Evangelicalism in the United States

[1] Comprising nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, evangelicals are a diverse group drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including nondenominational churches, Pentecostal, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Mennonite, Plymouth Brethren, and Quaker.

[6][7][8] During the bloody Civil War, each side confidently preached in support of its own cause using Bible verses and Evangelical arguments, which exposed a deep theological conflict that had been brewing for decades and would continue long after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

[13] As a reaction to the 1960s counterculture and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, many white evangelicals became politically active and involved in the Christian right,[14] which became an important voting bloc in the Republican Party.

According to sociologist Brian Steensland and colleagues, "evangelical denominations have typically sought more separation from the broader culture, emphasized missionary activity and individual conversion, and taught strict adherence to particular religious doctrines.

"[18] Mainline Protestants are described as having "an accommodating stance toward modernity, a proactive view on issues of social and economic justice, and pluralism in their tolerance of varied individual beliefs.

[32] Pietism was a movement within the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Europe that emphasized a "religion of the heart": the ideal that faith was not simply acceptance of propositional truth but was an emotional "commitment of one's whole being to God" in which one's life became dedicated to self-sacrificial ministry.

An Anglican priest, Whitefield had studied at Oxford University prior to ordination, and there he befriended John Wesley and his brother Charles, the founders of a pietistic movement within the Church of England called Methodism.

The Great Awakening hit its peak by 1740,[39] but it shaped a new form of Protestantism that emphasized, according to historian Thomas S. Kidd, "seasons of revival, or outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and converted sinners experiencing God's love personally" [emphasis in original].

In New England, a major revival began among Congregationalists by the 1820s, led by Edwardsian preachers such as Timothy Dwight, Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Asahel Nettleton.

[52] In northeastern Kentucky's Bourbon County a year later, the Cane Ridge Revival led by Barton Stone lasted a week and drew crowds of 20,000 people from the thinly populated frontier.

According to scholar Mark Sweetnam, dispensationalists are evangelical, premillennialist and apocalyptic, insist on a literal interpretation of Scripture, identify distinct stages ("dispensations") in God's dealings with humanity, and expect Christ's imminent return to rapture His saints.

This new and controversial method of interpreting the Bible,[74][75] which does not reconcile easily with findings from recent mainstream archaeological and textual research,[76][77][78] was incorporated into the development of modern Evangelicalism.

[83][84][85][86] Focused on the city of Chicago and active in the Sunday School movement and Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) from 1858 in his early ministry, Moody had relentlessly sought financial contributions from rich evangelical businessmen such as John Farwell and Cyrus McCormick.

[84] Convinced now that the world would be changed not by social work but by Christ's return and the establishment of His millennial kingdom on Earth, Moody abandoned his own previous postmillennialist views.

After 1910, evangelicalism was dominated by fundamentalists who rejected liberal theology, emphasized inerrancy of Scripture, and taught a dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible to support their views of human history and mankind's future.

It was mailed free of charge to ministers, missionaries, professors of theology, Sunday school superintendents, YMCA and YWCA secretaries, and other Protestant religious workers in the United States and other English-speaking countries.

[106] Dispensationalism led fundamentalist evangelicals to see the world as a battleground in a deadly conflict between God and the Devil that would sweep all unbelievers to perdition very soon, so that they must focus on saving souls, with reform of society as a strictly secondary concern.

[110] Dispensationalism also led fundamentalists to fear that new trends in modern science were pulling people away from what they saw as essential truth, and to believe that modernist parties in Protestant churches had surrendered their Evangelical heritage by accommodating secular views and values.

Among these fundamentalist evangelicals, a favored way of resisting modernism was to prohibit teaching evolution as fact in public schools, a movement that reached a peak in the Scopes trial of 1925.

Many earlier evangelists had preached in tents to small-town audiences on the "sawdust trail," but the new evangelicals sought ways to save souls in the big cities that had come to dominate American life.

[113] Youth for Christ was formed in 1940 to help make the evangelical message attractive to soldiers, sailors, and urban teenagers;[114] it later became the base for Billy Graham's post-war revival crusades.

[118] Fuller Theological Seminary founding president Harold Ockenga coined the term neo-evangelicalism in 1947 to identify a distinct movement he saw within fundamentalist Christianity.

A tall, handsome, spellbinding preacher from North Carolina with a piercing gaze, Graham aimed to fill his listeners first with dread that they were lost sinners in a world rushing headlong into disaster, then with a deep longing to turn their lives around, trust Jesus, and be saved.

[122] Two days before the start of the revival, in a statement released on September 23, 1949, President Truman revealed to the public that the communist Soviet Union had built and successfully detonated its own nuclear bomb on August 29.

Many came from poor rural districts that had struggled during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but wartime and postwar prosperity had dramatically increased the funding resources available for missionary work.

After Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been defeated, the newly mobilized evangelicals prepared to combat perceived threats from atheistic communism, secularism, Darwinism, liberalism, Catholicism, and (in overseas missions) paganism.

[153] The Christian Right is a coalition of numerous groups of traditionalist and observant church-goers of many kinds: especially Catholics on issues such as birth control and abortion, plus Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and others.

[158][159][160] Most African Americans who identify as Christians belong to Baptist, Methodist or other denominations that share evangelical beliefs, but they are firmly in the Democratic coalition, and (with the possible exception of issues involving abortion and homosexuality) are generally liberal in politics.

[170] Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and Baptist pastor, notes that a significant amount of Americans who have begun to embrace the evangelical identity are people who self-report as "never" or "seldom" attending church.

They have worked in coalitions with other religious and secular groups to press for action on matters like ending Sudan's civil war, addressing the AIDS crisis in Africa, and combating human trafficking.