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A religious movement born in Great Britain and colonial America, Evangelicalism has been politically significant for over two centuries. It is largely a Protestant spiritual renewal movement, emphasizing religious conversion, doctrinal orthodoxy, personal piety, and public morality.

The best definitions of Evangelicalism (e.g., David Bebbington’s 1989 Evangelicalism in Modern Britain) focus on four hallmarks: (1) respect for the authority, perspicuity, and truthfulness of the Bible; (2) an emphasis on a personal acceptance of the faith, commonly described as conversion, a faith commitment, or being born again; (3) a belief that religious faith should permeate one’s life, be shared with others, and be manifested in love for others; and (4) an affirmation of orthodox teachings about Jesus Christ, including His deity, virgin birth, atoning death on the cross, bodily resurrection, and eventual earthly return.

Origins Of The Movement

The movement’s roots are found in the First Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. Leaders such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and John Wesley sparked this spiritual revival. The political impact was personified by William Wilberforce, who fought a lifelong battle to end the slave trade in Britain.

It was the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century that gave rise to a distinctive evangelical presence in American public life. Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher, Charles Finney, and other evangelists inspired mass conversions, which led to the founding of hundreds of voluntary reform associations. Some associations were principally religious in their mission, distributing Bibles or promoting evangelism, but others concentrated on social and ethical issues: helping orphans, the deaf, and the destitute; promoting peace, literacy, and temperance; and combating dueling, prostitution, lotteries, and slavery.

As the century unfolded, pietistic fervor in the United States led to notions of Christian perfectionism and millennialism. When the number of converts reached a critical mass, they began to speak in terms of “manifest destiny” and “Christian America.” The high-water mark was the effort of Northern evangelicals to spark widespread opposition to slavery. The low-water mark was the capitulation of Southern evangelicals to the proslavery cause.

After the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), industrialization began to change the American landscape. Evangelical groups such as the Salvation Army, the Volunteers of America, the YMCA, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance responded by moving into the poorest areas of urban America to set up relief efforts. This was also the era in which evangelicals founded a number of colleges, formed the Christian Labor Union, and launched the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Retreat And Revival

By the turn of the nineteenth century, evangelical efforts were overshadowed by more theologically liberal proponents of the social gospel. The Protestant social gospel movement, led by men such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Charles Sheldon, and Washington Gladden, shifted the focus of Christian churches from individual conversion to social reform by supplanting traditional doctrinal teachings with modern notions about human progress and God’s immanence. These modernists moved from the periphery to the center of American Christianity, consolidating their power in seminaries and denominations. Among American Christians who were unwilling to jettison orthodoxy were the three groups that would become the heart of modern Evangelicalism in the United States: the fundamentalists, the Pentecostals, and the holiness movement. Each of these groups retreated from public life, establishing a vibrant but largely unnoticed subculture in middle America.

Feeling betrayed by the groups’ separatism, contentiousness, and divisiveness, in-house critics soon gave birth to the modern evangelical movement. Men such as Carl F. H. Henry, Edward John Carnell, and Harold Ockenga, “fundamentalists with PhDs,” led the charge, alongside the evangelist Billy Graham. Having been excluded from or marginalized by the major denominations, these men created parachurch organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Fuller Seminary (1947), and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (1950) as well as the magazine Christianity Today (1956).

A turning point came in 1947 with the publication of Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Henry argued that fundamentalism had become socially impotent, ethically indifferent, and morally irresponsible. His manifesto precipitated a profound change of heart within evangelical circles. Henry’s influence was extended when Graham invited him to edit Christianity Today. This magazine helped forge the modern evangelical movement. During Henry’s twelve-year tenure, politics, the bane of the fundamentalists, became common fare for evangelicals. The next generation dutifully returned to the public arena.

In the 1970s, the first wave of modern evangelical activism was surprisingly left of center as evidenced by Evangelicals for McGovern, Sojourners magazine, Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977), Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Chicago Declaration: a call to action on the issues of peace, race, and poverty. In 1976, the year pollster George Gallup and soon thereafter Newsweek magazine proclaimed the “Year of the Evangelical,” evangelicals helped elect President Jimmy Carter, “the best known Baptist deacon in America.”

This dalliance with the Democratic Party was short-lived. The catalyst for change was the rise of social liberalism. As social liberals gained control of the Democratic Party as well as the nation’s media outlets, entertainment industry, and colleges and universities, their values became increasingly ubiquitous. The shunning of traditional values and moral authorities left social conservatives, including evangelicals, reeling. Evangelicals were eager to join forces with anyone who would fight back.

The link between political conservatism and evangelicals solidified during the second wave of evangelical activism when Republican organizers helped Jerry Falwell, a Baptist television minister with a largely fundamentalist audience, form the Moral Majority in 1979. Similar organizations developed around the same time: Focus on the Family (1977), Christian Voice (1978), Concerned Women for America (1979), Religious Roundtable (1979), and the Traditional Values Coalition (1980). During the Reagan years, these groups mailed millions of voter guides, registered hundreds of thousands of voters, and enlisted thousands of campaign workers. Their actual influence, however, is contested, and the most visible of the lot, the Moral Majority, eventually fell on hard times and was disbanded in 1989.

The third wave of evangelical activism surfaced when another television evangelist, Pat Robertson, mounted a campaign for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. His campaign brought the Pentecostal/Charismatic wing of Evangelicalism into politics. Defeat did not dampen Robertson’s ardor for politics; he soon formed the Christian Coalition (1989), which employed a grassroots strategy, helping evangelicals achieve new levels of success.

The cumulative effect of these three waves is clear: evangelicals across the board are more likely to vote and more likely to vote conservatively. Despite limited electoral success and frequent public ridicule, evangelicals remain, for the foreseeable future, a force to be reckoned with in American politics.

Evangelicalism In The Twenty-First Century

Contemporary evangelicals are a fusion of disparate groups. There are sociological, historical, and most important, theological differences among them. Even the political views of evangelicals cover the full spectrum—left, right, and center. Although many are conservative, most are not actively involved in organized political action.

The movement approaches politics with an Augustinian perspective, a Protestant theology, and a republican spirit. Their Augustinian perspective, reflecting the lingering influence of St. Augustine of Hippo, emphasizes dual citizenship (in an earthly city and in the City of God), human depravity (the corruption of human nature due to sin), and the indispensability of civil society. Their Protestant theology prizes the authority of the Bible, the centrality of religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. Their republican spirit demands limited government, democratic populism, and moral virtue.

The conservative majority has a brand of conservatism that differs from libertarians, traditionalists, and neoconservatives. They believe in the idea of an enduring moral order that societies ignore to their own detriment. They believe the Bible is key to knowing that moral order and that institutions other than government (the family and the church) are essential to preserving that moral order. They have a keen awareness of human fallibility and thus see a need for prudent restraints on human appetites and institutional power. Generally populist, evangelicals recognize that tradition can embody sinfulness as well as wisdom; they understand that a free market does not solve all problems (and actually creates many), and they mistrust centralized power in most forms (including corporations).

Evangelical activism is often associated with social issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, pornography, and school prayer. Although those issues remain important, evangelicals are increasingly active in pressing for human rights and providing humanitarian aid. Various faith based evangelical organizations have fought the slave trade in Sudan, exposed human rights abuses in North Korea, combated child prostitution in Cambodia, and fought for religious freedom for Tibetan Buddhists. Other issues on their agenda include prison reform, racial reconciliation, global poverty, third world debt relief, environmental stewardship, and sex trafficking.

In his 2002 book, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins suggests that a conservative Christian resurgence is spreading around the globe in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Evangelicals are at the forefront of this resurgence. With some exceptions (evangelical Presbyterians in South Korea and evangelical Anglicans in Kenya and Nigeria), the rapid resurgence is largely a charismatic Pentecostal movement.

Comparative study of the political implications of the resurgence is a relatively new endeavor. Initial studies suggest (1) most evangelical movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are largely independent of evangelicals in the United States; (2) given the movement’s lack of an organizational center, political agendas are generally determined by autonomous congregations in their local context; (3) much of the growth in Evangelicalism has occurred in disadvantaged and marginalized communities; and (4) evangelical churches serve as schools of democracy, teaching adherents important lessons about grassroots organization, civic leadership, and responsible participation.

Although evangelicals around the globe adhere to orthodox theological doctrines and traditional moral values, they are not easily categorized in liberal-conservative political terms. Evangelicals have endorsed right-wing authoritarian regimes, contributed to democratization, and supported leftist revolutionary movements. Political agendas vary from promotion of narrow interests to universal demands for democracy and human rights. They promote their agendas with a full range of political activity from running for public office (e.g., Lee Myung-bak in South Korea) to organizing minor political parties (e.g., Brazilian Republican Party) to defending basic human rights from the pulpit (e.g., Archbishop David Gitari in Kenya). Given these global developments, the political influence of Evangelicalism may well be even greater in the twenty-first century.

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