information:extraction
20th century

After 1910 the Fundamentalist movement dominated Evangelicalism in the early part of the 20th century; the Fundamentalists rejected liberal theology and emphasized the inerrancy of the Scriptures.

Following the 1904–1905 Welsh revival, the Azusa Street Revival in 1906 began the spread of Pentecostalism in North America.

The 20th century also marked by the emergence of the televangelism. Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the megachurch Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, used radio in the 1920s to reach a wider audience.

After the Scopes trial in 1925, Christian Century wrote of "Vanishing Fundamentalism". In 1929 Princeton University, once the bastion of conservative theology, added several modernists to its faculty, resulting in the departure of J. Gresham Machen and a split in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

Evangelicalism began to reassert itself in the second half of the 1930s. One factor was the advent of the radio as a means of mass communication. When began his "Old Fashioned Revival Hour" on October 3, 1937, he sought to avoid the contentious issues that had caused fundamentalists to be characterized as narrow.

One hundred forty-seven representatives from thirty-four denominations met from April 7 through 9, 1942, in St. Louis, Missouri, for a "National Conference for United Action among Evangelicals." The next year six hundred representatives in Chicago established the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) with Harold Ockenga as its first president. The NAE was partly a reaction to the founding of the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) under the leadership of the fundamentalist Carl McIntire. The ACCC in turn had been founded to counter the influence of the Federal Council of Churches (later merged into the National Council of Churches), which fundamentalists saw as increasingly embracing modernism in its ecumenism. Those who established the NAE had come to view the name fundamentalist as "an embarrassment instead of a badge of honor."

Evangelical revivalist radio preachers organized themselves in the National Religious Broadcasters in 1944 in order to regulate their activity.

With the founding of the NAE, American Protestantism was divided into three large groups — the fundamentalists, the modernists, and the new evangelicals, who sought to position themselves between the other two. In 1947 Harold Ockenga coined the term neo-evangelicalism to identify a movement distinct from fundamentalism. The neo-evangelicals had three broad characteristics that distinguished them from the conservative fundamentalism of the ACCC:

Each of these characteristics took concrete shape by the mid-1950s. In 1947 Carl F. H. Henry 's book The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism called on evangelicals to engage in addressing social concerns:

t remains true that the evangelical, in the very proportion that the culture in which he lives is not actually Christian, must unite with non-evangelicals for social betterment if it is to be achieved at all, simply because the evangelical forces do not predominate. To say that evangelicalism should not voice its convictions in a non-evangelical environment is simply to rob evangelicalism of its missionary vision.

In the same year Fuller Theological Seminary was established with Ockenga as its president and Henry as the head of its theology department.

The strongest impetus, however, was the development of the work of Billy Graham. In 1951, with producer Dick Ross, he founded the film production company World Wide Pictures. Graham had begun his career with the support of McIntire and fellow conservatives Bob Jones Sr. and John R. Rice. However, in broadening the reach of his London crusade of 1954, he accepted the support of denominations that those men disapproved of. When he went even further in his 1957 New York crusade, conservatives strongly condemned him and withdrew their support. According to William Martin:

The New York crusade did not cause the division between the old Fundamentalists and the New Evangelicals; that had been signaled by the nearly simultaneous founding of the NAE and McIntire's American Council of Christian Churches 15 years earlier. But it did provide an event around which the two groups were forced to define themselves.

A fourth development—the founding of Christianity Today (CT) with Henry as its first editor—was strategic in giving neo-evangelicals a platform to promote their views and in positioning them between the fundamentalists and modernists. In a letter to Harold Lindsell, Graham said that CT would:

plant the evangelical flag in the middle of the road, taking a conservative theological position but a definite liberal approach to social problems. It would combine the best in liberalism and the best in fundamentalism without compromising theologically.

The postwar period also saw growth of the ecumenical movement and the founding of the World Council of Churches, which the Evangelical community generally regarded with suspicion.

In the United Kingdom, John Stott (1921–2011) and Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) emerged as key leaders in Evangelical Christianity.

The charismatic movement began in the 1960s and resulted in the introduction of Pentecostal theology and practice into many mainline denominations. New charismatic groups such as the Association of Vineyard Churches and Newfrontiers trace their roots to this period (see also British New Church Movement).

The closing years of the 20th century saw controversial postmodern influences entering some parts of Evangelicalism, particularly with the emerging church movement. Also controversial is the relationship between spiritualism and contemporary military metaphors and practices animating many branches of Christianity but especially relevant in the sphere of Evangelicalism. Spiritual warfare is the latest iteration in a long-standing partnership between religious organization and militarization, two spheres that are rarely considered together, although aggressive forms of prayer have long been used to further the aims of expanding Evangelical influence. Major moments of increased political militarization have occurred concurrently with the growth of prominence of militaristic imagery in evangelical communities. This paradigmatic language, paired with an increasing reliance on sociological and academic research to bolster militarized sensibility, serves to illustrate the violent ethos that effectively underscores militarized forms of evangelical prayer.