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The evangelical movement in eighteenth-century England, which emphasized a "new birth" in Christ and an active ministry of outreach, was overwhelmingly an Anglican phenomenon. From George Whitefield to biblical commentator Thomas Scott, to John Wesley, who declared his determination to live and die a member of the Church of England, the movement's leading clergy were members of the Established Church.

So, too, were the movement's leading laity, including men like Admiral Barham, the organizer of the British Navy, and the influential Earl of Dartmouth. There were also women like author and educationalist Hannah More, and Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who devoted her considerable private fortune and formidable organizing ability to spreading the revival, especially among the leaders of English society.

When viewed from a twenty-first century perspective, it seems inevitable that the congregations organized by Whitefield would become Independent Calvinist churches and that 80,000 of John Wesley's followers would leave the Church of England in the 1790s. It is easy to lose sight of the movement's Anglican context.

When viewed from the perspective of the 1730s, too, it must have seemed exceedingly improbable that evangelical strength would emerge from within the Church of England. The inheritors of the Puritan tradition, which in America gave birth to the evangelical revivals, were in England to be found primarily in small dissenting churches such as the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Independents (Congregationalists).

The clergy of the Established Church, by contrast, had largely rejected reformed theology, which was widely associated with political, ecclesiastical, and moral anarchy during the civil wars of the 1640s and the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

The dominant theological trends in Anglicanism in the early eighteenth century took two distinct forms.

First, an emphasis on the benevolence of God and the practice of self-conscious moderation (as opposed to religious enthusiasm) and practical virtue on the part of Christians—a program easily evolved into mere moralism.

Second, a rigorous High Churchmanship, stressing the exclusive claims to religious authority of the Established Church and encouraging its followers to a determined pursuit of personal holiness (often most visible in extended periods of self-examination and preparation before receiving Holy Communion). It also emphasized practical charity and good works.

The latter could be seen at its most intense in the religious societies that grew popular after 1700. These were small groups usually made up of young men meeting under clerical supervision for mutual encouragement in the practice of piety—like the Holy Club, established by John and Charles Wesley in Oxford.

It was against this apparently unpromising background that a number of Anglican clergy, starting in the 1730s, began to articulate an experience of conversion (the "new birth"). Their routes to this experience were varied. For John Wesley, whose heart was famously "strangely warmed" while attending a meeting of a religious society, a rigorous High Church piety that stirred a desire for personal holiness, which it apparently failed to satisfy, seems to have been a major factor.

Thomas Scott, a close friend and neighbor of John Newton, converted gradually over a period of at least two years in the mid 1770s. It was dissatisfaction with the rationalist tendencies of Anglican moderation and with his own pastoral laxity as curate that provided the starting point.

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