A British Perspective on Evangelicalism

Abstract

The Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century Britain gave rise to a movement that was marked by four emphases: on the Bible, the cross, conversion and activism. The movement ensured the creation of an Evangelical party in the Church of England, the growth of Nonconformity outside the Church of England and the transformation of Scottish Presbyterianism into Evangelical denominations. Assisted by a powerful appeal to many types of people, Evangelicals were also helped by an affinity with the spreading ideas that originated in the Enlightenment, but then were affected during the nineteenth century by Romantic thought and in the twentieth by Expressivist culture. By the opening of the twenty-first century they had declined from their mid-nineteenth-century dominance in British society to a position on the margins.