The word 'evangelical,' both the noun and the adjective, is burdened with ambiguity. It comes from the Greek (euangelion, meaning "good news") and is the New Testament's word for the Christian gospel. In the 18th century, it came to designate a party within the Church of England whose members tended toward Reformed or Calvinistic views on theology and liturgy, with their emphasis on Scripture rather than tradition and on good works as a consequence of salvation rather than as a way of achieving it. Over time, and especially in early 20th-century America, it came to describe anyone who believed the New Testament's account of the "good news" about Jesus and who therefore wanted others to believe it, too. For the past 20 or 30 years, it has designated nearly any Christian believer, Protestant or Catholic, who feels strongly about his or her faith.
Which is to say that it's not a very helpful word. Indeed, many evangelicals, or rather people who might otherwise be known as evangelicals, have long since disavowed the term. Steven Miller in "The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years" doesn't work very hard to define it; he says only (in a parenthetical aside) that evangelicalism is "the label commonly given to the public expression of born-again Christianity." That definition is at once too narrow and too broad. It's too narrow because it deals only with "public expression"—that is, politics—as if evangelicalism were primarily a political creed. And it's too broad in that it conflates people who want nothing to do with one another. What, other than perhaps a rough similarity in voting patterns, do followers of the mega-church Texas pastor Joel Osteen have to do with members of the primarily northeastern Orthodox Presbyterian Church? Not much.
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