Evangelical, Revivalist, And Pentecostal Christianity Research Paper

While a slow starter to get into missions, evangelical Christianity began to articulate an increasingly sophisticated global vision from the late 1600s, with the rise of the Pietist movement. As Lewis has noted, Pietism restored a sense of personal call to Protestant orthodoxy which, through agencies such as the University of Halle and Moravian missions, expressed itself in a growing internationalism. The correspondence of Zinzendorf, the migration of Moravians, and missionary outreach to Russia, Greenland, and India, created networks and examples of successful missions which informed the expanding networks of new settler societies and expanding capitalism. It was on a trip to the New World that John Wesley, for instance, first ran into Moravians, who, through the influence of Peter Bohler, provided the synthesizing principle to Wesleyan eclectic theology and practice which in turn made it a vibrant missionary force. It was likewise among Scots-Irish and Dutch settlers in the New World that religious revival produced the combination of Protestant theology and religious experience which has become known as ‘Evangelical Christianity.’ Definitions differ, usually with personal affiliation, but a standard definition of Evangelicalism offered by David Bebbington locates the movement in a quadrilateral of theology and praxis involving activism, cross-centeredness, Bible-centeredness, and conversionism. The fact that nothing like the French Revolution occurred in England helped legitimize the movement as a source of social and cultural stability. The inner energies of the movement, combining a universalizing crucicentrism and biblicism, with conversion-oriented activism, meant that the tens of thousands of converts to the Evangelical Awakening on both sides of the Atlantic provided a vast pool of willing support to the evangelical program to change globalizing British society. The leaders of the movement—in particular William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, the Clapham sect, and Selina, Countess of Huntingdon—were able to draw upon these networks of support in a dynamic program of social activism over the century 1750–1850. This activism arguably provided important impulse force to the processes of globalization, just as globalizing Western economies provided important resources and opportunities for evangelical expansion and change.

Protestants from Luther’s time were faced with an expanding globe in tension with an increasingly outmoded ecclesiology. While, during Luther’s own lifetime, Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope (1488), Columbus was driven west in pursuit of a millennial vision to land on the shores of America (1492), and other parts of the world were opened to Western influence by da Gama, Cabot, Cortes, Magellan, and Pizarro, Protestants were combining with increasingly nationalistic ruling classes (the nobility in Germany, bourgeoisie in Switzerland and The Netherlands) to reinstitute the ‘Christendom’ ideal within the national churches of rising nation states. While Catholic empires ruled the seas, Protestant missions were restricted to Europe. While the theology became increasingly arid and formalized, the impact of these churches was to reinforce the nexus between nationalism and capitalism. Capitalism expanded during the period through royal chartered companies, combining national expansion and capitalist enterprise. Halle Pietism specifically used this link to expand into Russia, just as Puritans used the chartered company to establish themselves in Massachusetts Bay. The CMS first fought with and later used the East India Company in Asia, while the Claphamites moved into West Africa on the tails of colonization companies. While Weber’s ‘spirit of Protestantism’ has been revised and attacked in some quarters, it is nonetheless a useful heuristic when viewing the interaction of shipping, chartered, and colonization companies on the one hand, and missionary agencies on the other.

Protestantism provided an ‘inner fascination with the world,’ and evangelicalism adopted the same fascination and extended it. There has been considerable work done, for instance, on the link between enlightenment and Evangelicalism, indicating that Evangelicalism, through its commercial and missionary emphases, was a major carrier of rationalizing Western concepts of time and space into the rest of the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only did Wesley proceed on the assumption of an ‘inner enlightenment,’ using both the vocabulary and technologies of enlightenment to further the evangelical cause (he was, for instance, an assiduous publisher), but Puritan and evangelical input into the sciences from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was immense. Clergy were not only involved in agencies such as the Royal Society, but were key suppliers of information to enlightenment projects such as the social sciences. (Malcolm Prentis, for example, has demonstrated the link between clerical collection and the construction of an international culture of research in anthropology.)

The logical place to look for the globalizing influence of evangelicalism is through the agency of missions. The marginality of missions at the beginning of the nineteenth century demonstrates the close association of evangelical expansion with Western expansion. By 1800, North America was subject to European settlement, but only on the eastern half and the western rim of the continent, and though there was no real challenge to Hispanic hegemony in South America, Christianization had not really pierced deeply below the surface of the indigenous and emerging plantation cultures. The impact of missions in the Indic, wider Asian, and Muslim worlds was negligible. Obviously, then, developments in the nineteenth century were critical for the development of global Christianity in our own period. Europe at the time was weak and divided religiously. The industrial revolution encouraged both concentration of the sort of wealth which could capture foreign markets and provided the scientific curiosity and the speed of travel to take advantage of new opportunities. While most European expansion in the eighteenth century had been mercantilist in nature— with small colonies of isolated Europeans trading with Asian nations in sealed cantons such as Shanghai, Macau, and Hong Kong—the nineteenth century saw a shift toward extensive settlement and active domination of local politics. At least in part, this was because it was now technically possible, with advances in communication and military hardware, to dominate other less advanced cultures. So Britain absorbed India, Burma, and Ceylon into a new Empire, France annexed Indo-China, and The Netherlands finalized its annexation of Indonesia. Other European powers founded colonies, such as the German colonies in PNG, and annexed parts of Africa, such as Togoland, Southwestern Africa, and the like. At least for the British, Stanley argues that there was a consistent imperial impulse to British society, but no plan of conquest, most acquisitions having been gained in order to protect trading rights. Formal control was never exercised when the much cheaper form of informal control could be used, and it was the increasing need for formal control, driven by the intensified competition of European powers for global resources, which drove Britain to acquire and then defend India as the keystone in its defense of the East.

In terms of the other global religious cultures, evangelicalism also faced weakened opposition. One advantage of the time was that Islam was in retreat—in 1821 Greece was retaken, and from the 1830s European powers began dividing up Islamic parts of Northern Africa such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Roman Catholicism at the beginning of the nineteenth century was under siege from the forces of modernization. With the eclipse of Portugal and Spain as imperial powers, increasingly the push for missions in the Catholic world came from France, Belgium, and (significantly for Australia) Ireland. While the Orthodox churches did not pursue much in the way of missions, despite the spread of the Russian Empire during this period, the Protestants, energized by the Evangelical revival, certainly did, both within and outside the English speaking world. Stanley suggests that, while there were agencies such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel with a missionary element to them, before the Evangelical awakening there was no consistent acceptance of the burden of foreign missions by either Anglican or Dissenting Protestants. Europe was the same. In 1810, for instance, a revival known as the Reveil spread out of Geneva and affected the French Protestant world deeply, leading to considerable missionary endeavor overseas. Norwegian revivals, most notably commenced by Hans Nielsen Hauge, a lay reader preaching in a way which was not legalized until 20 years after his death, energized Scandinavian missions to North America and later to South America. German missionaries, in the tradition of Halle and the Moravians, traveled all over the world. The interaction of these revival movements and missions can be seen in their common adherence to interdenominational agencies such as the Evangelical Alliance, which was founded in 1847, and held conferences in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Sweden, and the United States.

The model provided by the Alliance of a voluntary society was to become the classic form for Protestant missions. Many were formed at the prompting of chaplains and clergy travelling with army, trading company or political representatives. The first of them was the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), inspired by William Carey, who in turn had been inspired to mission by the accounts of the travels of such explorers as Captain James Cook in the Pacific. It was followed by the London Missionary Society (1795), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society (1813), and many others. Because the Church of Scotland refused the requests of its Evangelical party to form their own missionary agency, most Scots siphoned off into other agencies, such as the LMS. In 1810, preceded by many small bodies dedicated to evangelizing First Nations’ peoples, the first American foreign agency was founded in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

The extension of evangelical missions had a number of major interactions with the growth of global society. The first was that, with increased need for personnel, the missions started their own Bible training institutions. These in turn legitimized the long-standing ‘old dissenting’ academies, supported religious emancipation and social reform, and acted to break down the exclusivism of the established church-linked universities. European states, at slower or faster rates, responded to this broadening of the religious franchise (among other secularizing tendencies) by stepping back from the official sanctioning of one form of religious truth or another. By the end of the century, most European states had become generally ‘Christian’ countries without confessional attachments, and many, in their colonies (particularly in Canada and Australia) were actively encouraging liberal democratic states. Not only did missions change the education of the increasingly vital professional class at home, but in exporting the Western educational model, also exported Western professional values into the nation states which began to arise in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific from the late nineteenth century. In exporting values such as professional disinterestedness, the importance of technical expertise, and basic human rights, a common culture was established which facilitated not only the spread of global society, but also (through preservation and re-skilling of Fourth World peoples) the means for local opposition to global homogenization. The specter of evangelical African bishops nay-saying advanced liberal proposals at a Lambeth conference, or Aboriginal evangelicals controlling the balance of power in the national assemblies of the United churches of Canada and Australia, have demonstrated the interactivity between evangelical missions and mediation of global culture.

The establishment of comity arrangements between evangelical missions in foreign countries highlights the second major interaction. The movement of religious traditions outside their national boundaries produced a relativization of their content and form, creating movements toward ecumenism based on ‘common gospel’ assumptions, diminishing the importance of liturgical and cultural tradition, and homogenizing the culture of international Christianity. This was imported back into the West as de-denominalization, and into Third World countries as ‘alliance Christianity,’ enabling Christianity to be described as a unitary object in contact with other world religions. This sense of relativization of form sparked concerns about relativization of truth, concerns expressed most markedly in the fundamentalism modernism debates of the 1920s onwards.

Fundamentalism self-consciously identifies itself as a countermodernist movement, particularly in terms of theological modernism. Evangelicalism maintains something of this thrust, at the end of the twentieth century increasingly identifying itself as a counterpostmodernist movement. On another level, however, these debates can be seen as localized resistance to homogenizing forces at the global level, resistance seen most markedly in the general opposition of national evangelicals to agencies such as the World Council of Churches. In some cases, this meant the localization of evangelicalism into extreme nationalist forms. In most cases, however, especially after the rise of the National Association of Evangelicals in the USA and the Billy Graham Organization, the centrality of missions and a self-identity partly defined by contention for the faith caused evangelicals after World War II to take the same globalizing path that the WCC had already taken. This is reflected in the formation of agencies such as the Lausanne Committee, the World Evangelical Fellowship, and worldwide denominational fellowships such as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Particularly after World War II, these agencies provided the basis for expansion of English and, with increasing hegemony, American evangelicalism onto the world stage. By the 1990s, it was clear that denominations had become almost irrelevant to the self-definition of most evangelicals, and that localized megachurches were more important for agenda setting.

Likewise, evangelical missions had shifted from being denominationally and agency based to increasing integration with global movements in migration, occupation, and tourism. Short-term mission, and mission originating from countries in the ‘South,’ contribute nearly as much to the total Christian missionary workforce as do traditional, First World, agency based missions, and is likely soon to outstrip it.

Within these tendencies in evangelicalism in the nineteenth century arose the issue of ‘revivalism.’ Revivalism is a technical accommodation between the experience of revival, as formalized during and after the First Great Awakening by Calvinists such as Jonathan Edwards, and the utilitarianism implicit in early nineteenth century postenlightenment thought. The emphasis of Edwards and Wesley in defending the use of ‘means’ for the furtherance of religious revival were codified and extended during frontier revivals in New York State and the expanding American frontier. Not least among the codifiers was Charles Grandison Finney, whose Lectures on Re vial became the great ‘how to’ book of the nineteenth century. Revivalism as it expanded from the USA to England, and then around the world (by way of church and migrant diasporas) developed an array of techniques to maintain the association between Christian mass evangelism and spiritual response. It became the tool of choice for many evangelicals as Western societies seemed to be slipping away from their commitments to national religious frameworks, a set of ideas crystallized in the premillennial theology of archetypal evangelistic movements such as the Brethren, Baptists, and Methodists. As a technical accommodation to utilitarianism, revivalism was a natural client and promoter of globalization, which was very largely fueled by the technical innovation of high modernist capitalism. So revivalism quickly spread by the development of Methodist itineracy into the big campaign evangelism of D. L. Moody, Alexander Somerville, Gypsy Smith, and the like. Such itineracy became global, as shipping, then automobiles, and then airplanes, brought other parts of the globe within reach. As communications technologies also improved— through telegraphed newspaper reports, international postage, radioed accounts, and finally television coverage (culminating in the global campaign by satellite of Billy Graham in 1996)—evangelicalism spread with revivalism to all parts of the globe. It is important to note in this regard the high degree of evangelical participation in modern technological enterprises, from Back to the Bible Radio, to the massive media empire of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil. This has been seen as a paradox by some commentators—it is less obviously so when revivalism’s accommodation to technological utilitarianism is taken into account. Though revivalism is not limited to evangelicalism (Catholic revivalism, for instance, or the adoption of revivalistic techniques by Hindu and Buddhist promoters in South and Southeast Asia), and not all evangelicalism is revivalistic, it is clear that the two are blood relations and natural partners in many cultures around the world. At the same time, the fact that revivalism is a distillation of ‘revival tradition’ into a technological form which can thereby cross cultural boundaries makes it eminently transportable. For this reason, Edith Blumhofer has called the major global form of modern revivalism, pentecostalism, ‘world evangelicalism,’ because of its facility with communications technologies. The ability of pentecostalism to ‘cast’ itself as a communal form of thought through the abstracting processes of print media and CITs makes it a prime globalizing force. On the one hand, this makes for global expansion of evangelicalism through its revivalist and Pentecostal forms. On the other hand, the same process homogenizes its distinctives and causes it to adapt new local distinctives as it moves across cultures. The lack of a single center (unlike either Islam or Catholicism) is thus a great facilitator of growth, but is also the prime cause of internal dissension and fragmentation as various local evangelical cultures seek to adopt or invent normative centers which enable local communities and protect them from the effects of fragmentation. Neo-fundamentalism, Calvinist renewal movements in the Southern Baptist Convention, the Toronto and Brownsville revivals—each of these may be seen as the creation of new centers, which feed from the energies of globalization, and attempt to create islands of order amidst the chaos of global society.

In particular, evangelicalism as it stands at the beginning of the twenty-first century is clearly largely a two-thirds world phenomenon. As Piggin, Reed, and others have shown, revival is the inculturation of Christianity into local cultures. It is not too much to say, therefore, that the theology of revival, particularly as evidenced in Pentecostal revivalism since the 1950s, is a mainstream legitimating structure for the indigenization of Protestant evangelicalism. This is particularly evident in revivalistic outbreaks such as the East Africa Revival in the 1930s, the blossoming of Pentecostalism in Brazil and later in Argentina, and the Aboriginal revival commencing at Galiwin’ku in Australia’s Northern Territory from 1978. In each case, evangelicalism struck new roots and found new accommodations with existing religious cultures which have in turn been exported into the global religious network.

While the East Africa revival had comparatively little experience of charismatic manifestations, Brazil and the Aboriginal revival have been highly charismatic in their combination of local and general characteristics. As Freston notes, the massive expansion of evangelicalism in that showcase of evangelical inculturation, Brazil, is likewise largely Pentecostal in nature. As he noted in 1998, a ‘survey of evangelical institutions in Greater Rio de Janeiro discovered that, of the 52 largest denominations, 37 were of Brazilian origin, virtually all Pentecostal. While only 61 percent of all evangelical churches were Pentecostal, 91 percent of those founded in the previous three years were’ (Freston 1998, p. 74). Of the 450 million ‘evangelicals’ and 750 million ‘Great Commission Christians’ estimated by David Barrett to exist in 1990, some 350 million could be counted within the Pentecostal or charismatic camp. It is clear that at the end of the twentieth century, evangelicalism’s expanding edge was clearly Pentecostal charismatic in nature, leaving the national traditions of the First World heartlands significant challenges of reinvention in their struggle to survive the disappearance of their defining ethnic and national boundaries.

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