If you search for “define evangelical” in the 18 years worth of material stored here at GetReligion you will find about four screens worth of information. Here’s what that looks like in a Google search.
Believe it or not, this was a hot topic before the advent of Orange Man Bad and the dreaded “81% of White evangelicals” mantra.
Debates about the meaning of the church-history term “evangelical” are so old that I once asked the Rev. Billy Graham for his take. Here’s some information about his answer, drawn from this “On Religion” column: “Define 'evangelical' – please.”
… You might assume that the world's most famous evangelist has an easy answer for this tricky political question: "What does the word 'evangelical' mean?" If you assumed this, you would be wrong. In fact, Graham once bounced that question right back at me.
"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."
Wait a minute, I said. If Billy Graham doesn't know what "evangelical" means, then who does? Graham agreed that this is a problem for journalists and historians. One man's "evangelical" is another's "fundamentalist."
That leads us to the topic of this quick, and rather rare, Monday “think piece” (I’m traveling right now and rather unplugged, so I wrote this several days ago).
Thus, at the top of this post you will see a video feature from The Gospel Coalition in which two academics — political scientist Ryan Burge ( a GetReligion contributor) and ethicist-apologist Andrew Walker — debate this topic: “Is ‘Evangelical’ a Political or Theological identity?” (Careful readers may have noticed that, a few lines earlier, I called it a “church-history term” and I’m sticking to that.)
I will let Burge and Walker speak for themselves.
However, before signing off, let me add yet another voice to this discussion — historian Mark Noll. I wrote a 2017 post about his views on this subject — “Thinking about that whole 'evangelical' definition thing, with historian Mark Noll” — which opened by noting an oddity or two in a famous Time magazine cover story that attempted to list the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.”
As it turned out, a few of the people on the list were not, in fact, evangelicals — according to a definition based on doctrine and history. One was then U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, a Roman Catholic. When I called Time to ask about this, I ended up talking with a publicist who opined that Santorum “voted evangelical.”
Anyway, the student newspaper at Wheaton College once did a Q&A with Noll that is worth reading. Click here to find the full text for that.
But here is the material in that feature linked to this “think piece.”
C: Your banner book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” has, of course, secured you a place in modern history of evangelicalism in America. Do you think that the definition of evangelicalism is changing or has changed, since you wrote your famous book in 1994?
M: I think people your age are going to have to answer that question. Because I think the real problem is trying to define evangelical in any simple way. The things that David Bebbington identified, that others have used and I’ve used — cross, Bible, conversion, activity in the world — these all characterize broadly speaking “evangelical” people. I don’t actually think “evangelicalism” exists. There are evangelical institutions, evangelical movements, evangelical people, evangelical emphases. But you say, what’s the institutional or organizational continuity? And there just isn’t any. So does the word mean anything? If when people hear “evangelical” they think of something political first, then the serious meaning of the word is gone.
Wait, there is more.
What, pray tell, does the term “evangelical" have to do with support for one Donald Trump?
M: I think what’s called “evangelical support for Trump” had to do with the pro-life position of the Republican party, it had to do with a lot of antagonism against some of the cultural steps taken by the Obama administration. It certainly had to do with the memory of Bill Clinton’s immorality in the White House, and a lot of white evangelicals were concerned about economics. ... I do think we have increasing numbers of Christian academics who would have a much more sophisticated approach to political life than, “I’m angry at Hillary so I’m voting for Trump.” But I’m worried about the Christian populace at large listening all the time to their media go-to and never being concerned about folks who are trying to see things more broadly.
That’s all for now.
Enjoy the video and think, carefully, about what Noll had to say.