A New Kind of “Evangelical”?

“Evangelicalism has long had an individualistic strain that resists the idea that personal faith requires church attendance,” Graham and Homans tell us. And, in their minds, those they profile serve as evidence that Donald Trump has helped these new evangelicals carve out terrain in the legitimate and long-established non-church-going wing of evangelicalism. But all of their question-begging raises an important question: are these new evangelicals or not evangelicals? Certainly, evangelicalism is a tradition with murkier boundaries than Catholicism or Presbyterianism, but one would be hard pressed to identify which section of David Bebbington’s Evangelicalism Quadrilateral (conversionism, biblicism, activism, crucicentrism) has room for the Proud Non-Churchgoers.