals had also begun to take a growing interest in spreading Christianity to other parts of the world. In such efforts, English-speaking evangelicals lagged considerably behind their Continental pietists colleagues. Apart from a few efforts to reach native American Indians with the gospel, significant missionary labors by English speakers did not begin until the end of the eighteenth century. The ex-American slave, David George, emigrated from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792 as a dedicated preacher of revival just as that West African colony was being opened for outside settlement under the auspices of Anglican evangelicals. The next year, the English Baptist William Carey set out for India. Soon Carey’s Baptist Missionary Society was joined by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, the inter-denominational London Missionary Society, and not too many years by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, along with many other evangelical bodies in what would rapidly grow into great efforts of missionary proclamation. The missionary movement was a very important expression of evangelical zeal in English-speaking countries. It became even more important for planting seeds of Christianity in other parts of the world that would grow vigorously into strong indigenous Christian churches. At the start of the twenty-first century, evangelicals remain important in the broader Christian histories of Britain and North America. But the great story of recent past has been the flourishing of evangelical churches and movements in other parts of the world. Evangelicals from around the world continue to come to Britain, the United States, and Canada for training, but so now do missionaries from the Two-Thirds World arrive to spread the gospel among fellow immigrants in the West, and also to evangelize among Western pagans. To be sure, the newer evangelical churches of the world also face many difficulties of their own-instability, lack of wise leadership, shortage of educational resources, ethnic violence, numbing poverty, and more. But from these churches insights, practices, songs, and doctrinal emphases have also begun to flow back toward the original evangelical homelands. As one recent commentator has written with a focus on the Pacific: “New Zealand Maori, like other indigenous peoples, valued evangelical Christianity for its acknowledgement of the supernatural. The results may put pakeha [New Zealanders of European descent] back into the beginners class of spiritual things.” The theological explorations in the chapters that follow reflect wisdom from three centuries of evangelical life, but are also alert to the recent changes that have once again made evangelical Christianity an international and multicultural religion of great, if also complex, vitality."

"Evangelicals are a “people of the book” because they are, first and foremost, a people of the gospel (euangelion). This chapter thus focused on the nature (what it is), authority (rightful say-so), and interpretation (how to use it/make it work correctly) of the Bible, the “book” in question. In strictly speaking, evangelicals do not believe “in” the Bible but in the God who authored and speaks authoritatively through it. Yet this God, and the gospel, are “in” the Bible as well, and the purpose of exegesisis to “lead out” (ex + ago) the message of salvation so that the interprer-disciple can follow it in faith and obedience. The challenge for an evangelical theory (doctrine) and practice (interpretation) of Scripture is to hold fast to the gospel fixed in writings while engaging the living God who is its author and attending to the great salvation is its subject matter. “Biblicism” is one of the most frequently cited defining marks of evangelicism. Of course, the claim to be people of the good book-the book of good news-is a statement more of aim than achievement. Still, evangelicals take their doctrinal and ethical marching orders from the Scriptures, and the goal is to be a people whose faith, hope, and love-her doctrine, duty and devotion-centers on the promise of God fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the one about whom the gospel is proclaimed. It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that evangelicals invest heavily in the Bible: in various translations and editions of the Bible, in Bible study, in composing hymns and praise choruses that set its words to music, in writing and consuming commentaries, in demonstrating doctrines to be biblical and, last but not least, in the doctrine of Scripture itself. Devotional Bible reading, for example, “is more foundational to evangelical piety than the rosary is to Roman Catholic piety.” Moreover, the sermon-an exposition of a particular biblical text-was traditionally the place where the Bible was brought to bear or applied to all areas of life. Bible studies among college students are perhaps as central to the dissemination of evangelical tradition to the next generation as Bible translation is to evangelicals in the global South. These foundational practices for forming disciples presuppose doctrinal convictions concerning the nature and authority of the Bible."

"Evangelicals typically view themselves as heirs of the Reformation who have stood against the modern liberal tide. Jack Rogers and Donald McKim stood this claim on its head by arguing that the nineteenth-century Princetonians invented the doctrine of inerrancy and, by so doing, exchanged their birthright as children of faith for a mess of empiricist and propositionalist pottage, that is, for the modern scientific method. John Woodbridge wrote a book-length rebuttal arguing that the Princetonian view was fully in line with the historic tradition. Meanwhile, in the global South the Bible is being read through the lenses not of modernity but of premodernity: Phillip Jenkins argues that evangelicals in the non-Western world are able to identify with the world of the biblical text much more directly. Many live in agricultural societies marked by social poverty on the one hand and a belief in spiritual powers on the other. The story of evangelicals and the Bible marches on, and it less likely to stumble when no one faction alone gets to narrate it."