The history of evangelicalism in America is the story of a trans-denominational Protestant movement defined by personal conversion, biblical authority, and active mission. Shaped by eighteenth-century Great Awakenings, frontier revivals, twentieth-century fundamentalist debates, and Billy Graham's crusades, American evangelicalism developed into a dominant cultural and spiritual force nationwide.
History of evangelicalism: The First Great Awakening and colonial revival
The roots of the evangelical movement in North America took shape during the 1730s and 1740s in a wave of religious revivals known as the First Great Awakening. Before this period, colonial religious life was strictly divided along European territorial lines: Congregationalists dominated New England, Anglicans held sway in Virginia and the Carolinas, and a mosaic of Quaker, German, and Presbyterian communities populated the Mid-Atlantic. In many towns, church membership was tied to social standing, and corporate worship often drifted toward formal ritualism.
A dramatic transformation began in the Connecticut River Valley under the pastoral ministry of Jonathan Edwards. Serving the Congregational church in Northampton, Massachusetts, Edwards observed an extraordinary spiritual awakening in 1734. In works such as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and his famous 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Edwards articulated a brilliant theological defense of revival. He argued that true religion consists of holy affections—an experiential tasting of divine beauty and grace that fundamentally regenerates the human heart.
The local revivals coalesced into a continent-wide movement with the arrival of English evangelist George Whitefield in 1739. An ordained Anglican priest endowed with extraordinary dramatic oratorical power, Whitefield toured the thirteen colonies from Georgia to Massachusetts. Preaching outdoors to crowds exceeding twenty thousand people, Whitefield ignored parish boundaries, calling all listeners—regardless of denomination, class, or race—to personal repentance and the necessity of being "born again" in Jesus Christ.
Whitefield's preaching tours represented the first shared cultural event uniting colonists across geographic lines. The Awakening produced deep divisions between "New Lights" (who embraced revivalism, heartfelt piety, and itinerancy) and "Old Lights" (who defended traditional order, educational requirements, and institutional stability). In the process, the revivals democratized American religion, elevating personal spiritual experience above formal clerical hierarchy and preparing the cultural ground for the American Revolution.
The Second Great Awakening: Camp meetings, Finney, and moral reform
Following the disruption of the Revolutionary War and an era of post-war religious skepticism, a second and even more widespread spiritual wave erupted between 1790 and 1840: the Second Great Awakening. This movement developed along two distinct geographic trajectories, each leaving an indelible stamp on the American church.
On the western frontier of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio, the revival manifested through massive outdoor camp meetings. The most famous occurred in August 1801 at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, where Presbyterian minister Barton W. Stone and Methodist preachers addressed an estimated twenty thousand people gathered in wagons and tents. Participants experienced intense emotional and physical reactions, including weeping, trembling, and shouting. The camp meeting became the primary vehicle for taming the American frontier, fueling explosive growth for Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers who proclaimed free grace to pioneer families.
In the urbanized Northeast, the revival was shaped by Charles Grandison Finney, a former upstate New York lawyer converted in 1821 who became the foremost revivalist of the nineteenth century. Evangelizing the rapidly industrializing towns along the Erie Canal—a region termed the "Burned-over District" due to its successive waves of religious fervor—Finney revolutionized revival methodology. Departing from traditional Calvinist beliefs that revivals were unprompted miracles of sovereign grace, Finney asserted that a revival was the logical result of the right use of appropriate means.
Finney introduced the "New Measures": the "anxious bench" where convicted sinners sat at the front of the sanctuary to receive direct prayer, protracted nightly meetings lasting weeks, direct and colloquial preaching targeting the human will, and public invitations for women to pray in mixed assemblies. Finney taught that conversion was a conscious choice of the will to surrender to God, coupled with a duty to pursue holiness and moral benevolence.
Crucially, the Second Great Awakening linked personal conversion directly to social reform. Finney and his evangelical contemporaries believed that redeemed individuals were called to reform society. This conviction unleashed the "Benevolent Empire"—a network of voluntary evangelical societies dedicated to the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement, prison reform, universal public education, and women's rights. Oberlin College in Ohio, founded in 1833 by evangelicals and later led by Finney, became a historic bastion of abolitionism and the first American college to admit women and African Americans alongside white men.
Urban revivalism in the industrial age: D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday
In the decades following the devastation of the Civil War (1861–1865), American society underwent rapid transformation, driven by massive industrialization, corporate urbanization, and unprecedented waves of European immigration. Evangelicalism adapted its message to the crowded tenements and factories of modern cities through mass urban revivalism.
The central figure of Gilded Age evangelicalism was Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899). A former shoe salesman who organized Sunday schools for poor children in industrial Chicago, Moody paired with gospel singer and hymn-writer Ira D. Sankey to launch massive evangelistic campaigns across Great Britain and the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. Moody stripped revival preaching of theological complexity, focusing on the simple "Three Rs": Ruin by sin, Redemption by Christ, and Regeneration by the Holy Spirit.
Moody operated with business efficiency, renting civic exhibition halls, organizing interdenominational committees of lay business leaders, and utilizing public transit systems to bring tens of thousands to nightly meetings. Sankey popularized the "gospel hymn"—catchy, emotionally accessible melodies with memorable refrains that dominated American Protestant songbooks for decades. In 1886, Moody founded the Bible Institute for Home and Foreign Missions (now the Moody Bible Institute) in Chicago, pioneering a practical model of Bible institute education that trained lay workers, urban rescue mission directors, and overseas missionaries.
In the early twentieth century, former professional baseball player William Ashley "Billy" Sunday (1862–1935) succeeded Moody as the premier urban revivalist. Sunday's theatrical physical stunts across the stage, aggressive colloquial slang, and fiery sermons against saloonkeepers, theological modernism, and Darwinian evolution drew millions of listeners down the sawdust trail, providing moral energy for the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) in 1919.
The fundamentalist-modernist controversy and institutional fracture
Beneath the surface of popular revivalism, deep theological fault lines were fracturing American Protestantism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The emergence of evolutionary biology, historical-critical approaches to biblical interpretation, and the Social Gospel movement led many northern pastors and seminary professors to reinterpret traditional Christian doctrine.
In response, conservative Protestant leaders rallied to defend historic orthodoxy. Between 1910 and 1915, two wealthy southern California oil executives financed the publication and free distribution of three million copies of The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. This series of ninety essays authored by leading British and American scholars defended five landmark doctrines: the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Christ, substitutionary atonement, the physical bodily resurrection, and the literal second coming of Jesus.
The conflict escalated into open warfare during the 1920s across northern Baptist and Presbyterian denominations. In 1922, prominent New York preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick delivered a widely publicized sermon titled "Shall the Fundamentalists Wi—, challenging conservative doctrines. In response, Princeton Theological Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen published Christianity and Liberalism in 1923, arguing that theological modernism was not a modern version of Christianity, but a completely different religion that abandoned the biblical gospel.
The turning point arrived in 1925 with the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, where high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching human evolution. While the prosecution secured a technical conviction, national press coverage led by H. L. Mencken portrayed fundamentalists as anti-intellectual, rural reactionaries. Following defeats in northern denominational conventions, fundamentalists withdrew from mainstream institutions. Rather than surrendering, they built a parallel evangelical empire: independent radio programs, publishing houses, mission boards, and colleges such as Biola and Bob Jones University, while denominations like the Evangelical Free Church of America and the Christian and Missionary Alliance provided stable fellowships for conservative believers.
Neo-evangelicalism: Billy Graham, the NAE, and cultural re-engagement
By the onset of World War II, a new generation of conservative Protestant leaders recognized that fundamentalist isolationism was leaving American intellectual and cultural life entirely to secularism. In 1942, delegates gathered in St. Louis to establish the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), providing an alternative to both the liberal Federal Council of Churches and the militant fundamentalist groups.
This movement—dubbed "neo-evangelicalism" by Boston pastor Harold John Ockenga—sought to retain orthodox Christian doctrine while abandoning fundamentalism's combative separatism. In 1947, theologian Carl F. H. Henry published The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, calling on conservative Christians to engage culture, philosophy, politics, and social ethics. That same year, Ockenga and radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller founded Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, designed to produce scholars capable of defending the faith in secular universities.
The public embodiment of neo-evangelicalism was North Carolina-born evangelist Billy Graham (1918–2018). Propelled to national prominence during his 1949 Los Angeles Crusade inside a canvas tent dubbed the "Canvas Cathedral," Graham spent six decades preaching the gospel in person to an estimated 215 million people in 185 countries. Graham skillfully utilized modern technology, broadcasting through the weekly Hour of Decision radio program, television specials, and theatrical feature films through World Wide Pictures.
Graham insisted on racial integration at his southern crusades beginning in the early 1950s, personally removing ropes separating Black and white attendees in Chattanooga in 1953, and inviting Martin Luther King Jr. to lead prayer at his 1957 Madison Square Garden crusade in New York City. In 1956, Graham and Henry established Christianity Today magazine as an intellectual flagship for the movement, cementing evangelicalism as a respected, mainstream force in American life.
The Jesus Movement, megachurches, and independent church growth
During the late 1960s and 1970s, another unexpected revival wave shook the nation: the Jesus Movement. Emerging amid the countercultural revolution in Southern California, thousands of young hippies and surfers converted to faith in Christ. Pastors like Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa embraced these young converts, replacing traditional organs and formal dress with acoustic guitars, contemporary folk songs, and casual clothing, giving birth to the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard movements.
The Jesus Movement fundamentally altered American church culture. It generated contemporary Christian music (CCM), revolutionized youth ministry, and normalized casual attire in Sunday worship. Building upon these cultural insights, church planters in the 1980s and 1990s pioneered the "seeker-sensitive" megachurch model. Leaders such as Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago and Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Southern California designed services explicitly for unchurched adults, removing traditional denominational symbols, high-church liturgical language, and formal choirs.
This period accelerated the rapid rise of the non-denominational church across the United States. Dissatisfied with denominational bureaucracy and theological controversies, millions of Christians gravitated toward autonomous, elder-led local congregations that prioritized contemporary worship, expository biblical preaching, and relational small groups.
According to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), non-denominational and independent churches expanded to 44,319 congregations and over 21 million adherents, marking the most significant institutional realignment in American Protestant history. The state-by-state data compiled in our review of the presence of non-denominational churches by state highlights how independent evangelical congregations have transformed suburbs and metropolitan centers across America.
American evangelicalism today: Demographics and church life
Today, American evangelicalism represents a diverse and dynamic movement. As outlined in our study of what is an evangelical Christian, the tradition is anchored in the historic convictions of the Bebbington Quadrilateral: the supreme authority of the Bible, the central importance of Christ's cross, the necessity of personal conversion, and active mission in the world.
While often stereotyped in secular political polling as a monolithic white voting bloc, the reality of American evangelicalism is increasingly multiethnic and global. Millions of Black, Hispanic, and Asian American Christians populate evangelical churches, bringing distinct cultural expressions and social perspectives to shared orthodox convictions. Simultaneously, American evangelicals maintain extensive international partnerships with growing churches in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, fulfilling the global vision first championed by eighteenth-century revivalists.
For seekers exploring independent and evangelical churches in their local communities, reading a practical guide to evangelical worship services reveals an active community of faith. From eighteenth-century open-air fields to twenty-first-century modern auditoriums, the central heartbeat of the evangelical movement remains constant: proclaiming the transforming good news of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.