Evangelicals often complain about misuses of these categories. Basically, they don’t want to be lumped in with fundamentalists, who don’t dance, don’t chew, and don’t go with the girls that do. Who wants to be tagged alongside segregationists, creation scientists, and millenarians?
Yet it’s remarkable how happily evangelicals misapply the category to flatter themselves. Jonathan Edwards? Charles Finney? Even Harriet Livermore, who preached before Congress in 1827? (Confession: I only learned of Harriet Livermore while Google-prepping this post.) According to this line of thought, anyone who loved the Bible, loved Jesus, and sought the conversion of unbelievers counts as an evangelical. Like the rest of us, evangelicals appropriate a version of history that flatters themselves.
There’s a critical problem with this category mistake: evangelicalism as we know it derived as a spin-off from modern fundamentalism. It is not the religion of Edwards, Finney, or Livermore, nor could it be.
The meaning of “evangelical” has changed greatly over time. It once meant, simply, “Protestant,” as it largely does in Europe today. Today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America does not identify as evangelical in the way that, say, the Reformed Church in America does. Their name goes back to that more ancient usage, as did the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which became part of the United Church of Christ.
The fundamentalist-liberal controversies began in the second half of the nineteenth century and dramatically transformed the American religious landscape. These conflicts emerged in response to the combination of evolutionary science and modern biblical scholarship, both of which called into question the literal, scientific truth of the Bible. Modern science won’t allow us to imagine a 6000 year-old creation, and modern biblical scholarship won’t abide the notions that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that the Gospels represent eyewitness testimony.
Fundamentalists largely lost their battle with liberalism, a defeat that pushed fundamentalism to the cultural margins. But in the 1940s and 1950s a new movement emerged among religious conservatives. Evangelicals basically adhered to fundamentalist principles, but they sought a renewed engagement with the broader culture. They built new institutions, embraced art and popular culture. They even learned to dance. More than any other individual, Billy Graham embodied this movement toward cultural engagement.
The problem is, no one has ever successfully distinguished evangelicalism from fundamentalism because so much is at stake in the distinction. The rise of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right in the 1970s, combined with conservative movements in major denominations, further blurred the distinction.
Let’s take an example. When conservatives took control of my alma mater, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, they said they wanted to build a great evangelical institution. (Note: they did not previously regard the seminary as “evangelical.” Southern Baptists largely avoided the term until the 1980s.) Eventually, they wound up firing members who supported women’s ordination. Southern Seminary is now known, among other things, for promoting women’s submission at home and in the church. That looks like a fundamentalist position to many of us, especially in comparison with “evangelical” seminaries like Fuller and Gordon-Conwell.
Now that 81 percent of white evangelicals have voted for Donald Trump, and the group still constitutes his most loyal base of support, the evangelical-fundamentalist distinction looks rather thin.
Experts know and write about the diversity within the evangelical movement, yet even they often use the word indiscriminately in many ways. I learned my lesson as a college student, doing honors research under Valarie Ziegler. My 1987 thesis, “Modern Fundamentalism and the Legacy of Nineteenth Century Revivalism,” demonstrates the enormous gap between, say, a Jerry Falwell and a Charles Finney. Finney knew nothing of evolutionary science or critical biblical scholarship, and his social views clearly identified him as a progressive. Falwell started out as a segregationist, then promoted the broad range of views we now identify with the Religious Right. Yet Falwell’s associates claimed a direct line between Finney and fundamentalism.
People apply the term evangelical to all sorts of people who diverge in significant ways. Is the black church evangelical? If so, why don’t African Americans support Trump like white evangelicals do? Do we include socially progressive evangelicals like Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne — who prefer the term “red letter Christians” — alongside a Franklin Graham? How do we account for Southern Christians, who rarely identified as evangelicals before the rise of Jerry Falwell, and whose religious history is deeply imbricated with slavery and segregation?
White evangelicals’ scandalous affinity for Donald Trump leads many to question the viability of the movement itself. And well it should. It would also help if we’d be clear in what we’re talking about.
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