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What Is an Evangelical?

What Is an Evangelical?

Last updated on: March 13, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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What Is an Evangelical? 2025-03-09T12:23:48-04:00 Gene Veith

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The Religious Landscape Survey that we’ve been discussing this week says that 23% of Americans identify as “evangelicals,” amounting to some 78 million Americans, making that category the largest grouping of Christians in America.

But that’s misleading. There is no evangelical church, as such. Pew researchers working on the RLS sorted the various kinds of Protestant into “families” (Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.). They then split each family into “Mainline” or “Evangelical” (and sometimes “Black”) denominations. Thus, for Baptists, American Baptists are “Mainline”; Southern Baptists are “Evangelical”; and National Baptists are “Black.” In the Lutheran family, the ELCA is “Mainline” and the LCMS is counted as “Evangelical.” But some families are one or the other: everyone in the Pentecostal tradition counts as an “Evangelical,” while everyone in the “Congregationalist” tradition counts as “Mainline.”

Daniel Silliman of Christianity Today asks, in the words of his title, “Who Are Evangelicals?” with the deck, “Twenty-three percent of Americans don’t all look, vote, or pray the same.”

The term derives from the Greek word for “good news”–that is, in the Germanic languages like English, the “gospel”–so that the authors of the New Testament books about the good news of Christ’s coming (the “Gospels”) were called Evangelists, as were preachers who proclaimed the good news of salvation through Christ.

Silliman says, “The first group of people to claim evangelical as a noun was the Evangelical Voluntary Church Association in England in the 1830s.” Well, as usual, the Lutherans get left out. Before they were called “Lutherans,” those who were reforming the church in the 16th century were called “evangelicals.” That was the term preferred by Luther himself. For Lutherans, the evangel of salvation through Christ is at the heart of every facet of their theology, with justification by faith in that gospel the article by which the church stands or falls.

Just as “Calvinists” preferred to be called “Reformed,” Lutherans preferred to be called “Evangelicals.” And then the Prussian Union tried to combine these two theologies in a church that survives in the New World as the “Evangelical and Reformed.” Anyway, the Reformed also started calling themselves “evangelical,” so there were “Lutheran evangelicals” and “Reformed evangelicals,” so “Lutheran” became the brand name.

But America grew out of England, so I don’t dispute what Silliman says about the use of the term in England and America. He points out that as a classification for Christians across multiple denominations, the term didn’t emerge until the mid-20th century, when Billy Graham started using the term for his supporting churches and Carl Henry of Christianity Today adopted it for Bible-believers who were not so closed off as “fundamentalists.”

Silliman is surely right to describe the great variety within the evangelical orbit. He stresses the social, racial, and political differences. But surely the theological differences are even greater. Lutherans, the first evangelicals, have a high view of both Word and Sacrament. But most evangelicals today have little use for the Sacraments, with some using the Word not as a means of grace but as a rule book, while others use the Word as a supplement to the revelations of the Holy Spirit that come through the inspiration of individual believers. They differ over how we are saved–through faith in the work of Christ? Or becoming convinced of our election? Or making a decision? Or by doing good works?–as well as the goal of the Christian life–loving God and our neighbor? establishing a new political order? doing great things for the Lord?

What is the Gospel, the evangel, that the various evangelicals hold to? Christ crucified for sinners? A social gospel? The prosperity gospel? There are “evangelicals” who hold to all of these.

How much in common do all of these folks have, and is there enough to smush them into one category?

The RLS seems to use the term as a synonym for “theological conservative” in whatever Protestant family the person belongs to. If a respondent is a Southern Baptist, the researchers know to put that survey in the “evangelical” pile. If the respondent doesn’t know how to answer and the researcher doesn’t recognize the church being referenced, there is a follow-up question: Have you been born again? Again, that can mean different things–baptized? made a decision? experienced a conversion?–but the RLS system seems workable for its purpose. Other researchers define the term as someone who has been born again, believes in the truth of the Bible, and wants to evangelize others. Others reduce it to political and social opinions. Those definitions have problems and ambiguities too. At least the RLS approach references theology and the confessions of different church bodies.

I propose dropping the word and just using terms for the specific theology a person holds, perhaps with an adjective describing where a person fits within that theology: A conservative Wesleyan; a 5-point Calvinist; a confessional Lutheran, etc.

But what about the Nondenominationals, according to the RLS the second largest Protestant “family” after the Baptists at 7.1%? Though they may not have a denomination, they do have a theology.

Most of them allow for a wide-range of beliefs and do not define all of their doctrines precisely. But they either baptize infants or they don’t. They usually don’t. (Does anyone know of a nondenominational church that will baptize babies for parents who want to?) Most, in practice, have a Baptist theology.

I would call members of such churches nondenominational Baptists. I do know of some nondenominational Reformed congregations. There are also a lot of nondenominational Pentecostals. I have even heard of a nondenominational Lutheran congregation, though that’s harder for me to get my mind around.

In its modern usage the label “evangelical” has been applied in the name of Christian unity, as in “we may be Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and Nondenominationals, but we are all evangelicals.” This went hand in glove with the rise of “parachurch” ministries, which marketed their products and drew on the participation to all conservative Protestants by playing down their doctrinal distinctives.

But that strikes me as a kind of “unionism,” reminiscent of what the founders of my church tried to get away from and the “ecumenism” of the liberal mainline churches. (More on them tomorrow.)

But those with faith in Christ do have a Biblical unity as “Christians,” as members of the holy Christian church, His body, going back through history and forward into His eternal kingdom. Everyone of whom it can be said: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). Since the belief of the heart cannot be seen, this isn’t a matter of a visible church, though some visible churches confess with their mouths this truth more clearly than others and some tragically distort it. But there are Christians everywhere, not just among “evangelicals” but also among Catholics, Orthodox, and Mainline Protestants.

Christ’s church is diverse too, with people of many different gifts (1 Corinthians 12) and comprised of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Revelation 7:9).

“No one could number” this spiritual company. So much for statistical surveys!

Image by J F from Pixabay

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