Hans Fiene: What is an “evangelical?”

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, January 30th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: evangelical voters.

WORLD Opinions commentator Han Fiene says that when talking theology in public, it’s important to get the definitions right.

HANS FIENE: The less clearly you define your terms, the more pointless a debate will be. If, for example, a Roman Catholic and a Southern Baptist debate whether baptism saves without sharing a common definition of both “baptism” and “saves,” both sides will end up barking slogans at each other and neither side will win any converts.

Likewise, if you wish to argue that Donald Trump “is connecting with a different type of Evangelical voter”, you won’t make a terribly convincing argument if you have no clear definition of “evangelical.” Unfortunately, that’s precisely the path Ruth Graham and Charles Homans take in their recent New York Times article.

Graham and Homans profile a handful of these “new” evangelicals who share a few things in common, namely a fervent desire to see Donald Trump reelected and a lack of regular church attendance. There’s Karen Johnson, who hasn’t attended a worship service in years and who sees Trump as both “our David and our Goliath.” There’s Cydney Hatfield, who prays to God every night but doesn’t attend church and describes Trump as “the only savior [she] can see.”

Graham and Homans tell us, “Evangelicalism has long had an individualistic strain that resists the idea that personal faith requires church attendance.” But that raises an important question: are these new evangelicals or not evangelicals? Certainly, evangelicalism is a tradition with murkier boundaries than Catholicism or Presbyterianism, but which section of David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism Quadrilateral has room for the Proud Non-Churchgoers? 

Bebbington argues that to be an evangelical, one must hold to four markers: conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism or being cross-centered. Conversionism means believing that “lives need to be transformed through a ‘born-again’ experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus.” Being cross-centered means evangelicals stress “the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.” So, how does someone who sees Trump as more of a messiah than the actual Messiah have a place in that tradition?

In 2021, Gregory A. Smith of Pew Research Center noted, “white Americans who viewed Trump favorably …in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”

In other words, President Trump didn’t change the views of pre-existing evangelicals as much as he made the label “evangelical” appealing to those outside the tradition. Throughout Trump’s presidency, those who loved Trump but weren’t regular churchgoers watched hostile media voices use “evangelicals” as a slur meaning “deplorable Christians who support the Bad Orange Man.” And, as is often the case in the religious realm, the maligned began positively adopting the slur. 

American Lutherans–the tradition to which I belong–have never identified themselves as part of the modern evangelical movement. But I’m tired of seeing Christian-scented Trump worshippers falsely labeled as “evangelicals” in order to discredit faithful Christians, many of whom hope to bring about godly policies through an ungodly politician. Words have meaning, and if we’re interested in anything deeper than scoring cheap political points, we should let “evangelical” retain its historic and theological definition.

I’m Hans Fiene.

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