In America, the most visible evangelical denominations are Baptist, especially the Southern Baptists, which is by far the largest Protestant denomination, with nearly 19 million adherents. The only other American religious group to exceed 10 million members is the United Methodists, which is much larger than any other relatively liberal church, with 11 million believers. More or less tied for third place among American religious communities are Jewish people and Evangelical (liberal) Lutherans, with over five million adherents each.

While English evangelists Wesley and Whitefield, and American Presbyterian intellectual Jonathan Edwards were the spiritual icons of American Revolution-era evangelicalism, the subsequent awakenings as well as the current evangelical movement are seen primarily as revolving around spiritual leaders like Billy Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and others. All but Dobson are Southern Baptist, and all of them are influential in many other churches and institutions as well.

Billy Graham (b. 1918)

Billy Graham has been the most widely recognized religious leader in the United States since at least 1950, and has been one of the Gallup Poll's “ten most admired men” in the world forty-seven times since 1955, including forty consecutive citations, more than any other world figure, making him the most admired individual by Americans overall for the past four decades.

He was ordained in 1939 in the Southern Baptist Church and received his degree from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1943. He pastored a Baptist church in Illinois for several years before joining the staff of Youth for Christ as an evangelist, later founding the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in Minneapolis.

Though he began his ministry with messages often characterized as having strong politically conservative implications, criticism of Graham's ministry has come mostly from conservative voices, usually self-identified as fundamentalists to Graham's right, like the late Carl McIntire and, earlier in his ministry, Jerry Falwell. Their main complaint has been regarding the inclusiveness of his crusades, which he has consistently insisted be supported by citywide clergy and church associations, regardless of the orthodoxy of the ministers or their churches.

Graham doesn't respond to such critics, but those who interpret his actions favorably seem satisfied that in the long run his policy has enabled the Gospel to be preached to thousands who wouldn't have been in his audience if he were less inclusive, and that the net effect of his ministry has been strengthening the conservative and evangelical churches, while the liberal ones represented on the dais have consistently experienced membership declines.

A more general criticism has been that most of the commitments to Christ in his crusades don't seem to stick, and, despite his success at reaching probably more people in live appearances than any other preacher in history, no widespread revival comparable to the Great Awakening has taken place during his decades of active ministry (history may eventually dispute this claim).

Through his publishing, radio and television ministries, and his being instrumental in the founding of Christianity Today (arguably the only socially significant periodical in the United States with a clearly identifiable religious position), Graham undoubtedly gets major credit for the rise of evangelicalism to its current prominence.

Pat Robertson (b. 1930)

The son of a longtime United States congressman and senator from Virginia, after graduating magna cum laude with his Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington and Lee in 1950, Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson served as the assistant adjutant of the First Marine Division in combat in Korea. He was promoted to first lieutenant in 1952 upon returning to the United States. Robertson received a J.D. from Yale University Law School in 1955 and a Master of Divinity from New York Theological Seminary in 1959.

Robertson hosts a television program called The 700 Club. Approximately half of this program is devoted to reporting and interpreting current events from Robertson's and his other hosts' perspectives.

Though detractors call Robertson a “televangelist,” he prefers to be considered a “religious broadcaster, educator, religious leader, businessman, author, and philanthropist” as founder and chairman of CBN Inc., founder of International Family Entertainment, Inc., and because of his involvement with Regent University, Operation Blessing International Relief and Development Corporation, American Center for Law and Justice, The Flying Hospital, Inc., and several other enterprises. He was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1961 but surrendered his credential to run for president in 1986. He is also a figure in the charismatic movement by virtue of the word of knowledge healings and other miracles that are a regular feature of The 700 Club.

The International Family Entertainment company he founded developed the cable Family Channel and branched out into entertainment program production before he sold it to Fox Kids for $1.9billion. The Family Channel was subsequently acquired by Disney's American Broadcasting Company. Now it is billed as ABC Family Network and is still contractually bound to carry The 700 Club as part of the terms of sale.

The American Center for Law and Justice that Robertson launched as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union has been in the forefront of legal actions defending Christian expression in the public square, especially public schools. In his 1986 campaign for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, he polled second in the early Iowa caucuses of that campaign, which was eventually won by George H. W. Bush, who was given Robertson's support in the party's national convention and subsequently won the office.

After Robertson's presidential campaign, he founded the Christian Coalition to continue supporting conservative political goals. It was a strong force in George W. H. Bush's second, failing campaign, but Robertson left the Coalition in 2001, turning leadership over to Ralph Reed who, in turn, left it in the hands of Roberta Combs.

Though often criticized in the mainstream press for remarks suggesting that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were God's retribution for American decadence, and later calling for the assassination of Venezuela's anti-American President Hugo Chavez, his constant exposure to a sizable audience and his generally erudite apologetics for his views tend to keep him one of the most influential American evangelicals.

Jerry Falwell (b. 1933)

A Lynchburg, Virginia, pastor and founder of the now-defunct Moral Majority (1979–1989), Jerry Lamon Falwell was one of the country's first pastors of what is called a megachurch. In Falwell's case, Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg has grown from a starting core of thirty-five adults in a temporary location in 1956 to a congregation of 24,000 in a city of 65,000. For some decades, the most visible proponent of self-described fundamentalist evangelicalism in the United States, and a member of the Bible Baptist Fellowship International, he changed his membership to the more moderate Southern Baptist Convention.

Voted one of the ten most admired men in America in a Good Housekeeping poll, Falwell was named one of the twenty-five most influential people in America in U.S. News & World Report in 1983, and has been featured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek. His Moral Majority claims to have been the first conservative organization labeled as the Christian right by the media, and to have started the campaign to elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.

James Dobson (b. 1936)

An associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine for fourteen years, James Dobson also spent seventeen years in the division of child development and medical genetics while on the staff of the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles before launching his Christian psychology radio program, Focus on the Family.

His book on child discipline, Dare to Discipline, got widespread media attention for its approval of moderate spanking of children under age eight. The ministry, begun as a twenty-five-minute weekly discussion radio program in 1977 from Arcadia, California, has been relocated to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and employs some 1,300 staff members. Its public policy arm, the Family Research Council, is considered a major influence on government policies, extending to the White House.

Peale and Schuler

In the last half century, the only other members of the American Protestant clergy to become household names to any extent approaching the ones previously mentioned have been the late Norman Vincent Peale of New York City, and Robert Schuler of Garden Grove, California. Both were ordained in the Reformed Church in America, possibly the closest thing to a moderate denomination in the United States, if that is taken to mean midway between theologically liberal and conservative. Though both have described their denomination as similar to Methodism, in theology it is closer to the Presbyterian churches, with a Calvinist background. But socially, or socio-politically, it is very close to the United Methodists, who have many individual conservative evangelicals (like American Family Association founder and head Donald Wildmon) but is controlled by a liberal denominational establishment. Peale and Schuler carefully sidestepped making statements that could be called over the line from orthodoxy, but the emphases of their preaching and books have been more psychological, relational, and inclusive than evangelistic, and are more for believers than aimed at converting non-Christians.