ABSTRACT
While “evangelical” has many legitimate meanings, it is used here to describe a family of Protestant traditions descended from the English Reformation, which espouses a basic set of religious convictions described by D.W.Bebbington as “conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross” (Bebbington 1989, 2-3). The evangelical awakening, which began in the 1730s and affected most regions of Great Britain, Ireland, and the North American Colonies, was part of a European-wide turn toward pietism that placed new emphasis on heartfelt religion and encouraged new skepticism about inherited, traditional religious authority. The spellbinding preaching of the British itinerant George Whitefield (1714-70), the pietistic theology of the Massachusetts minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), and, by the 1770s, dramatic growth among churches founded by John Wesley’s (1703-91) Methodist missionaries made revivalism the defining heart of evangelicalism in the United States. By comparison with its British and Canadian counterparts, American evangelicalism has usually been more activistic, oriented to the immediate, and anticlerical.
