How "Evangelical" Became Politicized
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I have a “Houses of Worship” column asking, “How ‘Evangelical’ are Iowa’s Evangelicals?” Here’s a sample:
The 2024 presidential campaign begins in earnest on Monday, with the Iowa caucuses. On the religion front, this means a new round of reports by journalists, pollsters, and scholars about how “evangelicals” support the twice-divorced Donald Trump.
But who exactly are these evangelicals? It’s difficult to know. Some self-identified evangelical voters don’t even attend church. Many in the media seem to define “evangelicals” as white Republicans who consider themselves religious. Such a definition, in both a spiritual and a historical sense, is ludicrous…
For technical reasons related to sample sizes, most pollsters ask only white people if they are evangelicals. The result is that the news media’s label mostly refers to white Americans who respond to polls and identify as evangelicals. In a time when conservative churches are booming in Latin America, Africa, East Asia and elsewhere, this white Republican cohort is a thin slice of the world’s evangelical community. Globally, most born-again churchgoers aren’t white and they certainly aren’t Republican, because they aren’t American.
Read the rest here.
For those of you who have read my book Who Is an Evangelical? these may be familiar themes. That book was one of the reasons the Journal editors asked me to write this piece.
The column was also prompted by Ruth Graham’s excellent story at the New York Times, which actually profiles some of the nonchurchgoing “evangelicals” in Iowa. This is one of the only attempts I have seen in the media to identify and understand nonchurchgoing voters who still call themselves evangelicals.
I don’t expect that my column will “move the needle” much in terms of intelligent discussions about evangelicals and politics. Journalists and scholars who simply want to trash evangelicals will continue to do so. But I have actually seen some improvement since 2016 in the relative nuance of some reporting on evangelicals.
I talked to a writer for a major national magazine in 2016, for example, who had no idea that polls about “evangelicals” usually only ask white people if they are evangelicals. That level of basic unfamiliarity with the subject may be receding a bit. Still, we can expect that in certain quarters “evangelical” will continue to be used as an all-purpose slur, especially in an election year.