Should we stop calling ourselves “evangelicals”?
Should we just give up on “evangelicalism”?
I am asked these questions all the time, usually by Christians who are concerned that these labels no longer accurately define or describe who they are and what they believe.
In this episode of Signposts, I talk about these questions and offer my own perspective on the status and future of evangelical Christianity in the United States.
Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, this is Russell Moore, and you’re listening to Signposts – questions about faith, life, and culture. Matter of fact, this is Signpost’s rebirth. This is the new relaunch of Signposts, and today I want to talk about a question that I get so often that I’m frankly starting to get tired of it. It’s the question of whether or not we ought to give up on the word “evangelical,” or whether we ought to give up on evangelicalism itself as a movement. Now here’s why I think this actually is an important question, and it’s about more than just names and titles and categories. I often, when I hear people talking about my hometown I know when someone pronounces it “Biloxi” that this is someone who has no idea what the town is, and they’re simply reading a word off of a page. I even had someone say to me one time, when they were talking to me about, “Now you’re from Biloxi, Mississippi.” I said, “No, I’m from Biloxi Mississippi. It’s pronounced Biloxi.” And the response was, “Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Well, it does matter to me, because if you’re naming it something other than what it actually is, then it’s telling me that you don’t know it, you don’t understand it.
I think that’s one of the reasons why many of us (and I say us) are irked sometimes when we see the word “evangelical” being used in some really broad and often weird and sometimes even gospel-denying kinds of ways out there in the broader culture. A couple years ago, I wrote a piece in The Washington Post that said that I find myself not using the word “evangelical” very often anymore and instead using “Gospel Christian” when people ask me about my religious affiliation and who I am. And the reason for that is because often now, when people in the larger world use the word “evangelical,” what they’re doing is talking about mostly simply a political category. They’re talking about white evangelicals, rarely talking about evangelicals of color, and they’re talking about a caricature of evangelicals, either that’s just kind of a voting bloc – a group of people that are just kind of like cicadas that go into dormancy between Iowa caucuses every four years, or evangelical in terms of the most buffoonish sorts of representatives of evangelicalism that might be out there on television or or on the internet.
Now, why that’s important is because there is a sense out there among many people that I deal with all the time – some of you, I know that many of you who listen to this program aren’t Christians yet, and sometimes the biggest skepticism that many people have is “Well, is Christianity, and particularly evangelical Christianity, about something else? Are you talking about Jesus just so you can get me to sign up with some movement, or so that I can behave the way that you want me to behave, or so I can buy the products that you want me to buy?” Those sorts of questions. That’s a problem, that’s an important issue that we ought to face.
The other is that often when I see the word “evangelical” being used, it’s being used in a way that is on the one hand really, really narrow – talking about white evangelicals who share the same sorts of subculture, on the other hand, really, really broadly – including, for instance, prosperity gospel hucksters out there in the world that that are being claimed as evangelical Christians. And one of the ways that this came home to me in recent years was I was having a conversation with someone who is a prosperi