ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a certain critical distance between the “evangelicalism” of the long eighteenth century and of today so that one can discuss the degree to which Samuel Taylor Coleridge should be associated with the specific movement without bias from the term “evangelical”. It provides a broader overview of British evangelicalism, which included Wesleyan and Calvinist Methodism, much of “New Dissent”, and the Anglican Evangelicals. Before the second generation of more moderate Evangelicalism concluded, the pendulum swung in the other direction as an internal rift developed in the 1820s between those committed to the moderate form and those with features often associated with contemporary evangelicalism. Especially after the 1750s, the opponents failed or refused to see distinctions within evangelicalism and would deridingly label anyone associated with the revival a “Methodist”. British evangelicalism in its first two centuries is not discontinuous with the forms of evangelicalism that would develop, proliferate, and diversify over the next two centuries.
