I recall watching Richard John Neuhaus address the National Association of Evangelicals when still a Lutheran pastor. He intoned in his sonorous voice at the start of his talk, “We evangelicals . . .” all the time smiling like a Cheshire cat.
Neuhaus’ grin came to mind recently when reading American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert Putnam and David Campbell. The scholars analyze the results from surveys they created to help them describe and understand American religion. As with any survey, the results of Putnam and Campbell’s polls can be received with confidence only if the sample size of the surveys is large enough to assure the researchers that the results reflect the underlying population. So Putnam and Campbell needed to aggregate members of religious groups in order to get a large enough sample so that they, and their readers, have some confidence in the statistical results they publish. One of the categories they created is the category of “evangelical Protestant.”   

Putnam and Campbell include in this group churches as diverse as the Assemblies of God (charismatic), the Christian Reformed Church (Calvinist), Church of the Nazarene (Wesleyan), Four Square Gospel Church (fundamentalist), Southern Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist, Pentecostal Churches, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, and many more. They distinguish this set of churches from Mainline Protestant, Black Protestant, and Catholic.     

A couple of thoughts on the category.   

First, I have no complaint with Putnam and Campbell’s category; they had to come up with some way of defining and grouping evangelical churches. The only alternative to grouping would be to increase the size of the sample they took significantly, which would have increased their costs significantly. So they need to aggregate across denominational lines.     

Nonetheless, their grouping of churches they include as “evangelical” is arresting. It raises the question both of the description of “evangelical” as well as its use as a category in explaining religious behavior in the U.S.    

While the group of evangelical churches identified by Putnam and Campbell generally shares a consensus on a set of basic doctrines—the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, his deity, his virgin birth, his second coming, etc.—there nonetheless is also significant variation in belief and practice among this set of churches. Yet for all the variation, churches in this group do share an underlying commonality in orientation toward reading the scriptures that allows for cross-denominational identity and communication.     

For the most part, any member of one of these churches could sit down with a member of another church in the group, open the Bible, and share a lucid conversation (even if not arriving at a common conclusion). I particularly enjoy chatting with members of the Church of Christ (not to be confused with the unrelated United Church of Christ). In my experience, members of that church have the highest average level of Bible literacy of any evangelical church in the U.S.     

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