evangelicalism

evangelicalism. Based on the ‘evangel’ or gospel message, evangelicalism is the generic term for a wide‐ranging religious movement that transcended national, denominational, and theological boundaries. It was most often characterized by an emphasis on justification by faith, the Bible as the chief source of religious authority, the centrality of conversion and the New Birth, the importance of religious experience, and the doctrine of assurance of sins forgiven.

Perhaps the most important factor in evangelicalism's international spread in the 18th century is the way in which its formidable religious activism and organizational pragmatism could be adapted to different social and political conditions in a variety of geographical locations. Its roots in Ireland go back to the voluntary religious societies created by committed Protestants in Dublin and elsewhere in the early 18th century. But it was in the 1740s, with the arrival of itinerant evangelists such as John Cennick, John Wesley, and George Whitefield, that its conversionist zeal was first manifested. Thereafter, the story is a complicated one, for evangelicalism had the capacity to revive old settlements of European pietists, such as the Palatines, stimulate missionary zeal among the established Protestant denominations, act as the catalyst in the formation of new religious movements such as Methodism, and bring forth a vast array of voluntary religious societies for the proclamation of the gospel and the reformation of manners.

Evangelicalism benefited from the political uncertainties of the 1790s and through the socalled Second Reformation launched a sustained offensive in the 1820s to convert Irish Catholics. But over the course of the 19th century its greatest gains were confined to the north of the country, where conversionism produced a great religious drama in the form of the Ulster revival of 1859. Evangelical religion undoubtedly played a part in stiffening the anti‐Catholic resolve of a significant proportion of Irish Protestants and has contributed much to the distinctive religious and political culture of Northern Ireland from 1920 onwards. Although the religious zenith of evangelicalism is probably past, new forms of enthusiastic popular Protestantism, from pentecostalism to charismatic renewal, continue to enliven the religious landscape of early 21st‐century Ireland.

There is a sense in which ‘evangelicalism’, as opposed to ‘evangelicals’, is a potentially misleading term, for its adherents are not easily reduced to a particular religious typology. Its boundaries include bellicose, anti‐Catholic pulpit politicians as well as pious dispensers of manifold charities: some evangelicals were ardent Calvinists, others were equally ardent Arminians; some were hard and sectarian, others were inclusive and internationalist; and some were rigid denominationalists while others thought denominationalism to be the scourge of ‘vital religion’.

Evangelicalism, among contemporaries and historians alike, has evoked strong opinions. Opponents throughout its history have claimed that it elevated enthusiasm far above reason and that it disturbed churches, communities, and families with fanciful notions and socially divisive doctrines. Some historians, equally, have seen it as a pernicious religious movement of counter‐enlightenment, while others have drawn attention to its influence in expanding the sphere of religious activity open to the laity, including women and children, and to its admirable, if selective, social conscience. What is not in dispute is its characteristic activism, which reshaped the lives of those who committed themselves to it and led to the expansion of a zealous form of Protestantism throughout the North Atlantic world and beyond in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the words of Francis Newman, himself a committed evangelical with Plymouth Brethren associations in Dublin in the 1820s, though later a freethinker, religious enthusiasm may be despised, but few dispute its power.

Bibliography

Bowen, D. , History and the Shaping of Irish Protestantism (1995)
Hempton, D., and and Hill, M. , Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society 1740–1890 (1992)

David Hempton