Evangelicalism is one of the most influential movements in modern Christian history, and one of the most fragile.

In this opening episode of the Evangelicalism series, I lay out the core pattern that keeps repeating: evangelicalism is beautiful and broken, because its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses are often the same thing.

We trace the instincts that made evangelicalism travel, scale, and “work”, revival urgency, conversion culture, activism, biblicism, and why those same instincts can also produce emotional strain, defensiveness, division, and constant reinvention.

This is not a hit piece. It’s an attempt to understand the movement properly, historically, so we can talk honestly about its future.

Victorian ritualism is often reduced to aesthetics, controversy, or ecclesiastical tribalism. But in the places that mattered most — the slums, the docklands, the overcrowded industrial parishes — it was something far more serious.

This episode opens a 12-part series on 19th-century Anglican ritualism by asking a harder question: what kind of Christianity can actually survive under pressure?

Through the world of the slum priests, we explore ritualism not as taste or nostalgia, but as a claim about the nature of Christian life itself. Was it a system of dignity that offered beauty, structure, and endurance to the poor? Or was it a form of control that built institutions around power and discipline? Often, it was both.

At its heart, ritualism insisted that Christianity has a shape — that faith is embodied, structured, practised, and sustained through time. In parishes marked by poverty, disease, instability, and conflict, that claim was tested daily.

This is not a romantic defence, nor is it a takedown. It is an attempt to understand what these priests thought they were building, what it produced, and why it provoked such intense backlash.

Because the deeper question is not only Victorian.

What kind of Christianity are we building now?

And will it hold under pressure?

What is an evangelical, actually?

In this episode I start where most modern discussions begin: David Bebbington’s Quadrilateral. Four markers that scholars use again and again to describe evangelical identity:

1. Conversionism (lives need to be changed)
2. Activism (the gospel expressed in action)
3. Biblicism (a high regard for Scripture)
4. Crucicentrism (the cross at the centre)

But the point isn’t just listing them. The point is asking what this definition explains, what it hides, and why it’s been so persuasive for so long.

We’ll also keep one question in view the whole time: is evangelicalism a distinct movement, or have we simply described normal Christianity in a particularly Protestant key?

This is the foundation stone for the rest of the series.