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Using social movement, this chapter examines political, socioeconomic, and demographic data to discover the underlying causes of the variation in implementation of the faith‐based initiative among states. Most researchers argue that social movements use disruptive acts or lobbying to persuade elites to meet their demands; however, the resurgent evangelical movement has gained power by being influential within state politics, promoting policies like the faith‐based initiative. Data on administrative and legislative implementation at the state level was analyzed using two types of regression analysis. Changes based on the faith‐based initiative were more likely to occur in states with a strong evangelical movement presence and with conservative welfare policies, suggesting both political and fiscal motives behind creating faith‐based policies.

While most research has focused on federal faith‐based initiatives, what has gone largely unnoticed has been how extensive state faith‐based initiatives have become. State faith‐based initiatives are in fact more advanced in many ways than implementation at the federal level. States have passed significant faith‐based legislation, something the federal government has never been able to do, and state implementation of these initiatives has begun to shape governmental and faith‐based organizational culture. The consistent efforts of state liaisons and faith‐based conferences, with new faith‐based policies, have created greater opportunities for partnership between faith and government sectors, but have very rarely come up with the resources to make these new efforts work for extended periods of time. Analysis of data illustrates that state faith‐based policies and practices are creating an over‐arching cultural shift away from church/state separation to church/state cooperation.

Although certain currents of modern British Evangelicalism owed a strong debt to the views on predestination and saving faith conventionally labelled “Calvinist,” the figure of Calvin himself was less well known and less consistently praised by Victorian British Evangelicals than the great figures of the English and Scottish Reformations such as John Knox and William Tyndale. Knowledge of and interest in Calvin’s person and thought nonetheless grew between 1850 and 1950. In the twentieth century first the influence of Dutch neo-Calvinism and then that of Karl Barth led to the emergence of currents that explicitly identified themselves with Calvin and Calvinism.

The establishment of the Evangelical Movement of Wales in 1947 brought evangelicals in Wales from across the traditional denominations together and allowed them to express a common voice in a way that had barely been witnessed before. Using the Evangelical Magazine of Wales as its main source, this essay explores the identity of these evangelicals. It argues that in their stress on the authority of the Bible, their exclusive emphasis on the substitutionary atonement of Christ, their increasingly belligerent secessionist stance and their often hostile attitude to the society and culture in which they found themselves, these evangelicals often exhibited fundamentistic tendencies.

This chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part comprises a theological and cultural analysis of the Highland evangelical movement. The second part enquires into the development of Highland ‘peoplehood’ and the cultural awakening of pro-Gaelic sentiment. The social and economic aspects of these processes are examined and there are case studies of the contribution of two prominent Highlanders, the journalist John Murdoch and the leading Free Church minister, John Kennedy.

As Chapter 5 argues, conservative Christian abstinence-only advocates learned a great deal from the liberal Protestants and comprehensive sexuality education they rejected. This phase of sex education, often defined by the struggle between competing versions of sex education, began with the emergence of abstinence-only education in the 1980s. After years of opposing sex education, conservative Christians like Tim LaHaye developed their replacements. Supported by—and supporting—the newly developed Christian Right and the evangelical pro-family movement, these programs espoused chastity before marriage and omitted information on contraceptive benefits and the diversity of sexual behaviors and identities. It was no longer a question of whether sex education belonged in schools, but rather which type would be taught. Conservatives, too, had learned how to translate religious values into secular spaces in order to gain a bigger audience for their concerns and values.

Classification methods of racial names were an eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century obsession. The Enlightenment guarantee of using hypothetical methods in order to defeat the tyranny of clergy and hereditary aristocracy increased the hope that science would put a conclusion to the superstitions of theology. Yet as has become evident in the substitution of the curse of Ham by scientific racialism, the efforts of bringing the light of reason to “race” were deeply negotiated at times. On the one side, in the English-speaking world, it was partly due both to the revolutionary Enlightenment thinking and romantic evangelical movements that the African slave trade and slavery were ultimately destroyed; and the whole concept of antiracist scholarship rests on the Enlightenment legacy.

The book concludes by suggesting that some of the traditional periodization and characterizations of conventional Church history need modification. In many ways, particularly in areas such as the need to follow through, and in some instances to instigate the pastoral and professional aims of the Reformation, and in participating in processes related to Church reform, the clergy in the long eighteenth century continued to work of seventeenth-century clergy, as well as anticipating some of the ideals of the Evangelical and Oxford movements. Reluctance to recognize this has led historians to neglect the strengths of the Church between the Restoration and 1830s, which it is argued here, should not be judged primarily for its failure to attain the ideals of the other movements, but as institution possessing its own coherent and positive rationale.

The goal of this chapter is to comment on the scholarship on gender in the Pentecostal movement and to provide some case contextualization from ethnographic field research with Pentecostals in Colombia. In the religious landscape of Colombia, the term Pentecostal evokes a single denomination, the “Jésus Sólo” Iglesia Pentecostal Unida (IPU). The IPU's rejection of the Trinity isolates them from fellowship with the rest of the evangelical movement in Colombia. Despite their custody of the descriptor Pentecostal, they are by no means the only emergent religious group in Colombia. This spiritual focus is of greater importance for some evangélicos in Colombia than others, and there are a number of unifying factors among evangélicos specific to the Colombian context. In most significant study and analysis of evangélicos in Colombia there is an aggressive focus on the family, on marital and parental roles and responsibilities, that results in a discernible shift in the domestic life of converts.

This concluding chapter considers the implications from the studies discussed in previous chapters. First is the fact that black gospel music sustains a richly textured, oppositional, ethnoracial consciousness, which might imply further sympathies toward black identity in the evangelical landscape. Second, the fact that blackness has markedly different meanings for musicians of the three scenes indicates the need to examine the multiple meanings of blackness in the African diaspora. Third, the usefulness of the categories of history, place, and body to ferret out the underlying ethnoracial meanings of different musical scenes suggests the value of applying them to other musical scenes and arenas of expressive culture. Finally, how and why the fact that expressive culture sometimes supports and sometimes dilutes ethnoracial identities among evangelicals may contribute to the improvement of strategy by black evangelical movement activists.

This chapter examines the changing white representations of Indians in the early 19th century in the contexts of the Evangelical movement (missionaries), the conservative anti-revolutionary backlash, Britain's diminished colonial presence in North America, and a more distant relationship with Indians. Writers considered include Wordsworth, Hermans, and Southey.

The introduction first introduces Downtown Church, and presents some of the history of white Evangelical Protestantism and its efforts to engage urban America. Connected to this association with cities is the difficult relationship white Evangelical Protestantism has had with race. Recent efforts by some evangelical leaders have resulted in the Evangelical Racial Change Movement, an attempt at integration of church congregations and racial reconciliation. Downtown Church, while striving to be diverse, has not directly engaged this movement. An in-depth explanation of the methods used in this study to understand the Downtown Church congregation is discussed. The chapter concludes with a presentation and definition of the three main analytic concepts in the book: racialized urban imaginary, managed diversity, and racial utility.

This book presents a biography of George Whitefield that depicts him as the key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity. It examines the role played by Whitefield, together with other evangelical pastors and laypeople, in establishing a new interdenominational religious movement in the eighteenth century. It also looks at their commitement to the gospel of conversion as well as the preaching of revival across Europe and America. The book places Whitefield fully in the dynamic, fractious milieu of this early evangelical movement, while also revealing his obvious failings as a man and minister—including his advocacy of slavery and personal ownership of slaves.