Who Owns Evangelicalism?

A little while ago, I had written two pieces (here and here) making the case for defining evangelicalism according to its theological distinctives and not its (pervasively but not exhaustively) shared convictions on social issues.  Evangelical positions on abortion and gay marriage, I said, are positions that most evangelicals deduce from our core principles.  But they are not the core principles themselves, and some evangelicals (who are genuinely evangelical theologically) do not arrive by deduction at the same positions.  That is, and I say this as a social conservative: you can be evangelical theologically and not conservative on social issues.

All well and good, says Fred Clark, proprietor of the popular “slacktivist” blog.  ”I agree with Tim” that evangelical should be defined theologically, he wrote, “although I’m afraid that — in practice — most Americans evangelicals do not.”  Indeed, “culture-war definitions of ‘evangelical’ seem to be ascendant.”