I would suggest that these poll results point to a wholesale watering-down and politicization of the term ‘evangelical.’ We probably can’t do without the term, and historically it was quite a valuable one. But in American pop culture parlance, ‘evangelical’ now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republican.
George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards would be utterly perplexed by this development. These early evangelicals were fighting specifically against cultural Christianity, which was politicized in state churches. In their day, if you lived in Britain or its colonies, and had been baptized as an infant, you were regarded as a Christian. No questions asked.
Swimming against the stream of culture, the evangelicals of the Great Awakening preached against nominalism and national faith, declaring that you must be born again. The born-again believer would find a radically different, Kingdom-minded way of life in the community of the redeemed.
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