FOUNDED: Seventeenth century C.E.
RELIGION AS A PERCENTAGE OF WORLD POPULATION: 12 percent

Overview

Evangelicalism is a movement within Christianity that emphasizes reliance on Scripture over tradition and that holds conversion to be the foundation of the life of the believer. The doctrine that Jesus Christ died to atone for the sins of mankind is central to evangelical beliefs. Pentecostalism, a charismatic movement, is usually considered to be a part of evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism originated in the 1600s in the Pietism of Philipp Jakob Spener, a Lutheran pastor in Germany. By the eighteenth century it had spread to England and by the nineteenth century to the United States. Today evangelicalism is a worldwide movement of some 750 million believers.

History

Evangelicalism, which began in the seventeenth century in the Pietism of the Lutheran pastor Philipp Jakob Spener and others, was a response to the formality and perceived rigidity of the...