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I was recently asked this question by an acquaintance, and I believe it may in fact be one of the more important questions Evangelicals can answer today. With fundamentalist Islam looming as a supposed threat and fundamentalist Christians sometimes causing offense with their stringent separation from the world, Evangelicals will want to carefully parse out their differences and commonalities in comparison to the fundamentalist branch of Christianity.

Of course we can’t do all of this without a quick sweep through history.

I could start in any number of places, but I’ll pick up the story in England 1700’s. A group called the Pietists from Europe, mainly Germany, had a profound impact in the 1600’s and 1700’s, prompting Christians to seek out God in personal devotion in addition to public worship. As the Bible became available to people, lay preachers became more common, and the people took greater responsibility for their personal walks with the Lord. In this time a group began to coalesce under the banner of the simple Gospel message the Christ died for sins, rose from the dead, and we can be saved by believing he’s the Savior.

Preachers also spread this ecumenical message in America during the 1700’s, and revivals moved through a variety of congregations, though the ones with lay preachers spread rapidly such as the Methodists. Throughout the 1700 and 1800’s the Evangelical movement emerged as a Gospel-centered group, even certain denominations took up the “Evangelical” qualifier to their names (such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church).

In the late 1800’s theological liberalism took a strong hold in many denominations and removed the supernatural elements from the Bible in the wake of the scientific method. There was great anticipation about the progress of humanity under the Bible’s moral guidance and humanity’s reason until World War I broke out. In the 1920’s a group of theologically conservative Christians worked to hold on to five key fundamentals for Christianity such as the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, and the resurrection. This group set a course of withdrawing from the world as it tried to preserve the truths of scripture. Thus, the Fundamentalists of Christianity formed.

After twenty years of cultural retreat in the interest of preserving truth, a number of Christians, especially in the Northeast section of America in towns such as Boston, began to rediscover the importance of an Evangelical consensus on the truth of the Gospel, much like the consensus in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. Though many laid the groundwork, Billy Graham became the face of this neo-Evangelical movement. Graham simply focused on preaching the Gospel message of salvation; however his son has since founded a relief agency known as Samaritan’s Purse.

It is this neo-Evangelical movement that we know today. Over time many of these neo-Evangelicals entered the political fray under the group known as the moral majority in order to support several issues deemed important for the moral health of America. In the past five to ten years this group has begun to unravel with more moderate and liberal elements emerging in the Evangelical camp.

Though some mistake Evangelicals for Fundamentalists, the two groups have very different approaches to contemporary culture and theology. They both believe in the same God and the same basic elements of the Gospel, but one could never drop the words of a Fundamentalist into the mouth of an Evangelical or vise versa without taking great care. One scholar once quipped that you can tell someone’s an Evangelical if he/she likes Billy Graham. In my experience, this statement is generally true.