In fact, many of the causes evangelicals consider “liberal” agendas today were started by these nineteenth-century evangelicals. In her book The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior wrote, It was in large part owing to the early evangelicals that the larger society began to see human suffering in a different way—as a result of systemic injustices that could and should be eased…. They therefore set out to abolish the slave trade, educate the poor, improve conditions for laborers, and stem cruelty to animals.[3]
