Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500-1950
Recent academic use of the word evangelical in American history has been surprisingly static. Drawing upon scholars of evangelicalism, historians have been tied to an essentialist, or doctrinal, definition of evangelicalism that stretches unbroken from the early eighteenth century to the prese...
| Published in: | Religion and American culture |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
[2016]
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| In: |
Religion and American culture
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
USA
/ Evangelical movement
/ History of ideas 1500-1950
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| Further subjects: | B
Unitarianism
B Unitarian B Universalism B Evangelical B Evangelicalism |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Recent academic use of the word evangelical in American history has been surprisingly static. Drawing upon scholars of evangelicalism, historians have been tied to an essentialist, or doctrinal, definition of evangelicalism that stretches unbroken from the early eighteenth century to the present. Such ahistorical readings, however, obscure a far more interesting and complex reality. This essay argues that from the Protestant Reformation through the early twentieth century, to be evangelical was most often a Protestant-inflected way of being in the world, which at times could have multiple, changing, and contested doctrinal associations. It was a flexible and dynamic idiom, intended to communicate a relative biblical authenticity by those who wielded it. In particular, this essay seeks to recover three overlooked dimensions of the use of the word evangelical: first, the firmly Protestant and even anti-Catholic implication of the term that spanned the history of Protestantism from the 1520s to the twentieth century; second, the relative authenticity, true-Christian usage, which contained within it a strong primitivist impulse with reference to New Testament Christianity; and third, the contested nature of the word, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when evangelical identity supposedly started to become more recognizable. |
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| ISSN: | 1533-8568 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/rac.2016.26.2.184 |