Evangelical at its root means evangel or “good news.” We proclaim to follow a man who chose to affiliate himself with the poor and dispossessed, who called the political and religious leaders of his day to account, who saw and loved people whom others had discarded.
To be sure, no political leader can or should try to enact the good news in policy. Christians of good conscience have and will continue to elect leaders of different ideologies, then go about the daily task of loving their neighbors.
But when evangelical starts to sound like very bad news for very many Americans, it has drifted far from its roots. A prophetic consensus has emerged that U.S. evangelicalism is irreducibly linked with white privilege.
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