Anglican theologian Scott McKnight thinks the word “evangelical” is spoiled. He said: “It’s time to bury the word ‘evangelical.’” The issue, as McKnight sees it, is: “The word ‘evangelical’ now means Trump-voter.” He suggests that if this hijacking of the term evangelical embarrasses you, quit calling yourself one. “When you are asked to check a box, don’t check Evangelical. Check another one.”
Scott McKnight shared these thoughts in his blog article for the Jesus Creed, “Bury the Word ‘Evangelical.’” He pointed out where a student ministry, known as the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship for more than eighty years, changed its name to the Princeton Christian Fellowship in 2017 because of the baggage that comes with the term evangelical. The organization’s director said: “There is a growing recognition that the term evangelical is increasingly either confusing, or unknown, or misunderstood to students.”
He said being evangelical in the US now means (supposedly) conservative in politics and therefore someone who votes Republican. This sense, he believes, is not going away and he suggests walking away and calling yourself something else. What he despises about Christianity in the US is how it has aligned with a political party: mainliners with the Democrats and Evangelicals with Republicans. “Let the rest of us call ourselves Christians.” Pointing to just one example of this tendency, we see where Allen Frances, author of Twilight of American Sanity, A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump, has regularly tweeted comments like the following: “”Jesus Christ would be disgusted by the hypocrisy of evangelical leaders defending anti-Christ Trump.”
While there is some legitimacy to McKnight’s claims—81% of self-identified evangelicals did vote for Trump in 2016—that isn’t the whole truth. The Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2016 presidential vote also noted that 58% of non-evangelical Protestants (Protestant/other Christians) and 52% of Catholics (60% of white Catholics) voted for Trump. Even 61% of Mormons voted for Trump. “Trump’s strong support among white Catholics propelled him to a 7-point edge among Catholics overall (52% to 45%) despite the fact that Hispanic Catholics backed Clinton over Trump by a 41-point margin (67% to 26%).”
While earlier in the campaign some pundits and others questioned whether the thrice-married Trump would earn the bulk of white evangelical support, fully eight-in-ten self-identified white, born-again/evangelical Christians say they voted for Trump, while just 16% voted for Clinton. Trump’s 65-percentage-point margin of victory among voters in this group – which includes self-described Protestants, as well as Catholics, Mormons and others – matched or exceeded the victory margins of George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
In an opinion piece written for The Washington Post, “The Trump Evangelicals Have Lost Their Gag Reflex,” Michael Gerson noted that after Watergate broke, a chastened Billy Graham, who had been a golfing buddy and spiritual advisor to Richard Nixon, warned that an evangelist should be careful not “to identify the Gospel with any one particular political program or culture,” and then added, “this has been my own danger.” Gerson singled out several evangelical leaders who have been publically supportive of President Trump (including Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son), saying:
Trump’s court evangelicals have become active participants in the moral deregulation of our political life. Never mind whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute. Some evangelicals are busy erasing bright lines and destroying moral landmarks. In the process, they are associating evangelicalism with bigotry, selfishness and deception. They are playing a grubby political game for the highest of stakes: the reputation of their faith.
Christian historian George Marsden, who wrote Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and The Rise of Evangelicalism, suggested we stop thinking of evangelicalism as if it were one thing and started thinking about its diversities. He said what we call “evangelicalism” is made up of a number of churches and organizations from around the world “that are mostly disconnected with each other,” even though they share a number of common features. He wondered what would happen if we started by recognizing this fundamental diversity within evangelicalism and thought about it “in the light of its many majority world manifestations, instead of first through an American lens?”
We need to first remind ourselves and others that assigning the term “evangelical” just to white Americans, as the pollsters typically do, is equivalent to the fallacy we would be committing if we assigned the term “mammal” just to house cats. “Evangelical” for the pollsters becomes mostly an older-stock white ethno-religious political category of people who have been locked into voting overwhelmingly Republican for a long time.
Marsden suggested evangelicalism had “a huge mind/body problem.” Whatever the vigor of “evangelical” scholarship was, “only a tiny part of the body is listening.” Applying a biological analogy, he said it is not really news that most species of American evangelicals have been “shaped by populist trends and have been largely anti-intellectual and susceptible to pseudo-intellectual theories.” Yet he sees where some species of evangelical churches and their schools have the potential to be “important leavening influences.”
He pointed out where several evangelical seminaries are turning out thoughtful pastors. “And quite a few ‘evangelical’ churches that are not anti-intellectual, especially among the Reformed, are flourishing.” Some of these churches have impressive multicultural urban ministries that don’t fit the “white evangelical” stereotype. Many American “evangelical” seminaries are centers for international diversity.
It may well be prudent for the time being for non-Trump American Christians, including most Christian scholars, to distance themselves from any identification as “evangelical” in public. The term has never been that widely used as a primary self-identification.Certainly the word “evangelical” is still useful historically to help describe a huge set of historical phenomena and the remarkable fact that they can be so diverse yet hold certain features in common. It at least seems safe to predict that long after Trump is gone, if the human species survives, many varieties of what are now called “evangelical” Christians will still be flourishing. And some of these will be flourishing even more—especially I would hope by being kept closer to the mainstream of the Christian heritage and all that implies in practice—if the faithful scholars among them do not lose heart.
Within an article reflecting on the five-volume “History of Evangelicalism Series,” of which he was a coeditor, Mark Noll had a more nuanced view on the state of modern evangelicalism. Noting the two-pronged sense discussed above, Noll thought the evangelical political view was too shortsighted and the scholarly sense too ambiguous. A longer historical view and a wider international view were needed. “To say the least, the series reveals extreme diversity among Protestant Christians who called themselves evangelicals or who have been so regarded by historical consensus. Yet commonalities of not only belief and practice, but also sentiment and instinct, are often as obvious as the diversity.”
The other coeditor of “History of Evangelicalism Series,” David Bebbington, in 1989 proposed four emphases of evangelicalism: conversion, biblicism, crucicentrism and activism, that have been widely referenced as a succinct definition of evangelicalism. Conversion meant a belief that lives needed to be changed, while biblicism was the “belief that all spiritual truth was to be found in its pages.” Activism meant that all believers, especially the laity, were to live their lives in service to God—especially in sharing the Christian message. Crucicentrism referred to “the conviction that Christ’s death on the cross provided atonement for sin and reconciliation between sinful humanity and a holy God.”
From the beginning, parties that historians have called “liberal evangelical” and “conservative evangelical” were able to agree between themselves on the centrality of Scripture, the indispensability of the New Birth, and the imperative to live out the faith actively. Increasingly in the twentieth century, by contrast, that cooperation declined. “Liberal evangelicals” appeared increasingly as only the moderate faction among mainline or modernist Protestants; “conservative evangelicals” faced rising demand within their own ranks to “separate” completely from the world. The result narrowed the range of possibilities that evangelicals had once pursued among themselves.The Protestant or Protestant-like forms of Christianity that are expanding so rapidly in Africa, China, and Latin America are not concerned with the problems of nominal religion or the threat to Christianity of Enlightenment rationality, but with poverty, disease, oppression, and demonic forces. The Christian gospel confronting these enemies bears some resemblance to the message proclaimed by George Whitefield, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, or Billy Graham. Yet the cultural contexts in which these battles occur are also very different from those in which generations of English-speaking evangelicals proclaimed the gospel message.
In Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, George Marsden said modern evangelicals were any Christians traditional enough to affirm the basic beliefs of the old nineteenth century consensus. “The essential evangelical beliefs include: 1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, 2) the real historical character of God’s saving work recorded in Scripture, 3) salvation to eternal life based on the redemptive work of Christ, 4) the importance of evangelism and missions and 5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life.”
By this account evangelicalism includes striking diversities: holiness churches, pentecostals, traditionalist Methodists, all sorts of Baptists, Presbyterians, black churches in all these traditions, fundalmentalists, pietist groups, Reformed and Lutheran confessionalists, Anabaptists such as Mennonites, churches of Christ, Christians and some Episcopalians, to name only the most prominent types.
The changing shape of global Christianity helps to put the American debates over evangelicalism into a broader context. Citing data from the 2001 edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, Mark Noll noted while there were 210 million evangelical Christians worldwide, only 64 million lived in Europe or North America. Another 510 million Christians were Pentecostal, Neo-Pentecostal or Charismatic, with only 116 million in Europe or North America. There is an increasingly diverse, but recognizable worldwide network of shared religious convictions. This indicates, “that the politics and preoccupations of the contemporary American media should not be allowed to dictate what “evangelical” means.”
Recent American preoccupations are missing the most important question about evangelicals in contemporary history. That question asks how evangelicals of British and American heritage, however defined, will participate in the rapid changes now taking place in Christianity throughout the world.
