Wilberforce / Evangelicalism

William Wilberforce was an advocate of evangelical Christianity. Evangelicalism was a movement in modern Anglo-American Protestantism. Wilberforce and his associates contributed greatly to education for the poor, the founding of the Church Missionary Society (1798) and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1803), the institution of the British ban on slave trading (1807), and the abolition of slavery (1833) in British territories. Protestantism rejected the authority of the pope and in emphasizing instead the authority of the Bible and the importance of individual faith.