Evangelicals in America can’t stop voting Trump. So it seems. Trump is walking away from the Iowa caucus with a dominating win. He is the leading contender for the GOP Presidential nomination. A few notable exit polls worth mentioning from CNN:
- 68% of GOP Iowa primary voters believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate President
- Of voters who identify as “evangelical” or “born again Christian” 55% voted for Trump
These exit polls aren’t dogma. They’re fluid and can be massively unreliable. Still, they give us an interesting window into a small corner of America that plays a significant role in our electoral process.
What is clear is that evangelical support for Trump hasn’t changed; it is still very strong. And over the weeks/year to come, there will be more talk about evangelicals as a political base.
But not everyone agrees that these “evangelicals” are—well—actually evangelicals.
Now, the political punditry has to cover this group of people commonly called “evangelicals.” And since the 1970’s, when TIME declared 1972 the “year of the evangelical”, there has always been an effort from journalists and pundits to keep track of this certain group of people who shape the electorate in significant ways.
But right behind these electoral takes is a whole raging discourse about how to define evangelicals, with some claiming the pundits get evangelicals wrong, that much of the discussion about “evangelicals” is driven by contempt, and massively out of touch with “real evangelicals” who are theological not political. (Ahem, all theology is political)
You’ll hear defensive claims like “those evangelicals in the polls don’t go to church”others will try to associate criticism of “evangelicals” with anti-Christian contempt. In other words… all of this can be summed up in one raging question: how do we define “evangelical”?
Defining “Evangelical”
But here’s what that question is missing: the label has always been contested, appropriated, and used to discriminate the “real” Christians from the rest. It’s not just how we define evangelical. The definitional attempt to pin down “evangelical identity” as some consistent, traceable identity across history tends to obscure the very live, existential conflict that swirls around the term in every historical period—this conflict is filled with contradiction.
For example, if “evangelical” is a theological term, you won’t really focus on race as you look at history. You try to look at people who shared/confessed these beliefs. Except, in America, even though black Christians shared many of the theological beliefs with white Christians, they weren’t always looped in as “evangelicals” historically. (See Tisby and Silliman on this, cited below)
When white Christians went about building “evangelical institutions” like Moody or Christianity Today or Fuller—black Christians were largely kept out. Why is that? Hold that thought. This is a preview of a much bigger point.
One of my favourite, really broad definitions for “evangelical” comes from Dr. Andrew Walls, of the University of Edinburgh. He says,
Historic evangelicalism is a religion of protest against a Christian society that is not Christian enough…Evangelical Christianity, in a word, assumes Christendom”1
Wall’s definition is insightful. It recognises that, historically, “evangelical” has tended to be a label useful for organizing the “true Christians” among mere cultural Christians.
In a social order where everyone was largely understood as “Christian” simply by virtue of being born, the “evangelical” label arose as a way to identify as a “Christian” Christian, so to speak.
Walls gets us close to seeing “evangelical” historically as always a live question, something fought over, and fought for—because it serves as a banner for identifying one group as the “real” Christians.
But—as we will see—there are more definitions. Mark Noll, a historian of evangelicalism, notes (rightly) that there tends to be a huge gap between what scholars say about “evangelical” identity and what the pundits say.
So let’s do a little primer. Because definitions for “evangelical” are dime a dozen. And they range from theological beliefs to religious practice to cultural and sociological data. Keep in mind this maxim: every definition of evangelicalism will read history and interpret it differently.
Definitions for evangelicals are like lenses. We put one on and tend to see certain things. We swap prescriptions, and we’ll see other things. It’s not just facts, but also value judgments, assigning significance to this event or that person. All this together creates stories that come to us as claims over what is true and good. But what if these stories contradict? Are we just supposed to choose one over the other?
Definitions: Dime-A-Dozen
Here’s some examples of definitions, and how they contradict:
The Bebbington Quadrilateral is the work of historian David Bebbington. It’s the industry standard for what we’ll call a “theological” definition. For Bebbington, an “evangelical” is anyone who believes/emphasizes 4 elements of Christianity. These are:
“Conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and what may be called crucicentrism, a stress on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Together they form a quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of evangelicalism.” 2
But the Quadrilateral has limits. Sure, you can apply it to the record to create a historical account. It might even work as a way for people to “find each other” in terms of shared beliefs.
But Daniel Silliman, the news editor of Christianity Today, has an excellent article that traces the history of the magazine. He rightly points out the limits of the Quadrilateral:
The real meaning of “evangelical” would always be contested. It would be in flux. What is interesting, though, is that the Bebbington quadrilateral does not explain that flux. Focus on a moment in history when evangelicals are defining evangelicalism, drawing lines, and making decisions about who they trust, and the four marks do not explain why they do any of the things they do.3
Silliman defines “evangelical” this way:
Evangelicalism is ultimately an imagined community. The identity is imagined through theological claims, genealogical narratives, and common enemies, but it is organised and structured by the material realities of social connection and communication4
It’s always been a label fought over and appropriated. And so now, what about white evangelicals? Historian Jemar Tisby, PhD raises this crucial point about race in American evangelicalism:
While the question most often raised is, ‘Are black Christians evangelicals?’ the more salient query is, ‘What limits do white evangelicals place on black Christians?’ …Historians must also probe how the intersections of gender and class influenced black Christians in the context of white evangelicalism. Regardless of how one defines “evangelical” or whether black Christians are indeed evangelicals, the answers must include considerations of race as a critical component.5
Defintions are used to organize and yes, filter, the historical record. These definitions produce contradicting stories. It’s not just that one story censors out facts that another includes. It’s that the stories each come to tell about evangelicals are moralising stories, that is, they interpret history, they assign significance to one event, where another story might say “no this was more important”
What I’m saying is that writing history is not just about reporting the facts. There is a moral component involved in telling the story of a particular people. And the conceptual framework of some sort of theological orthodoxy can’t explain everything that happened with American evangelicals.
The Danger of Definitions
There will be many evangelicals who dismiss the evangelical identity at the exit polls and say “ah! but those are not ‘church-going’ evangelicals.”
But it is exactly this conflict over defining “evangelical” which ends up serving anyone who wants to avoid identifying with and dealing with the scandalous, damaging aspects of “evangelical” history in the United States. In other words, re-defining evangelicalism can be a way of defending it. This is called a No True Scotsman fallacy.
To those who say “Trump voters are not church going evangelicals!” I raise you the abuse crisis inside evangelical churches.
The game of defining “evangelical” in a way that shelters a group from accountability and responsibility is sub-theological. No framework of orthodoxy or purported purity is every supposed to suspend the Word of God’s judgment and grace.
We mustn’t confuse identifying with the “evangelical” label as the same as discipleship in the way of Jesus. The definitional identities must not obscure the existential responsibility confronting us today.
But in the name of “orthodoxy” or “purity” the evangelical label can become a self-justifying, man-made shelter that keeps all those who run into it away from an encounter with Jesus Christ.
Opting for definitions that keep our group, our tribe, away from criticism denies what theology is meant to do: criticize the church’s proclamation. And when it comes to “evangelical”– try as we might — there is not and never will be an authorized story of evangelicalism, no authorised definition.
All the moves to defend “evangelical” by defining it theologically aren’t sufficient answers to the question of whether or not our existence is a faithful witness to Jesus Christ. Again, this isn’t about accepting all judgments of evangelicals as valid but rather about refusing to judge insiders as faithful. “Judgment” says Peter, “begins with the household of God.”
So never mind the political punditry who treat “evangelical” as a partisan term. If the concern after exit polls is to rail against pundits and say “you got evangelical wrong!” well — I’d argue the so-called partisan capture of “evangelical” is largely due to the success of a certain sort of evangleicalism in America which has been mobilizing and constructing a political machine for half a century towards this sort of moment in American politics, intentionally and unintentionally.
On Being Born Again, Again
Sometimes I sympathise with historian Dr. Timothy Gloege who points out, “being evangelical means never having to say you’re sorry.” So long as “evangelical” is synonymous with “orthodox” you never have to take criticism seriously, since it always arises from tainted, seemingly contemptuous, heretics-as-pundits.
I do not think “evangelicalism” is at the center of God’s kingdom, of Christianity, or the world. The United States of America is not the birthright of evangelical Christians; God’s economy of salvation is not hanging on evangelicalism. But as someone who comes from these spaces, in criticizing evangelicalism, I criticize myself. In trying to tell the truth about it, I try to live under the Word of truth.
And so if the preferred and prevailing definitions of “evangelical” always seems to cast the “us” as the “righteous” or “authentic” or “orthodox” then the label is really serving as a self-justifying shelter. One we should feel free to abandon and really encounter Jesus Christ.
So let me say this: nothing about the “evangelical” label is inherently necessary to follow in the faith of Jesus Christ.
Try as we might: there is no authorized or conclusive story of evangelicalism. And behind these stories, from pundits and scholars alike, are certain definitions of just who counts as an evangelical, and these all contradict at various points. These contradicting definitions produce stories that contradict.
Instead of definitional conflict, I want to resurface the existential question, which is how do we move forward? How ought we live as those of us who, one way or another, come from or have identified with spaces which have for better or worse been involved in the fight to be known as “evangelical”?
When Jesus told Nicodemus he must be “born again” (a term that is now used in exit polls)—he was calling Nicodemus out of his constructed shelter of national heritage into the community of the Messiah that was the fulfilment of that heritage.
Nicodemus assumed the question was how a faithful, observant Jewish man could find salvation seemingly outside of Israel? But that was to ask the wrong question. For Jesus was not calling him to leave Israel, but to see Israel’s history as fulfilled in its Messiah.
The danger behind the fight to define ‘evangelical’ is that the label can become another man-made shelter, protection from the divine encounter of both judgment and grace.
Identifying as “evangelical” may yet prove to be another very elaborate escape strategy from discipleship. These are shelters Jesus commands us to leave behind if we are, in fact, to be born-again, heirs of His kingdom.
1 Walls, The Missionary Movement, 81-82.
2 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britian: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London, England: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
3 Daniel Silliman, “An Evangelical Is Anyone Who Likes Billy Graham: Defining Evangelicalism with Carl Henry and Networks of Trust.” Church History 90, no. 3 (September 2021): 621–43. 643.
4 Silliman, An Evangelical, 643
5 Tisby, “Are Black Christians Evangelical?” in Evangelicals, 272.
Jared Stacy 