ABSTRACT
One of the most striking phenomena in the story of late-twentieth-century Christianity has been the resurgence of evangelicalism in the transatlantic West and its expansion across the Global South. The fundamentalist controversies of the 1910s and 1920s left Anglo-American evangelicalism divided, discredited and demoralised, but in the years after 1945 a remarkable renaissance took place.1 The ‘new evangelicalism’ in the United States, associated particularly with Carl Henry and Billy Graham, saw evangelicals eschew the shibboleths of ‘fighting fundamentalism’ and regain a position of influence in the ecclesiastical and cultural mainstream, to the extent that Newsweek magazine could respond to the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter by labelling 1976 ‘the year of the evangelical’.2 A comparable transformation took place in Great Britain, with the revival and strengthening of conservative evangelical strands in the historic denominations from the 1950s and then from the late 1960s the growth of new churches, some charismatic in worship style and theology, and some appealing to a particular national or ethnic constituency. The historians of the Evangelical Alliance characterised its history in the late twentieth century in terms of ‘renewal’ and ‘resurgence’, while the Alliance’s sesquicentenary in 1996 prompted serious reflection on the opportunities and challenges of greater numbers and growing influence.3 Church leaders, scholars and secular commentators, moreover,
recognised that evangelicalism was a significant force in the non-Western world. As the numerical balance within Christianity shifted to the Global South, so the strength of burgeoning evangelical churches in Africa, Asia and Latin America became increasingly important.4
