EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: What Is Evangelicalism?

The Bible teaches us that what we call things matters

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Warren Smith’s forthcoming book A Lover’s Quarrel with the Evangelical Church, to be published by MinistryWatch in January.

The ancient parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant describes the predicament we face when we try to define the evangelical church.

In that parable, each blind man describes the elephant based solely on his experience. The man who grabs the elephant’s trunk experiences the elephant differently than the man who grabs its tail, or its ears, or its legs. Seven men in all, each grabbing the elephant in different places, describe the elephant differently.

Each man accurately describes what he experiences, but each man is also wrong in his description of the whole. In one version of the parable, each man is so fully convinced of his understanding of the elephant that he suspects the others are intentionally lying, and they end up resorting to violence and bullying to press their points.

No metaphor is perfect, but this story is instructive in describing the current state of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has become the elephant. Journalists, pundits, politicians, theologians, ideologues, and even those who describe themselves as evangelicals have conflicting and sometimes mutually exclusive definitions for evangelicalism. Like the blind men in the parable, these various groups look only at the parts – the parts they personally experience – and fail to consider the whole.

So, what is evangelicalism? And why does the definition matter?

Let me consider the second question first. It matters because what we call things matters. Words matter. Genesis 2 highlights the importance of rightly naming the animals. When Jesus cast out demons in Mark 5, he first asked them their name.

When God told Adam to name the animals in Genesis 2, He made the “right naming of things” a core aspect of Biblical epistemology. It’s so important that bearing false witness, or falsely naming thing, merits special consideration in the Ten Commandments.

This idea is central to a biblical understanding of the world. It is an erosion of this idea that is at the root of many of our “culture war” challenges. At the root of many problems in our culture and especially in our public discourse is a lack of agreement on the meaning of words. We have a common vocabulary, but we use different dictionaries.

Abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism – the list could go on and on – are questions that are not merely moral in nature. They are ontological (the definition of reality) and epistemological (how we know that reality). In other words: how we define reality, and how we name that reality, matters more than our culture war battles. When we have a proper biblical ontology and epistemology, most of the other issues follow logically.

All of this is why I’m prepared to say that the cause of much confusion in the evangelical church today is a confusion of language. The effect is that we evangelicals often end up becoming what we are warning against. We say we stand for objective truth, or biblical morality, but many self-identified evangelicals are willing to lie or tolerate immorality in their political or economic lives, for the sake of some desired outcome. We forget that our political and economic lives are not separate from our spiritual lives. They are all parts of the same elephant.

This compartmentalism is in part the consequence of a strong streak of anti-intellectualism in the evangelical movement. Evangelicals have become impatient with close reasoning and careful argument. Our political activism taught us, wrongly, that it is better to defeat than to persuade. Mark Noll’s classic book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind makes this point, and it is a book I am unlikely to improve upon here, so I simply refer you to it and note that this anti-intellectualism is real and (in my view) tragic.

It is tragic because it has made evangelicals impatient with doctrine and theology, or – more specifically – the rigor of thought required to appropriately connect sound theology (orthodoxy) to sound practice (orthopraxy).

For example, we now define sin primarily in moral categories, not ontological and epistemological categories. Because we no longer argue from these philosophical first principles, our objection to (for example) abortion tends to reduce to moral arguments. (“Killing an innocent human being is wrong.”) Notice that the most common counterargument is not a moral rebuttal, but an epistemological one. (“A fetus is not a human being.”) We should not hesitate to make a moral argument against abortion. But in the modern public square, what Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square,” morality is constantly shifting. It has no ontological grounding. It is derived by consensus or is decided individually. Moral arguments without an ontological foundation are incoherent, unconvincing, or counterproductive.

That said, let us return to the specific “naming” problem before us: a lack of a common understanding of the word “evangelical.”

Access to MinistryWatch content is free.  However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts.  To make a donation, click here.

Defining Evangelicalism

David Bebbington popularized (at least among academics and intellectuals) a definition of evangelicalism in 1989 that still bears consideration. His definition came to be known as the “Bebbington Quadrilateral.” It first appeared in his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain:  A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. The four qualities of evangelicalism he identified are:

• Biblicism: a high regard for the authority of the Bible,
• Crucicentrism: a belief in the centrality of the atoning work of Christ on the cross,
• Conversionism: the belief that human beings need to be converted, and
• Activism: the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort.

This model is helpful, but not specific enough to qualify as a definition. Otherwise, why would Wheaton College or the National Association of Evangelicals or MinistryWatch not simply adopt these four distinctives and call it a day? No evangelical organization I know of has done so. That’s proof enough of the limitations of the Bebbington Quadrilaterial.

So, let’s look at another purported definition. The National Association of Evangelicals identified not four, but seven, essentials of evangelical faith:

• We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
• We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
• We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, in His virgin birth, in His sinless life, in His miracles, in His vicarious and atoning death through His shed blood, in His bodily resurrection, in His ascension to the right hand of the Father, and in His personal return in power and glory.
• We believe that for the salvation of lost and sinful people, regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely essential.
• We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life.
• We believe in the resurrection of both the saved and the lost; they that are saved unto the resurrection of life and they that are lost unto the resurrection of damnation.
• We believe in the spiritual unity of believers in our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is always dangerous to speak for others, especially for those long dead, but I can imagine that Augustine, Aquinas, and Athanasias would find much to like, and nothing to refute, in this statement. In other words, while the NAE statement is broadly biblical, what makes it distinctively evangelical? Many Catholics, Orthodox, and mainline Protestants could affirm these “essentials of evangelical faith.”

It’s also worth noting that a few important ideas are notably missing, especially given our discussion about ontology and epistemology. For example, if we compare the NAE’s statement of faith to the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed, we note the NAE’s failure to include a distinctive about creation. It is a critical omission. A weak or “thin” doctrine of creation and the subsequent “Fall” has created a failure of the evangelical church to be convincing on such matters as abortion and marriage, to name but two of many.

It is also interesting that a statement from the National Association of Evangelicals omits any mention of, well, evangelism. Bebbington’s “activism” means more than evangelism, but it certainly includes evangelism. The NAE missed an opportunity to refine Bebbington’s definition, to specifically say that an evangelical is one who evangelizes, one who shares the gospel by word and deed.

We should also note that the largest evangelical denomination in the country, the Southern Baptist Convention, is not a member of the NAE. Neither is the Presbyterian Church in America. Further, many of the largest evangelical churches in America are non-denominational. These facts mean, in part, that the NAE has no real authority to define evangelicalism or protect the definition it has created. This crisis in authority in evangelicalism has profound implications. In the absence of any universally recognized authority in the evangelical movement, the incentive to build or seize platforms has become irresistible. An evangelical is what the largest and loudest self-identified evangelical says it is.

As we go along, we will see how and why the limitations of both the NAE’s and Bebbington’s definitions have created much confusion in the church, and in the culture, about what it means to be evangelical.

I do not presume to create my own definition here, but I do note that theologian Robert Webber was right when he said that the “most pressing spiritual problem of our time is who gets to narrate the world.” In eras past, when narratives about God, the church, or other important matters were false or wore thin, the best minds got together and attempted to solve that problem. The early church councils come immediately to mind. More recently, and more distinctively evangelical in nature, we can look to the 1978 Statement on Biblical Inerrancy or the 1974 Lausanne Covenant on world evangelism.

It seems to me that we are long overdue for the creation of such a definition. But the current crisis in authority and the erosion of the credibility of evangelical leaders makes such a project all but impossible.

The Evangelical Myth

Because nature abhors a vacuum, evangelicalism’s failure to adequately define itself has spawned various and sometimes contradictory myths – or metaphorical self-definitions — about evangelicalism.

Said another way: the failure to satisfactorily define evangelicalism in theological or ontological categories means that we (and others, those on the outside looking in) use sociological, or economic, or political categories to define evangelicalism.

One idea I will return to in this book again and again is the idea that you have to measure the right things, in the right way, if you want to come to the right conclusions. Because we have so far had no true definition of evangelicalism, a myth has flourished in that vacuum. I call it the evangelical myth. That myth goes something like this:

In the years before World War II, the mainline church had succumbed to liberalism and heresy. Since World War II, partly in response to the apocalyptic destruction of that war and the nuclear age the war opened, and partly because an increasingly liberal and secular church that was failing both to capture the imagination and to heal the wounds of modern life, a revival broke out. Parachurch organizations such as Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and the Navigators began taking the gospel to college campuses that were burgeoning with G. I. Bill-financed student bodies. These college students graduated to become leaders of churches and business—and an ever-expanding roster of still newer Christian ministries. Overflowing Billy Graham crusades, Explo ’72 (the “Christian Woodstock”), the Jesus Music revolution of the 1970s—these were all signs of a revival not seen in the United States since the Second Great Awakening. Drug addicts and rock stars were getting saved. Beginning in the 1970s, churches were exploding in growth. And in 1980 these Christians also began to make themselves known at the ballot box. The hope of those early leaders—that this revival would be not just a religious movement but a cultural and societal movement—seemed to be coming to pass. It was morning in America again. We can make America great again.

That’s the myth. And like many myths, it contains truth. But also like many myths, it contains nostalgia and sentimentality and ideology. Indeed, that’s what happens when we forget our history: we succumb to nostalgia and sentimentality and ideology. That may be why one of the most common commands in the Bible is simply: “Remember.” It occurs more than 70 times in Scripture. This is an idea we will explore more fully in the next chapter.

One of the few commands that appears more frequently “remember” is some version of “fear not” or “be not afraid.” That’s no coincidence, either. When we know our history and remember it, it can guide us through current challenges. We fear less ourselves. We are less vulnerable to ideological or political arguments based on fear. When we “remember” and “fear not,” we are not seduced by the failed ideas and behaviors of the past. Why? Precisely because we remember them as failures. Most new heresies are old heresies that have been tried and discarded, only to be tried again after we have forgotten them. Remembering our history also makes us more confident, less tentative, about the tried-and-true, what T.S. Eliot called the “permanent things,” even when the permanent things fall out of fashion.

Many theologically conservative evangelical Christians have no trouble identifying and understanding the problems associated with the loss of history, or with revisionist understandings of history. Conservatives understand intuitively the dangers of – for example – deconstructionism in the study of literature, or “critical theory” in the study of history and sociology, or Darwinism in the study of science and anthropology. This intuitive repulsion to these progressive experiments in mythmaking is often valid. You might say that our Christian memories have inoculated us from dangerous ideologies, or at least have created in us a sense of caution.

We are less cautious, more easily seduced, when ideological myths come wrapped in superficial Christian disguises. We forget that – as the old saying goes – “Christian” makes a great noun, but a terrible adjective. We label beliefs, behaviors, ideas, events, art, and industries as “Christian” based on the degree of their self-identification or based on their adoption by our own Christian sub-culture. We don’t pause to note that the same “expressive individualism” and “moralistic therapeutic deism” that has infected the culture has also infected the Evangelical Industrial Complex. We forget that what makes a belief (or idea or creative artifact) “Christian” is not the label we slap on it, but whether it is – in fact — good, true, and beautiful.

To repeat:  We use the wrong yardsticks.

This habit of using the wrong yardstick makes us vulnerable to nostalgia and sentimentality. So, for example, we want to “take America back” or “make America great again.” Some assert that America was a Christian nation and should be so again. But has there been any point in our past that fully embodied the Christian values we seek? Many people who identify as evangelicals answer that question with an unequivocal yes. Indeed, it is easy to marshal evidence for that conclusion: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and other cultural problems are clear and present and seem to be increasing.

But are these the only indicators of cultural or spiritual well-being? One way to answer that question is to ask: Is it better to live in the America of 2023 or 1923? Few readers of this book want to exchange the lifestyles they enjoy today with those of their great grandparents. Because of war and a global smallpox epidemic, Americans born in the year 1900 died, on average, at age 50. Is America today better or worse for a black man than it was in 1950? Klan members in the early part of the 20^th century included Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and Alabama Governor Bibb Graves.

Over time, nostalgia for a mythical past can overwhelm the truth of history. By the early 21^st century, evangelicals had not only forgotten the biblical admonition to “remember,” but we had also forgotten the biblical command to “fear not.” The Evangelical Myth was slowly becoming indistinguishable from the American Myth, thanks to the work of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. But instead of spreading hope, this conflated myth fueled anger and resentment. This anger and resentment in turn fueled a populist revolt that claimed Christian roots. The populist revolt of the 2010s and 2020s shared only a superficial relationship to Christianity. But because we have failed to define ourselves in theological and ontological terms, the word “evangelical” was appropriated by those who shared only a tribal kinship with evangelicalism, not a theological one.

It is the contention of this book that evangelicalism is worth saving. Evangelicalism represents values and behaviors worth preserving and nurturing.  Those values and behaviors have political, economic, and cultural implications, but they have value even if they did not.

Many evangelicals find it difficult to let go of The Evangelical Myth in part because their own economic and emotional self-interests are linked to the myth. Even evangelicals who do not make a living from what I describe in Chapter Five as the Evangelical Industrial Complex are financial contributors to it. The 1000 largest ministries in the country, tracked by MinistryWatch, have more than $44 billion in annual revenue. And there are more than a million Christian churches and non-profits in this country.

These two groups – donors and doers — have a vested financial interest in the status quo. The idea that something is wrong or – worse yet – to entertain the notion that the evangelical movement was having a net negative impact on The Great Commission and the spiritual life of America, would be a difficult possibility to admit.

The Political Illusion

As is now evident, one of the problems with The Evangelical Myth is that it defined evangelicalism as a sociological, economic, and political movement rather than a religious or spiritual movement.

Political activism is not wrong, or enjoined by scripture, but it is fraught with moral peril. Adlai Stevenson, who ran unsuccessfully for president several times, reportedly summed up his experience: “Any man who will do what is necessary to become president is unfit to serve.” If that is true of the presidency, it is also likely true to a lesser degree for any position of power in our current system.

But why should this be so?  Is it not possible to serve honorably?

The answer to the second question is “yes,” but serving honorably as a politician or political activist must also include an awareness of the limitations of politics. Adlai Stevenson suggested that it is impossible to achieve political power without compromising one’s integrity. We do not have to agree completely with Stevenson to admit that if it is not impossible, it is incredibly hard.

Further, we must “forget not” that Jesus himself said that his kingdom is not of this world. When we forget that, we succumb to what philosopher and sociologist Jacques Elul called “The Political Illusion.” That illusion is (in part) the belief that all problems are political problems, so all solutions must be political solutions. Christians come to believe that the goal is political victory, and not advocating for the Gospel, for the truth, and for our neighbors.

But, again, we must “forget not.” In this case, we must forget not what T. S. Eliot said: “We fight not to win, but to keep the truth alive.” When we sacrifice the true (or the beautiful, or the good) for the sake of political victory, even if it is the victory of a “good thing” over a “bad thing,” we are no longer walking in the footsteps of Jesus.

It is not hard to understand why Christians succumb to The Political Illusion. Christian activists and populist political activists are not wrong when they say that Christians have been ignored, aggrieved, even abused by major cultural institutions of politics, media, education, and entertainment. Populist power shifts in the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, whether during the era of Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, Franklin Roosevelt, or Donald Trump, often find early adherents in the economic underclass, and often in parts of the country – the rural south and west, for example – where religious practice remains (at least superficially) important.

But, again, we must “forget not.” We must remember that 21^st century American Christians are not the first Christians in history to be ignored, aggrieved, or abused. The Apostle Peter, writing to the first century church, said,

Dear friends, don’t be surprised when the fiery ordeal comes among you to test you, as if something unusual were happening to you. Instead, rejoice as you share in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may also rejoice with great joy when his glory is revealed. (I Peter 4:12-13)

Peter is suggesting that suffering is a sign of success, not of defeat. But those who either don’t know their Bible, or have forgotten it, or stand to gain by generating conflict (people writer Amanda Ripley call “conflict entrepreneurs”) can’t resist the desire to seek political solutions, even if it means forgetting biblical solutions (service, humility, suffering) and thereby compromising their moral authority. Again, we must be careful not to measure the wrong things.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with fighting for truth. Indeed, we should fight for truth. Many Christians have rightly criticized a liberal-leaning media, one that is frequently indifferent to Christian ideas, and often actively antagonistic toward them. Marvin Olasky wrote what is the classic book on this subject – Prodigal Press: Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media, which I helped revise in 2013.

But we cannot fight “their” falsehoods with “our” falsehoods – which is what many on the political right have done. Rather, we fight falsehood with truth.

All to say that in these ways and many more, we evangelicals who entered the world of politics and have tasted a bit of the power it offers are often misshapen by the relentless machinery of our political processes. Said another way:  We have become what we hate, in danger of becoming what we entered the political arena to fight in the first place.

This is not a new insight. Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson reportedly said, “Any man who will do what is necessary to become president is unfit to serve.” Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So too the quest for power tends to corrupt those who embark on the quest. We might seek power to do good, but the more power we have, the more our ability to do good is corroded.

Defining Evangelicalism by What Gets Measured

As I’ve said, one of the themes of this book is that evangelicals and evangelical organizations measure the wrong things. An absence of authority and accountability within the movement means that the biggest and the loudest often claim the mantle of leadership, and the competition for that mantle is fierce and relentless. Instead of measuring the fruit of the spirit, we measure those things we can count, sometimes cynically reduced to the expression “butts and bucks.” Here are some of the false indicators we use to measure the health of evangelicalism:

• Size. We have come to value mass or scale. In the next chapter we will look specifically at the phenomenon of the megachurch, which is this idea of scale applied in a particular motif—the local church— and taken to its logical end. It is enough to say here that in the calculus of the evangelical mind, large numbers are better, because it means that God is blessing the effort.
• Growth Rates. We also measure growth, but not spiritual growth. Rather, we measure numerical growth. Bigness, even evangelicals will concede (usually when talking about mainline denominations or the Catholic Church), can lead to stagnation and death. But growth is a sign of life, and God is life. Growth is yet another sign of God’s blessing.
• Money. And, as I’ve already said, we measure money. The organization of these rallies is not cheap, and they can be very profitable. We have already seen how for-profit corporations have become instrumental in the organization of some of these events. But even those that remain under the umbrella of not-for-profit organizations have taken on the characteristics of the corporation. Focus on the Family’s 2018 revenue was about $100 million. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has more variability in its annual budget than many organizations, depending on the number of rallies it conducts in a given year. But its 2018 revenue exceeded $130 million, and it had a whopping $296 million in assets. The 1000 ministries in the MinistryWatch 1000 database took in a total of $44 billion in 2024.
• Independence, or Autonomy. A less obvious but powerful value of the evangelical church in America is its desire for independence or autonomy. Autonomy is a sign of strength, of self-sufficiency. Some also view it as an important way to maintain allegiance to the mission of the organization, and not be subject to or beholden to a church or denomination.

But this impulse has seriously eroded community, oversight, and accountability. To understand this, a little history helps.

The Evangelical Church is Becoming Increasingly Opaque

In 1970 there were only about a dozen Protestant megachurches in the United States, and all of them were part of a denomination and governed by that denomination’s polity (church structure and oversight). We had only a few hundred thousand tax-exempt organizations in the U.S.

But by 2020, the number of megachurches had grown by a geometric factor, to about 1700.  Further, approximately 25 percent of the 1700 megachurches in the country are nondenominational. Many of these churches do not have independent boards of directors. Some of them do not have deacons or elders. Even when these churches do have deacons and elders, they are often toothless. Before its collapse in 2015, Seattle’s Mars Hill Church had nearly 40 elders, but almost all of them were employees of the church.  Pastor Mark Driscoll could, in effect, fire the very people who were supposed to be holding him accountable.

We have also seen a meteoric rise in the number of tax-exempt organizations. The number of 501-c-3 organizations in the U.S. today tops two million.

Most parachurch ministries are 501(c)(3) organizations. They enjoy a tax-exempt status in exchange for having a mission that serves the community, or the common good, and they disclose their financial information so donors can see that they are doing what they say they are doing.

However, a growing number of parachurch ministries now claim to be churches and are thereby exempt from releasing their Form 990s to the public. This trend is important because the Form 990 contains not only financial data (including the salaries of key executives), but the names of board members and other important information.

This practice is not entirely new, but until recently only controversial and sometimes outright fraudulent organizations have claimed the church exemption. For example, it has long been a common practice of televangelists and prosperity gospel preachers.

Now, though, other organizations are following the example of these prosperity gospel preachers. Some of these organizations are those that five years ago were exemplars, ministries that set the standard, that were above reproach.

Alas, that is no longer true for organizations that hide behind the church exemption as an excuse for a lack of transparency. Among the organizations who now claim the church exemption are: Compassion International, Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), The Navigators, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Willow Creek Association, Gideons International, Ethnos 360/New Tribes Mission, Precept Ministries, Denison Ministries, Voice of the Martyrs, Missio Nexus, Wycliffe Associates, and the now defunct Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Many of these organizations have made this change in the past five years. At least two of these organizations (Willow Creek and RZIM) had major scandals in recent years. Indeed, RZIM is no longer in business.

What Is Evangelicalism? – Revisited

We began this essay by asking “What is evangelicalism?” We might want to define evangelicalism by the principles of Bebbington or the National Association of Evangelicals, but it has become obvious that these definitions no longer fit, if they ever did. A rigorous definition of evangelicalism has been replaced by a fuzzy myth that includes nostalgia, money and power, autonomy, and expressive individualism.

But the question remains: What is evangelicalism? We are likely in a cultural moment in which no clear definition of evangelicalism is possible. Those who might put forward such a definition – the NAE, others — lack the authority to do so.

But we have gotten to the point where it is fair to say this: many of the worse elements of the modern world—materialism, empire building at the expense of community building, and the accumulation of power and money—have become some of the most recognizable attributes of American evangelicalism. These attributes also help explain why you will find self-identified evangelicals among the more populist political tribes in this country and in western Europe.

I have called American evangelicalism’s growth and its accumulation of power and money “myths” not because there is not an element of truth in them, but because they don’t tell the whole story. They tell merely the story some of us want to believe about ourselves.

That is not to say that there is not also much to admire about the modern evangelical movement: its desire and willingness to change the culture for good, for example. The power it has accumulated has been used at times effectively to stand against some of the darker angels of our nature. But too often we have spent the moral capital our history and theology have accumulated in our behalf just to buy a seat at the table of power. And once there, we have no power left to resist the temptations of that table.

Let me close this chapter with this idea: Evangelical Christians, at their best, are not unlike artists. They—we—are generative and procreative. Our goal is to lead those lost in an ugly and false view of the world toward beauty and truth.

But in order to fully realize this vision, we must confront what has sometimes been called “the devil in the inkpot.”  In other words, the artist who tells the truth about the world must not shrink from the reality of evil.

We evangelicals are good at pointing out the evil of others, but sometimes we forget that the best place to find evidence of original sin is to look in the mirror.