The Term "Evangelical" Has Become Meaningless

I would suggest that something more complicated is going on, something that may have given a generation of Americans the wrong idea about evangelicalism – and U.S. politics. What has happened is nothing short of a 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. And due to polling definitions, it doesn’t fully include millions of African Americans and Latinos, confusing our understanding of how religion and politics mix.