What is an evangelical?

Since many college students define "evangelical" as "anti-homosexual," it's worth noting "The Washington Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment" that a bunch of evangelicals signed last week. This Manifesto stresses "the Evangelical message, 'good news' by definition, is overwhelmingly positive, and always positive before it is negative…. Just as Jesus did, Evangelicals sometimes have to make strong judgments about what is false, unjust, and evil. But first and foremost, Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything."

The declaration, developed by evangelicals including Rick Warren and Os Guinness, opposes both "liberal revisionism and conservative fundamentalism." Liberals "have tended to accommodate the world… to the point where they are unfaithful to Christ; whereas those more conservative tended so to defy the world that they resist it in ways that also become unfaithful to Christ."

Theological liberals, the declaration contends, typically have "an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God. In the end they are sometimes no longer recognizably Christian." But the declaration also accurately criticizes the tendency of fundamentalism "to romanticize the past, some now-lost moment in time, and to radicalize the present, with styles of reaction that are personally and publicly militant to the point where they are sub-Christian or worse." What's important to remember: "The Gospel of Jesus is the Good News of welcome, forgiveness, grace, and liberation from law and legalism."

What does all of this mean for public policy? "We cannot back away from our biblically rooted commitment to the sanctity of every human life, including those unborn, nor can we deny the holiness of marriage as instituted by God between one man and one woman." At the same time, "we must follow the model of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, engaging the global giants of conflict, racism, corruption, poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, ignorance, and spiritual emphasis."

The declaration also calls for neither a Christian America nor a secularized one, neither a sacred nor a naked public square, but rather "a civil public square - a vision of public life in which citizens of all faiths are free to enter and engage the public square on the basis of their faith, but within a framework of what is agreed to be just and free for other faiths too. Thus every right we assert for ourselves is at once a right we defend for others. A right for a Christian is a right for a Jew, and a right for a secularist, and a right for a Mormon, and a right for a Muslim, and a right for a Scientologist, and a right for all the believers in all the faiths across this wide land."

The declaration's bottom line: "We should neither privatize nor politicize faith; the church should be identified neither with the religious right nor the religious left." In contrast with "being unquestioning conservatives and unreserved supporters of tradition and the status quo, being Evangelical means an ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ, and this entails innovation, renewal, reformation, and entrepreneurial dynamism…. Evangelicals part company with reactionaries by being both reforming and innovative, but they also part company with modern progressives by challenging the ideal of the-newer-the-truer and the-latest-is-greatest by conserving what is true and right and good."