ABSTRACT This article engages with an ongoing controversy over the coherence of evangelicalism, that is, the question of whether the term corresponds to a coherent movement stretching from the eighteenth century to the present or is a false throughline constructed by modern evangelical historians. This American-focused scholarship has a major lacuna: its failure to reckon with evangelical Christianity outside of the United States. Evangelical Christianity has always been more cogent in Britain than the United States, in large part because of the minority status and unusual institutional cohesion of the evangelical wing of the Church of England since the end of the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, British evangelicalism played a major role in clarifying what it meant to be “evangelical” in the United States. The “evangelical throughline” stretches across the Atlantic. Evangelicalism is neither a twentieth-century invention nor fundamentally American.
Thomas Whittaker (Wed,) studied this question.