"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."