Evangelical Studies Program

The evangelical movement is a section of Protestantism that is growing. In the United States it has overtaken the mainline churches, and in the majority world it has mushroomed over recent years. Evangelicals, alongside Roman Catholics, are likely to form the great bulk of Christians in the world of the future. Some of the main outlines of the history of the movement since the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century are fairly well known, but there are other aspects that have been little studied. There are fields of American evangelical history such as the evolution of its doctrine of assurance or the movement’s image in literature that remain uncultivated, and some lands where it has put down roots more recently lack thorough academic scrutiny altogether. There is great scope for the development of scholarship on evangelical Christianity.

For many years down to 2014 there existed at Wheaton College, Illinois, an Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. It held a number of international conferences and generated several important collections of essays in the field. The Evangelical Studies Program, under the auspices of the Institute for Studies of Religion, has tried to pick up the torch of the Wheaton agency by promoting the scrutiny of evangelical history and to extend its coverage beyond the confines of the United States.

The need for study is apparent at a time when evangelical identity is under widespread discussion. Authentic evangelicalism is not a political bloc of American voters but an international religious movement emphasizing the Bible, the cross, conversion and activism. That movement, in all its variety, needs to be explained in depth and detail if its identity is to be understood in the contemporary world. All Christian denominations containing evangelicals are within the scope of the Program. The central aim of the Evangelical Studies Program is to promote influential academic research. It achieves that goal by holding conferences, which have so far been held on-line and so have attracted scholars from all over the globe, and by publishing material, whether from conferences or otherwise.

The conference held in 2020 focused on “Evangelicals in Latin America”; in 2021, it dealt with “Evangelicals and Religious Freedom”; a third conference in 2022 took as its subject “Evangelicals and their Past” and a fourth in 2023 addressed “International Evangelicalism.” Volumes from the first and second have been published by Baylor University Press and volumes from the third and fourth are being prepared for publication. Our fifth conference, “Evangelicals and Missions: Studies in the History of the Spread of the Gospel”, is planned for October 2 – October 4, 2024. Speakers include Dana L. Robert (Boston University), Heather J. Sharkey (University of Pennsylvania) and Brian Stanley (University of Edinburgh).

The Program has established a roster of Fellows, making it a global hub for the study of evangelicals. They include George Marsden, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Notre Dame, and Stuart Piggin, Conjoint Associate Professor of History, Macquarie University, Australia. The non-resident Director is David Bebbington, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Stirling, Scotland, U.K. The incoming non-resident Director is John Maiden, Head of Religious Studies and Senior Lecturer at the Open University, Milton Keynes, U.K.