The debate over what evangelicalism ‘is’ was not resolved in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and, in fact, evangelicalism remains a contested category within Christianity and the wider culture. The fact that nearly eighty percent of American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, despite the fact that in both his personal and professional lives he ostensibly stood for ideals anathema to Christian values, is evidence that we still don't have a very good grip on the essential character of evangelicalism or how it functions more broadly. Likewise, as mainline protestant denominations – which now includes the United Methodist Church – grapple with how to respond to larger social changes (most notably the acceptance of LBGTQ marriage), the space of evangelicalism itself has once more become one of contestation and debate. On the one hand, self-described ‘evangelicals’ within these mainline denominations have anointed themselves the protectors of ‘traditional’ biblical values, while some on the other side have pushed back against the appropriation of the term evangelical – arguing that evangelicalism is a matter of the heart and not social policy. LBGTQ Christians, like the female preachers of the eighteenth century, should be judged not by their outward characteristics but by their commitment to Christ and their experience of him in their everyday lives.

What I have suggested in this book is that at least part of the problem can be located in how we define and talk about evangelicalism – primarily as a set of beliefs within Christianity – and that instead it is more productive to think about evangelicalism as a set of discursive practices that can be called into service at various times and for a multitude of purposes. The Greek root word of evangelical, ‘evangel’, literally means ‘good news’ – it is a message that requires mediation, first to the heart of the individual believer and then more broadly through various means of mediation. By locating our discussion of evangelicalism historically and in terms of how evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries interacted with culture, we can thus use historical distance to critically assess how evangelical modes of mediation operate and consider their broader cultural impact.