You may have grown up attending “an evangelical church.” You may have friends from overseas who emphasize that they are Roman Catholics or Anglicans, not “evangelical Christians.” Or, in the 2016 presidential election’s aftermath, you may have heard people arguing about why “all the evangelicals supported Trump.” Whatever your exposure, evangelicalism is an important term for understanding current American Christianity.
Where Does “Evangelicalism” Come From?
Evangelicalism, and its shorter form evangelical, come from the ancient Greek euangelion. The New American Standard Lexicon translates euangelion as “a reward for good tidings.” In the New Testament, euangelion refers to the good news of Jesus the Messiah bringing God’s kingdom to earth, dying for humanity’s sins, and making salvation possible. Many English Bible translations translate euangelion as “gospel” or “good news.” It first appears in Matthew:
“Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel [euangelion] of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people” (Matthew 4:23 NIV, emphasis added).
Latin Bible translations made euangelion into evangelium, thus leading to the English word evangelicalism. Because evangelicalism refers to the gospel, scholars apply it to various religious movements that preach returning to the gospel or a personal relationship with Jesus. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that Martin Luther and other Protestant Reformers were known as evangelicals since their teaching emphasized returning to Scripture and a personal connection to God. The Great Awakening’s key figures (Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, George Whitefield) were called evangelicals. An article by Focus on the Family highlights how in the 19th-century, John Newton, William Wilberforce, and their circle of Christian reformers were also called evangelicals.
In 1950s America, the term evangelical took on a new meaning.
What Is American Evangelicalism?
While evangelicalism has a wider use explained above, it has become a name for a specific American religious movement. Today, if you’re reading a study on evangelicalism, the author usually means something more specific: American White Anglo-Saxon Protestants with theologically and politically conservative (i.e., Republican) views.
Gerald R. McDermott observes that this shift began with the National Association of Evangelicals’ founding in 1942. Leaders like Billy Graham, Carl Henry, and Harold Ockenga began calling themselves “the new evangelicals.” In the 1970s, members of the Christian Right referred to themselves as evangelical Christians seeking change.
To understand this meaning, we must see why Graham and his colleagues felt they had to call themselves “new evangelicals” (or neo-evangelicals). They were distancing themselves from something that happened 40 years earlier: the fundamentalist movement.
What Does Fundamentalism Have to Do with Evangelicalism?
In the late 19th-century, American Christians became concerned about society and churches drifting from the gospel. The Scopes Trial had legalized teaching evolution in American public schools, which worried creationists. German higher criticism scholarship had begun questioning the supernatural elements in the Bible.
In response, many Christian leaders argued for returning to “the fundamentals” of Christianity. In 1910, Milton and Lyman Stewart published a pamphlet series titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth. The same year, the Presbyterian Church of America held a general assembly that mentioned “the five points of fundamentalism,” points also emphasized in the Stewart pamphlets:
- Scripture is the inspired, infallible word of God.
- Jesus Christ was born of a virgin mother
- Jesus Christ’s death on the cross brought substitutionary atonement for humanity’s sins.
- Jesus Christ physically rose from the dead.
- The miracles described in the New Testament are genuine miracles that Jesus Christ performed.
Fundamentalism became an important part of American Christianity through World War II. They promised a return to evangelical Christianity, and various denominations split over fundamentalist-liberal debates. Some fundamentalists left seminaries to start new ones.
While fundamentalists held their beliefs firmly, they quickly became open to criticism. They often criticized each other harshly, creating feuds or church splits over disagreements on minor theological points. A subset known as the separatists refused to engage or collaborate with any Christian leaders or churches (including other fundamentalists) they disagreed with.
“By the 1950s, the fundamentalist movement had acquired a reputation for divisiveness, prompting many American evangelicals to seek alternative associations.”—The Essential Zondervan Companion to Christian History, pg. 206
In his biography of Francis Schaeffer, Colin Duriez gives a taste of the fundamentalists’ fights. Before becoming a famous apologist and culture critic, Schaeffer studied at a fundamentalist seminary, pastored fundamentalist churches, and followed the separatist movement. At least once, other separatists accused Schaeffer of being a communist because they disagreed with something he said. In 1950, Schaeffer and other fundamentalists met Karl Barth. After the meeting, Schaeffer sent Barth a letter detailing his concerns with Barth’s higher criticism theology. Barth responded, asking why Schaeffer wrote the letter when he clearly saw Barth as a heretic “burnt and buried for good."
“I do not know how to deal with a man who comes to see and speak to me in the quality of a detective inspector or with the behavior of a missionary who goes to convert a heathen.”— Karl Barth's letter to Francis Schaeffer, dated September 3, 1950
Five years after this meeting, Schaeffer had cut all his ties with the separatists and founded L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland.
Fundamentalists also had a generally anti-culture attitude. They held that enjoying movies, novels and other forms of culture were worldly concerns. Outsiders like H. Richard Niebuhr (Christ and Culture) and Dorothy L. Sayers (The Mind of the Maker) argued for a different view, where culture could be seen as something redemptive. Schaeffer’s L’Abri seminars about art (from Bergman movies to Beatles albums) also pursued a nuanced view of culture.
By the end of WWII, sectarian debates left many wondering if the fundamentalist movement could continue. Groups like the National Association of Evangelicals presented a new option. Evangelicals could maintain theologically conservative views but have conversations with less conservative leaders. They could recognize sinful elements in culture but also see making culture as an honorable job for Christians.
“In contrast to the fundamentalist separation from modern culture, the ‘new evangelicals’ (led by E.J. Carnell, Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Billy Graham) were committed to engaging with culture in an attempt to transform it through the gospel…”—Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? pg. 27
“Evangelicals sometimes have to make strong judgments about what is false, unjust, and evil. But first and foremost we Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything. The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism. It is a colossal Yes to life and human aspirations, and an emphatic No only to what contradicts our true destiny as human beings made in the image of God.”—The Evangelical Manifesto, pg. 8
Why Has Evangelicalism Become Unpopular?
At this point, you may be wondering why most Generation X (born in 1965-1980) and younger Christians have downplayed calling themselves evangelicals. Writers like David P. Gushee have written books titled After Evangelicalism. Gospel Coalition contributors have written articles about “the evangel is timeless, evangelicalism is not.” How did evangelicalism become a nasty word? The answers are complicated, but were three key factors had a huge impact.
1. Politics. Church historian Joel Halldorf explains that before the fundamentalist movement, “evangelicals had fought hard against slavery, protested discrimination of women, and championed economic justice.” After the fundamentalist movement arrived, any campaigning for minorities, economic changes, or the environment became “too liberal” or “too leftwing.” Historian George Marsden and others called this “The Great Reversal.” In the 1970s-1980s, the Christian Right movement solidified this attitude, ensuring that “evangelical” meant Republican and anti-social action.
2. Culture. While evangelicalism sought a better view of culture than fundamentalism, it didn’t accomplish this aim. Instead, evangelicals developed very specific subcultures for themselves. Daniel Silliman explains how in the 1970s, Christian bookstores helped create Christian Fiction, a specialized brand for evangelical readers. In the 1980s, Christian homeschooling and Christian private schools became the popular choice for evangelical families. In that same decade, the Jesus rock movement gave way to Contemporary Christian Music, a specialized market for evangelical listeners. Evangelical products and institutions melded to create a particular evangelical subculture… and as the Barna Group noted in You Lost Me, fear became a key motivator for why evangelicals had to stay in this subculture. Many evangelical parents concluded their job was to ensure their children were afraid of anything outside, rather than teaching them to be shrewd observers of the outside world.
End Times. James Emery White notes that many fundamentalists were also dispensationalists, thanks to the Scofield Reference Bible. As dispensationalists, they believed Scripture says the end times will involve Jesus ruling the earth for 1,000 years, then destroying it. Dispensationalists also maintain that God will rapture all the Christians away, probably before the carnage starts. Dispensationalism carried into evangelicalism, particularly through Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth. As the year 2000 neared, bestselling books like the Left Behind series got many evangelicals talking about the end coming soon. Ergo, many evangelicals didn’t bother with caring about art, deeper theological education, or the environment. Everything would be destroyed by 2000, so why care?
Where Is Evangelicalism Now?
By the mid-2000s, evangelicalism was in a tough spot. Many evangelicals had discovered they were automatically “dangerous liberals” if they wanted to apply New Testament teachings on loving “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) to seeking policies that help senior citizens, racial minorities, and people with disabilities. Christians whose artistic skills didn’t fit worship music or children’s entertainment had gotten sick of “the Christian ghetto.” Others had realized that the “culture war” view they grew up with assumed everything could be cleanly divided into either “sacred” or “secular,” which didn’t square with the Bible’s teachings on calling. Environmentalists were tired of dispensationalists ignoring nature.
Since then, these concerns have become more prominent, especially the political ones. Christian Nationalism arose from the worst side of the evangelical emphasis on rightwing patriotism. The 2016 presidential election made many evangelicals wonder whether getting someone “on our side” (a Republican candidate) into the White House was the most important thing.
Where evangelicalism will go next is anyone’s guess. The good news is that many evangelicals now feel open to discuss their views with each other and outsiders. During the 2020 pandemic, 19 Christian institutions hosted Breaking Ground, where evangelicals and non-evangelicals discussed how Christians could bring healing to a post-COVID society. Artist organizations like the Rabbit Room and the Chrysostom Society have enabled Christian artists to cultivate their crafts without fitting into “Christian entertainment” molds. Writers interested in culture, including Skye Jethani (Futureville) and Jake Meador (In Search of the Common Good), have considered dispensationalism’s flaws and how the “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1) may be the earth we know transformed.
Whatever the future holds for evangelicalism, we can pray and hope that American Christians will hold on to the euangelion.
Further Reading:
Understanding “Evangelical” Part Three: The Birth of Contemporary American Evangelicalism
Understanding “Evangelical” Part Five: The Current Crisis
What Does “Evangelical” Really Mean?
Evangelicals: Past and Present
Photo Credit: G. Connor Salter
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