In the late eighteenth century, many American Protestants saw the War for Independence and the freedoms delineated in the Declaration and Constitution as part of a global revolution that would inaugurate worldwide freedom. In the years since, many middle- and upper-class Anglo-American evangelicals have embraced triumphalist social causes—or what evangelical intellectual David Bebbington has broadly termed activism—in the name of moral reform and bringing about the kingdom of God. However noble this impulse might be, it has at times led evangelicals to embrace revolutionary and utopian movements with harmful effects. Evangelical support for such causes in the name of moral and social progress has often proved to be influenced less by Christian morality than by Whiggish idealism.