I was away from computer the last few days. I came home to the creek running at Grandma’s. The ranchers have the water rights, so they redirect the water in the summer. They just decided to let it flow again.

I found my computer in the back of the truck bed this morning. The hat shop I’m working at lets me use this truck when they’re not in town. I rested my computer on the side wall when I was packing the car up last night. I’m just glad it didn’t get thrown off altogether. It did go through the rain, but it started up this morning.

Main differences in the Christian faith

I went to an evangelical church for the first time this past Sunday. I’m fascinated by the evangelical movement. They’re really the Christians that do big stuff. The ones using social media, having lights, running political campaigns, and using 12-piece bands for service. They adopt modern practices in a way that the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and even Baptists don’t.

Most of the Christians in the United States are Protestants. Which is one of three sects of Christianity. How did we get three sects? Well, the fundamental difference lies in their beliefs about the Bible.

When Christianity first spread, it was united under the Catholic Church, which held that both Scripture and Church tradition carried divine authority, but that the church carries more. In the 11th century, the Orthodox Church split away in what’s called the Great Schism, rejecting papal supremacy and keeping to its own ancient liturgies and councils (they use a lot of ritual and ceremony).

Then in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation broke from Catholicism altogether, insisting the Bible alone—sola scriptura—was the highest authority, not church hierarchy.

That’s why today we have Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants: three streams flowing from the same source, each with a different answer to the question of what God’s word really means. Fundamentally, Protestants believe the Bible is the word of God. Catholics and Orthodox put the church first, not the text. Recognizing that the church has hierarchy over the Bible. This is a really good video on it if you want an EIL5.

Evangelicalism

If you live in the US, you’ve encountered evangelical Christians, or even just evangelical media, or culture. They’ve been one of the biggest influences on culture. However, the Evangelicalism we see today didn’t originate in the U.S. It’s the offspring of a restless Europe.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Protestant Reformation cracked open the Catholic church’s authority. Out of that came streams that we still see today, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Puritans. Protestants insist that faith is personal, scripture matters, and you don’t need a priest to stand between you and God. That DNA moved into what we look at as pure evangelical: direct, heartfelt, stripped-down access to the Divine.

By the early 1700s, England was in a religious funk (formal, stiff, moral but not alive). Enter John Wesley and the Methodists, George Whitefield the preacher with ‘lungs of thunder’, the Pietists in Germany: all of them saying, faith has to be felt, not just recited. That combination of revival fervor, hymn-singing, and a deep focus on conversion, being “born again”, is what becomes recognizable as evangelical Christianity.

Now, fast forward to America.

Colonial America was already seeded with Puritans and dissenting Protestants fleeing Europe’s wars of religion. When they got here, they laid a foundation: Bible as ultimate authority, community covenants, and suspicion of Catholic hierarchy. But, the movement takes off during the First Great Awakening (1730s–40s): A time of spiritual revival in the newly formed 13 colonies.

During this time, individuals like Whitefield, the English Anglican who was one of the original founders of the Methodist faith, sails across the Atlantic and preaches to massive outdoor crowds. Jonathan Edwards delivers “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Suddenly, sleepy colonial churches are lit up with revival.

And ‘revival’, if you haven’t heard that term before, is about a collective spiritual re-awakening. A season when faith feels urgent again, when people gather in droves to repent, weep, sing, and testify that God is here. It’s less about doctrine and more about experience, about shaking off religious routine or cultural happening and feeling the presence of God.

I would argue that we’re actually in a new time of revival here in the United States. One we can see clearly when we review the past.

Some have been calling it “awakening” or “spiritual awakening“, but either way, we’ve seen huge numbers of young people return to direct experiences with God, come back to Christianity, or simply revive some form of spiritual life (even your yoga routine is part of this).

America, for spacious skies

The Evangelical movement ultimately swept the 13 colonies during that First Awakening, and the revival was even said to have increased the number of African slaves and free blacks who were exposed to (and subsequently converted to) Christianity. It was all about bringing everyone, race, color, or creed, into relationship with God. Years later, we can still see the impact of that revival: In 2021, two-thirds of Black Americans (66%) were Protestant.

And as America expanded west, evangelicals moved with it. Circuit-riding preachers, revival meetings, and hymns sung under open skies made the movement the spiritual heartbeat of the frontier. It was democratic, accessible—anyone could be “born again.” That sense of immediacy carried power: it shaped abolition movements, women’s organizing, and later the Social Gospel, the civil and social movement that applied Christian ethics to social problems of the time. Evangelicalism has always had this activist identity: an arm toward radical social justice.

And with that, evangelicalism came as a grassroots religion. It thrived in tents, fields, homes, not just stone churches. I saw a group of evangelical Christians singing at a lake spot the other day. The movement is part of the frontier. Always moving westward, hungry for spiritual fire to match the physical wilderness.

But by the time of the Second Great Awakening (early 1800s), it was less about the evangelical revival. What did remain though was the evangelical style of camp meetings, altar calls, and hymn-singing. This was now America’s dominant religious culture.

Evangelicalism and politics

By the 20th century, evangelicalism fractured. The early “fundamentalists” fought to hold the line against modernism and science (the territory of the Scopes “Monkey Trial”). But after WWII, Billy Graham, an evangelical civil rights activist (I can’t believe the resemblance to Charlie Kirk), emerged with a gentler face, mass crusades, and stadiums full of ordinary Americans. Evangelicalism started to feel like mainstream America. Faith meets consumer culture, television, and the suburbs.

Then, in the late 1970s and 80s, evangelicalism fuses with politics in a new way. The Moral Majority, Reagan, the Religious Right. Suddenly, being an evangelical is tied to being “family values,” anti-abortion, and pro-American exceptionalism. This is where the movement becomes a voting bloc, not just a revival flame. Some say this politicization hollowed out the spiritual core; others see it as faithful resistance to cultural decline.

However, evangelicalism in the U.S. today remains a movement that is enduring, shaped by its history of revival fires, frontier expansion, cultural dominance, and political entanglement. It still commands huge numbers, again, think: megachurches, Christian media, and political influence. What began as a radical insistence on personal encounter with God has, over time, become a pillar of American identity. Remaining in the tension between its roots in heartfelt revival and its reputation as a political machine.

And so when we look at evangelicalism today, it was never just a religious movement—it was an American cultural one. It came here with restless Europeans, caught fire in revivals, galloped west with preachers on horseback, and settled into the suburbs with television and mass culture. Along the way, it shaped politics, justice movements, and even the way Americans understand freedom itself.

That’s why it still matters today: evangelicalism has always mirrored a piece of the soul of this country. Its hunger for immediacy, for a felt experience with God, its tension between justice and control, its marriage of faith and frontier. Whether you love it, fear it, or are just fascinated by it, like me, evangelicalism is one of the clearest windows we have into the American story.

Love,
Val

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