Evangelicalism Midterm Vocab

Gospel

The "good news" of Christianity: salvation through Jesus Christ, centered on his death and resurrection. For evangelicalism, the Gospel is not merely doctrine but a message that must be personally received, experienced, and proclaimed, making conversion and evangelism central to evangelical identity

Primary class model

The class's basic model for evangelicalism emphasizes biblicism (high view of scriptural authority), crucicentrism (focus on the cross), conversionism (belief in the need for personal conversion), and activism (gospel expressed through effort/mission). Together, these help explain why evangelicals emphasize Scripture, personal salvation, missionary activity, and the cross. This model matters because it lets historians treat Evangelicalism as a transdenominational movement defined by shared emphases rather than by a single church or creed.

Evangelical conversion narrative

The stylized testimony pattern in which a believer recounts a life "before" (sin, lostness) and "after" (new birth), often with a datable crisis moment. This genre became a structuring device for Evangelical identity from the First Great Awakening onward, shaping everything from revival preaching to modern personal testimonies and showing how conversionism gets lived out narratively, not just doctrinally.

Evangelical memory

The way Evangelicals understand their religious past and personal religious history. Childhood religion, conversion stories, revival experiences, and memories of "true religion" shape how people understand their present faith. This contributes to the Evangelical emphasis on new life, renewal, and personal transformation.

First Great Awakening

A wave of Protestant revivalism in the 1730s-40s emphasizing emotional religious experience, conversion, and itinerant preaching. It helped establish the revival tradition that would become central to American evangelicalism, as well as the recurring Evangelical pattern of revival → conversion → activism → new religious networks..

Johnathan Edwards

Northampton, Massachusetts pastor and theologian whose revival preaching (e.g., "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") and theological writings on religious experience (Religious Affections) helped ignite and interpret the First Great Awakening. He mattered for distinguishing authentic conversion from mere emotionalism, giving the revival intellectual respectability.

George Whitefield

An eighteenth-century revivalist and traveling preacher who preached outdoors to enormous crowds. His theatrical style, powerful voice, and willingness to preach outside established churches made him an early example of the celebrity/populist Evangelical preacher. He demonstrates Evangelicalism's willingness to use new media and performance to reach ordinary people.

Sarah Osborn

A Rhode Island Evangelical who experienced awakening under Whitefield and then hosted and led religious meetings in her home. She became an important writer about religious experience and participated in revival networks. Her example shows how revivalism crossed gender boundaries and gave women religious leadership outside formal church structures.

Samson Occom

A Mohegan convert who became the first Indigenous ordained Christian minister in the Americas. He ministered to both Indigenous and white audiences and wrote extensively about his religious experiences. His story demonstrates the cross-cultural and socially boundary-crossing potential of Evangelical conversion, while also showing Evangelicalism's complicated relationship with Indigenous peoples.

Critiques of revivals

From the beginning, revivalism generated criticism from "Old Lights" (and later observers) over emotional excess, manipulation, disorder, and questionable spiritual experiences. Examples included people desperately trying to experience conversion and spectacular phenomena at revivals.These critiques recur across every subsequent awakening and establish a recurring Evangelical tension between authentic spiritual experience and emotional/ sensational excess.

Second Great Awakening

A wave of revivals in the early nineteenth century (1800s-1830s) that expanded Evangelicalism through camp meetings, itinerant preaching, conversion, and social reform. It helped produce major growth among Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians and connected Evangelicalism to voluntary societies and reform movements.

Methodism

A major early institutional form of Evangelicalism associated with John Wesley and later American figures such as Francis Asbury. It emphasized emotional conversion, accessible theology, itinerant "circuit riders," and local class meetings. Its Arminian emphasis on human response helped make Evangelicalism accessible and contributed to its Americanization.

Cane Ridge Revival

The massive 1801 Kentucky camp meeting, associated with Barton Stone, marked by intense physical/emotional manifestations ("falling," "jerking") among thousands of attendees. It became the symbolic launching point of frontier revivalism and the camp-meeting format central to the Second Great Awakening

"Burned-over district"

Upstate New York became known as the "burned-over district" because repeated revivals had swept through the region. It became a center of both religious experimentation and social reform. The area demonstrates how Evangelical revivalism could produce lasting institutional and reform movements, not simply temporary religious excitement.

Charles Finney & the "new measures"

Presbyterian-turned-independent revivalist (lawyer-preacher) who pioneered techniques (the "anxious bench," protracted meetings, direct emotional appeals, early altar calls) designed to produce conversions rather than simply await them. Finney's activism and his insistence that revival was "the right use of the constituted means" shifted Evangelicalism toward a more human-engineered, results-oriented revivalism and tied conversion to reform activism (e.g., abolition).

Abolitionism

The movement to end slavery, which became deeply connected to Evangelical revivalism and reform. Finney and other Evangelicals connected conversion with social action and abolition. At the same time, Evangelicals were divided over slavery, demonstrating that shared Evangelical commitments did not automatically produce agreement on moral or political questions.

Evangelical slavery debates

Evangelical Christians split badly over slavery, with Southern Evangelicals developing biblical defenses of the institution while Northern Evangelicals increasingly moved toward abolition; several denominations (Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians) formally split North/South by the 1840s-50s. This debate demonstrates that shared biblicism did not guarantee shared politics — the same Bible was read to opposite conclusions.

African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME)

Founded in 1816 by Richard Allen after Black worshippers faced discrimination in white Methodist congregations, it became the first major independent Black denomination. It represents Black Evangelicals building autonomous institutions in response to white Evangelical racism, a pattern that recurs throughout the movement's history.

Sunday schools

Institutions that provided religious education, particularly to children and working-class communities. Evangelicals used Sunday schools as practical tools for spreading biblical literacy and forming Christian communities. They illustrate Evangelicalism's emphasis on organized activism and accessible religious education.

American Bible Society (ABS)

A voluntary society created to distribute Bibles widely. Rather than operating through a single denomination, it organized people around a specific Evangelical purpose. It represents the broader nineteenth-century development of parachurch and voluntary organizations that "organized" the energy generated by revivals.

YMCA/YWCA

Organizations that emerged from Evangelical revival networks and provided religious, educational, and social services. They allowed Evangelicals— especially women through the YWCA—to exercise leadership beyond traditional church structures. They demonstrate Evangelicalism's practical activism and institutional flexibility, and they mark the movement's adaptation from rural revivalism to organized urban ministry.

Evangelical Alliance

An international organization (founded 1846) meant to unite Evangelicals across denominational and national lines around shared core beliefs, prefiguring later 20th-century ecumenical-but-still-conservative Evangelical coalitions like the NAE. Its difficulty creating a common doctrinal statement illustrates the tension between transdenominational cooperation and doctrinal boundaries. It reflects the ongoing effort to give trans- denominational Evangelical identity institutional form.

Third Great Awakening

A period of revival, Evangelical institutional expansion, and adaptation to an increasingly urban, industrial, secular, and religiously plural America. This was also the high point of A.B. Simpson's ministry and saw the growth of parachurch organizations, Bible schools, holiness movements, and new approaches to missions.

Dwight L. Moody

A former shoe salesman who became a major nineteenth-century revivalist. He professionalized mass evangelism, used music (with Ira Sankey) and organizational efficiency, and founded institutions like Moody Bible Institute. His inquiry rooms made conversion more private and respectable than some earlier revival techniques. He shifted revivalism toward the city and toward institution-building, bridging 19th-century revivalism and 20th-century Evangelical infrastructure. He helped create the modern parachurch/ evangelistic ecosystem.

Whittle-Bliss Revival (Louisville, KY)

A post-Civil War revival campaign led by Major D. W. Whittle and gospel songwriter Philip Bliss, part of the broader wave of professionalized urban revivalism following Moody's model. It illustrates the spread and replication of the Moody-style evangelistic campaign format regionally, and the movement toward systematic, mass-mediated Evangelical revivalism.

Fourfold Gospel

A theological framework associated especially with A.B. Simpson: Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. It connected conversion with sanctification, divine healing, and premillennial expectation. It demonstrates Simpson's attempt to recover a fuller, supernatural Christian life rather than reducing Christianity to intellectual belief.

Holiness movement

A late-19th-century movement (rooted in Methodist perfectionism) emphasizing a "second blessing" of entire sanctification subsequent to conversion. It produced new denominations and institutions and directly seeded Pentecostalism, which would add Spirit baptism/tongues as a further "blessing" beyond sanctification.

Daniel Alexander Payne

A major AME leader after the Civil War who organized missions among newly freed Black Americans. He emphasized education, social progress, and institutional development alongside revival. His ministry shows the Black Evangelical tradition's emphasis on uplift, education, and community institution-building.

Salvation Army & Evangeline Booth

The Salvation Army, founded by William and Catherine Booth, combined Evangelical conversion with "social holiness"—bringing Christianity into the streets and addressing social problems. Evangeline Booth helped expand the movement in America. It demonstrates how Evangelical activism could take the form of organized social ministry and evangelism.

Divine healing movement

A nineteenth-century movement emphasizing supernatural physical healing through faith and prayer. A.B. Simpson strongly emphasized healing as part of Christ's work and the "redemption of the body." The movement illustrates Evangelicalism's resistance to reducing Christianity to doctrine and its emphasis on present supernatural experience. It fed directly into Pentecostal theology and practice and reflects the era's turn toward embodied, experiential religion.

Carrie Judd Montgomery

A major figure in the divine-healing and holiness movements who promoted faith healing and Christian ministry. Her work illustrates the increasingly important role of women as leaders in Evangelical healing and holiness networks, even when traditional churches restricted women's authority.

Bible College movement

The proliferation of independent Bible institutes (Moody Bible Institute being the prototype) offering practical, non-seminary training for lay ministers, missionaries, and evangelists. This built an alternative educational infrastructure that helped Fundamentalists and Evangelicals separate from increasingly liberal mainline seminaries.

Biblical inerrancy

The belief that Scripture is without error in its original form in everything on which it speaks. B. B. Warfield's formulation became particularly influential. In the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy, inerrancy became a major boundary marker concerning biblical authority and modern intellectual challenges.

Premillenialism

The belief that Christ will return before the millennium described in Revelation. It represented a shift away from postmillennialism and toward more literal readings of biblical prophecy. Premillennialism helped make the end times, prophecy, and Christ's return central to certain Evangelical subcultures. Its rise displaced earlier postmillennial reform optimism and encouraged a more pessimistic view of social progress among Fundamentalists.

Dispensationalism/ biblical prophecy

A system (popularized by John Nelson Darby and Scofield) dividing history into distinct "dispensations" and reading current/future events through detailed end-times prophecy schemes. It gave premillennialism a systematic interpretive framework and shaped Fundamentalist/Evangelical prophecy culture well into the present.

Scofield Reference Bible

A Bible published with extensive interpretive notes associated with dispensationalism. Because readers encountered Scripture alongside a specific prophetic framework, it helped spread dispensational and premillennial interpretations throughout American Evangelicalism.

Evolution vs. creationism debate

The conflict between Darwinian evolutionary theory and Evangelical/Fundamentalist commitments to a literal Genesis, intensifying in the early 20th century alongside the rise of biblical inerrancy. It became a central Fundamentalist battle line and a recurring flashpoint (through Scopes and beyond) in Evangelicals' relationship to modern science.

Fundamentalism

A conservative response to theological modernism that sought to defend foundational Christian doctrines and biblical authority (inerrancy, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, miracles) against theological modernism. The Fundamentals (1910-15) articulated core beliefs, while fundamentalists increasingly created their own Bible colleges, publications, and institutions. It represents an "Evangelical narrowing" in response to modernity, a major strand from which mid-century "Evangelicalism" would later distinguish itself as a more culturally engaged alternative.

New Theology/ Christian modernism

A theological movement that sought to reinterpret Christianity in light of modern science, scholarship, and culture. Modernists were more likely to read biblical material metaphorically and emphasize Christianity's ethical/social message. The conflict with fundamentalists centered on what could change while Christianity remained Christianity.

Social Gospel

A broadening of Christianity toward social ethics and structural reform. Rather than focusing primarily on individual conversion, this concept’s thinkers emphasized applying Jesus's teachings to poverty, labor, inequality, and society. It represents one possible Evangelical response to modernity: Christianity as social transformation.

Scopes Monkey Trial

The 1925 Tennessee trial over teaching evolution in public schools. William Jennings Bryan represented the anti-evolution position. Although the fundamentalists technically won the legal case, the trial damaged their public reputation and illustrates the broader Fundamentalist/Modernist conflict over science, education, and American culture.

Pentecostalism

A movement emphasizing the active work of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts, especially healing and speaking in tongues. It emerged from holiness and divine-healing currents but became a distinct global movement. Pentecostalism represents an especially strong expression of Evangelical experientialism and supernaturalism.

Tongues speaking (glossolalia)

Speaking in tongues, understood by Pentecostals as a spiritual gift and evidence of the Holy Spirit's activity. It became especially associated with Spirit baptism. The controversy over tongues illustrates Evangelical debates about whether supernatural gifts continue in contemporary Christianity.

Azusa Street Revival

The 1906 Los Angeles revival led by William J. Seymour, a Black preacher, that became a major center of Pentecostalism. It involved prayer, conversions, healing, tongues, and other spiritual manifestations and crossed racial, gender, and linguistic boundaries. Its rapid global spread demonstrates Pentecostalism's transnational and socially boundary-crossing character.

William J. Seymour

A Black Pentecostal preacher and leader of the Azusa Street Revival. His leadership is significant because Azusa initially brought together people across racial and social boundaries during an era of segregation. Seymour demonstrates how Pentecostalism could challenge conventional racial and institutional boundaries, even though the movement later developed divisions.

Assemblies of God

A major Pentecostal denomination that emerged in the early twentieth century. It institutionalized Pentecostal beliefs and practices while helping spread them widely. Its development shows the recurring Evangelical pattern of spiritual innovation becoming institutionalized. It represents Pentecostalism's move from spontaneous revival to durable denomination, paralleling earlier Methodist institutionalization.

Aimee Semple McPherson

A Pentecostal evangelist who combined revivalism, Spirit baptism, healing, premillennialism, media, and celebrity culture. She used automobiles, radio, theatrical performance, and a massive Los Angeles church to reach audiences. She demonstrates how Evangelicalism repeatedly adapts new technology and popular culture for evangelism.

Fourth Great Awakening

The post-World War II religious resurgence, roughly the 1950s-1990s, characterized by mass church participation, parachurch organizations, megachurches, media, and global Evangelical expansion. It developed partly in response to modernity and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s.

Billy Graham

The central postwar Evangelical revivalist who emphasized the personal "decision" for Christ. He combined mass rallies, careful organization, media, parachurch networks, and cooperation across Protestant denominations. His career illustrates Evangelicalism's movement toward professionalized, mass-mediated, transdenominational Christianity.

Youth for Christ (YFC)

A youth-oriented Evangelical organization that helped launch Billy Graham's early ministry. It used music, celebrity, athletics, and other popular attractions to reach young people. YFC demonstrates the Evangelical willingness to use "all the gimmicks reason would allow" for evangelism. It exemplifies the era's parachurch strategy of reaching beyond church walls using contemporary cultural forms.

LA Crusade (1949)

A major Billy Graham revival campaign that used extensive advertising, local church cooperation, media attention, and the theme of personal decision. Its enormous attendance helped make Graham a national celebrity and demonstrated the power of mass media + revivalism + organized local churches.

Christianity Today

An Evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956. It provided an intellectual and media platform for postwar Evangelicalism and helped establish a more respectable public identity for conservative Christianity. It reflects the development of an Evangelical media ecosystem.

Watergate fiasco

The Watergate scandal influenced Billy Graham's understanding of the dangers of close political involvement. Graham had developed relationships with several presidents, but Watergate reinforced his concern that Evangelical ministry could become too closely tied to partisan politics

Megachurches

Very large churches that became increasingly important in postwar Evangelicalism. They often combine large-scale worship, media, specialized programming, and extensive organizational structures. Megachurches continue Evangelicalism's historical tendency toward spectacle, accessibility, technology, and organizational innovation.

"Seeker-sensitive model"

A church-growth approach designed to make Christianity accessible to people who are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with traditional church culture. It often emphasizes contemporary music, practical sermons, welcoming environments, and minimal barriers to participation. It reflects Evangelical pragmatism and the goal of meeting people where they are.

Founders' Myth

When church has success, it's really centrally tied to this singular charismatic founder → deference of authority to that figure (basically becomes local pope), undermines collective communal nature of achievement, sets leader up for great falls

"Church growth model"

A model associated with the idea that churches grow most effectively when they organize around people who share important social characteristics. This reflects the Evangelical effort to use social science and pragmatic organizational strategies to increase conversion and membership.

Growth is most important; target suburbs, surveys to see what kind of church people want to attend → but not organized around bible? But it works. Corresponds to consumer culture → Jesus rock

Cult of Domesticity

A nineteenth-century ideal defining women primarily through motherhood, home, piety, and moral influence. Paradoxically, Evangelical ideas about women's moral responsibility also provided justification for women entering public reform movements. Thus, the domestic ideal could both restrict women and provide a basis for public religious activism.

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

An Evangelical reform organization founded in 1873 that opposed alcohol and advocated broader social reforms. Women connected temperance to issues including suffrage, prostitution, working conditions, and morality. The WCTU demonstrates how Evangelical women transformed domestic moral responsibility into public activism.

Complementarian vs. egalitarian debate

A major debate over women's and men's roles in Christianity. Complementarians argue that men and women have different divinely ordered roles, especially regarding authority in family and church; egalitarians argue that men and women should have equal authority and leadership. The debate reflects larger Evangelical questions about biblical interpretation, gender, authority, and modern social change.

Nancy Hardesty & evangelical feminism

Hardesty, co-author of All We're Meant to Be, was associated with the development of Evangelical feminism, which argued that biblical Christianity could support greater equality for women. Evangelical feminists challenged the assumption that traditional gender hierarchy was necessarily biblical. The debate demonstrates how biblical authority could be invoked by opposing sides of the same social question.

National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)

Founded in 1942 as a national organization representing Evangelicals and providing political/public advocacy. Unlike a denomination, it brought together different Evangelical traditions. It demonstrates the growth of organized Evangelical political and public engagement. It became a key institutional anchor of "neo-Evangelical" identity and later a political voice representing Evangelicals in Washington.

Nixon's Silent Majority/Southern Strategy

Nixon's political appeal to culturally conservative, often Evangelical, white voters (especially in the South) alienated by 1960s social upheaval, laying groundwork for the eventual Evangelical-Republican alignment. It's an early marker of the political realignment that would culminate in the Religious Right.

Green v. Connolly

A 1971 case involving the government's ability to enforce civil-rights requirements through the tax-exempt status of private institutions. Evangelical/fundamentalist institutions increasingly perceived federal regulation as a threat to their institutional independence. This helped contribute to political mobilization among conservative Christians.

Religious Right (RR)

The late-1970s/1980s coalition of conservative Evangelicals (and allied Catholics/Mormons) organizing politically around opposition to abortion, feminism, gay rights, and secularism, and alignment with the Republican Party. It represents Evangelicalism's decisive turn from postwar cultural re-engagement to direct partisan political mobilization.

Francis Schaeffer

An influential Evangelical thinker who wrote Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and argued that Christians needed to confront secular culture rather than retreat from it. His work helped make abortion and "secular humanism" central concerns for conservative Evangelicals. He helped connect theological ideas to organized cultural and political activism.

Jerry Falwell & the Moral Majority

Falwell, a Baptist pastor/televangelist, founded the Moral Majority (1979) to mobilize conservative Christians politically around "family values" issues. The organization promoted traditional family values, opposition to abortion and the ERA, school prayer, and other conservative causes, becoming one of the Religious Right's most visible organizations. It exemplifies the institutionalization of Evangelical political activism in the Reagan era.

Televangelists

Preachers (Falwell, Robertson, Swaggart, Bakker, et al.) who used television to build massive national audiences and fundraising bases from the 1970s-80s, extending Evangelical media strategy from Moody/Graham-era print and radio. Television expanded Evangelical reach but also connected religious celebrity with scandals, money, and political influence. This continues the historical Evangelical pattern of embracing new technology while worrying about its moral consequences. Several major televangelist scandals in the late 1980s also damaged public trust in Evangelical leadership.

STOP-ERA & Evangelical counter- feminism

Phyllis Schlafly's campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment mobilized conservative (many Evangelical) women against feminism, defending traditional gender roles as biblically and socially sound. It shows women as key agents of Evangelical political conservatism, not merely subjects of male-led movements.

"Culture wars"

Conflicts over issues such as abortion, sexuality, gender, family, education, and religion in public life. Henry connects these conflicts to the earlier Fundamentalist/Modernist battles over Christianity's relationship to American culture. Thus, culture wars represent a continuation of older Evangelical debates over modernity and social authority.

1980 presidential election

A decisive moment in the political consolidation of conservative Evangelicals and the Republican Party. Evangelicals, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, and others increasingly supported Ronald Reagan. The significance is less one candidate than the broader formation of a durable Evangelical political coalition.

Robertson, Ralph Reed → Christian Coalition

Pat Robertson's 1988 presidential run and subsequent founding of the Christian Coalition (led organizationally by Ralph Reed) built sophisticated grassroots political infrastructure to sustain Religious Right influence into the 1990s. The Christian Coalition used grassroots organizing, voter guides, and political activism. It demonstrates the transition from charismatic Religious Right leadership toward professionalized political organization.

Bush 43 presidency

George W. Bush's presidency (2001-2009), marked by his own Evangelical conversion narrative, faith-based initiatives, and close ties to Evangelical voters, represented a high-water mark of Religious Right influence in the executive branch. It shows the maturation of the Evangelical-GOP alliance into governing power, though they were at times disappointed with Bush's lack of direct policy action.

2016/2020 presidential elections

Donald Trump's strong support among white Evangelicals (despite his personal life diverging sharply from traditional Evangelical morality) revealed the movement's political alignment increasingly outweighing traditional character/piety concerns. It's a central data point in debates over whether "Evangelical" now names a political identity as much as (or more than) a theological one.

MAGA evangelicals & Trumpism

The subset of white Evangelicals whose support for Trump blends nationalist, populist politics with Evangelical religious identity and apocalyptic/providential rhetoric about Trump's role. It represents a contested, intensified endpoint of the trajectory from Religious Right politics toward explicit religious nationalism, provoking internal Evangelical backlash as well. The significance is the ongoing debate over whether Evangelical political engagement should be closely identified with a particular political movement.

Compassion International

A major Evangelical humanitarian organization focused on child sponsorship and poverty relief. It represents Evangelical activism that is not primarily partisan and demonstrates the continuing importance of missions and practical social action.

John M. Perkins

Black Evangelical civil rights activist and founder of the Christian Community Development Association, who articulated a holistic ministry model (relocation, reconciliation, redistribution) addressing racial and economic justice from an Evangelical theological base. He is a foundational figure for racial-reconciliation and social-justice currents within Evangelicalism.

Jim Wallis & Sojourners movement

Wallis founded Sojourners magazine/community to articulate a biblically-grounded Evangelical left, critiquing both Religious Right politics and secular progressivism on issues of poverty, war, and racism. It represents an organized alternative to the dominant conservative political trajectory of postwar Evangelicalism.

Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern

A 1973 statement by progressive Evangelical leaders (including Wallis, Perkins associates) confessing complicity in racism, sexism, and materialism and calling Evangelicals to social justice engagement. It's an early institutional marker of the Evangelical left as a self-conscious movement distinct from the emerging Religious Right.

Red-letter Christian movement

A movement emphasizing the teachings of Jesus, particularly the words traditionally printed in red-letter Bibles. It encourages Christians to prioritize Jesus's teachings about poverty, peace, compassion, and justice. It represents an attempt to define Evangelical social engagement through Jesus's teachings rather than partisan identity.

Evangelical Environmental Network

An organization applying Evangelical theology ("creation care") to environmental advocacy, complicating assumptions that Evangelicals are uniformly indifferent or hostile to environmentalism. It represents another progressive-leaning activist strand diversifying the movement's political range.

Samuel Rodriguez

Prominent Latino Evangelical leader (National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference) who has worked across racial and sometimes partisan lines on immigration and social issues. He highlights the growing significance of Latino Evangelicals as a distinct, influential constituency reshaping the movement's demographics and politics. His significance is connected to the changing racial and ethnic composition of American Evangelicalism and the movement's increasing diversity.

Francis Collins & BioLogos Movement

Collins, geneticist and former NIH director, founded BioLogos to argue that evolutionary science and Evangelical faith are compatible ("evolutionary creationism"). It represents an ongoing Evangelical effort to move past the Fundamentalist-era evolution/creationism impasse without abandoning core faith commitments.

Lecrae & Evangelical racial crisis

Christian hip-hop artist Lecrae's public break with much of white Evangelical culture (particularly around Black Lives Matter and the 2016 election) became a widely discussed flashpoint over race within Evangelicalism.His career highlights tensions between Evangelical claims of racial unity and the lived experiences of racial minorities. It demonstrates that race remains an unresolved issue within Evangelicalism, and an ongoing tension between Black and white Evangelicals despite shared doctrinal commitments.

Evangelical Center/ Left 2024 Statement on Faith & Democracy

A recent public statement by centrist/progressive Evangelical leaders addressing concerns about Christian nationalism and threats to democratic norms. It reflects continuing contemporary efforts by non-MAGA-aligned Evangelicals to publicly differentiate their theological and political commitments from the Religious Right/Trumpist wing, and to distinguish Christian faith from partisan political allegiance.

"Anthropological attitude"

The practice of studying Evangelicals by taking seriously how they themselves understand their religious experiences, rather than simply dismissing supernatural claims as irrational. This is important for Luhrmann's anthropological approach: the goal is to understand how Evangelicals experience God as real and present.

House groups

Small, informal home-based gatherings for prayer, teaching, and fellowship that were central to the Jesus People and early Vineyard movement's organizational style, offering an alternative to conventional institutional church structures. They reflect the countercultural, low-formality ethos these movements carried over from the 1960s.

1960s "hippie" counterculture

The broader youth countercultural movement (drugs, communal living, anti-establishment values) that the Jesus People movement both emerged from and sought to evangelize, adapting countercultural style to Evangelical conversion. It shows Evangelicalism's recurring capacity to absorb and repackage contemporary youth culture for evangelistic ends.

Lonnie Frisbee (1949-1993)

A charismatic preacher associated with the Jesus People movement and later the Vineyard movement. His ministry connected Pentecostal spiritual practices with the counterculture. He demonstrates how Evangelicalism can absorb cultural outsiders and translate supernatural Christianity into new cultural contexts.

Jesus People movement

A late-1960s/1970s movement in which young people from the counterculture converted to Christianity. It combined evangelical conversion, communal living, contemporary music, informal worship, and charismatic practices. The movement demonstrates Evangelicalism's capacity for cultural adaptation without abandoning core conversion and biblical commitments.

John Wimber (1934-1997)

Former musician turned pastor who became the central leader of the Vineyard movement, teaching "power evangelism" (healing, prophecy, and other charismatic gifts as tools for evangelism) while remaining relationally warm and non-showy compared to earlier Pentecostal stereotypes. He mainstreamed Charismatic practice for a broader, often middle-class Evangelical audience Wimber represents the movement toward "third-wave" charismatic Christianity within the broader Evangelical world.

Vineyard Christian Fellowship

A network of churches associated with John Wimber that combined Evangelical biblical teaching with charismatic practices such as healing and spiritual gifts. It sought to make supernatural Christianity accessible to ordinary Christians. It blended contemporary worship music, Charismatic gifts, and a relaxed, seeker-friendly style, becoming hugely influential on broader Evangelical worship culture (worship music especially) well beyond its own membership. It's a key bridge between Pentecostal/Charismatic practice and mainstream Evangelical worship norms today.

The "invitation"

The altar-call moment at the close of a revival service inviting hearers to respond publicly (coming forward, raising a hand) to accept Christ, a practice traceable to Finney's "anxious bench" and standard in Moody's and Graham's crusades alike. It's the structural device that operationalizes conversionism — turning belief into a decisive, visible, individual act. It captures the Evangelical emphasis on individual decision, conversion, and response.