Conservative Evangelicalism in Britain

Conservative Evangelicalism is a term used in Britain to describe a theological movement found within Evangelical Protestant Christianity, and is sometimes simply synonymous with Evangelical within the United Kingdom. The term is used more often in the first sense, but conservative evangelicals would themselves tend to use it in the second.

Conservative evangelicals are sometimes called Fundamentalists but typically reject that label and are keen to maintain their distinct identity, which is more Reformed. In this sense, Conservative Evangelicalism can be thought of as being distinct from Liberal Evangelicalism, Open Evangelicalism and Charismatic Evangelicalism. Some conservative evangelical groups oppose women ministers or women preachers in mixed congregations.

By the 1930s, the term "conservative evangelical" was being used in distinction to "liberal evangelical". The points of distinction largely were that while liberal evangelicals "maintain some of the other typical evangelical emphases, do not maintain, and often repudiate, the total reliability of the Bible and usually do not preach substitutionary atonement, even if they stress the cross in a doctrinally undefined way." Movements such as the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement and the Student Christian Movement could be described as Liberal Evangelical, the former organisation glad of the title "Liberal Evangelical". Organisations such as the Bible Churchman's Missionary Society (now Crosslinks) and the Inter-Varsity Fellowship of Evangelicals Unions (now UCCF) were distinctively Conservative Evangelical in the Anglican and university spheres respectively.

The Conservative Evangelical movement was small and as such largely defensive, in part because "In academic circles it was almost universally assumed that a CE view of the Bible was dead." The Keswick Convention, which would later have a very significant role in the shaping of Conservative Evangelicalism in the UK, was a small outpost of Evangelicalism still thoroughly committed to the sufficiency and authority of the Bible.

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