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Type or Movement?
There are basically two related types of definitions for “evangelical” “evangelicalism,” and the like.
Definition 1
“Evangelical” as a type (quite literally, a type—a particular, distinct variety) of Christian ethos, of “Christian being.” This definition is what is indicated by British historian David Bebbington’s oft-cited criteria of crucicentrism, Biblicism, conversionism, and activism:
- Evangelicals focus on Jesus Christ and particularly champion the doctrine of the atonement with a focus on the sacrificial, atoning death of Christ on the cross.
- Evangelicals love the Bible as the Word of God written and place it in the centre of their corporate worship (literally, in terms of church architecture, and liturgically, in terms of the order of service), spiritual exercises, theological method, homiletical emphasis, and epistemological outlook.
- Evangelicals believe that each person must be converted from sin to salvation (not necessarily in a dramatic “conversion experience”) and must press on toward full holiness of life—to be “fully converted.”
- Evangelicals commit themselves to participating with God in his saving mission in and to the world, particularly in the proclamation of the gospel but also in charitable work and in caring for all of creation.
This sort of definition is also the type of definition used by pollsters, sociologists, and others who go out into the world seeking evangelicals: “Do you believe the Bible is...,” “Do you attend church regularly...,” “Have you had an experience of...,” etc. Those people who correspond to their abstract definition they then count as evangelicals. And “evangelicalism” thus is the noun meant to describe this way of being Christian.
Alas, some pollsters and sociologists have used oversimplified versions of definition 1. Such definitions usually have been defended as easier to deploy in the field than the cumbersome jargon of the academicians. I suggest instead that a simple, but not simplistic or truncated, definition can be had, and such a definition will help prevent some unhappy outcomes, not least among which have been the wildly varying totals for “evangelicals” in Canada or the United States.
Worse, some observers of evangelicalism, armed with such compromised “data,” have gone on to make characterizations of “evangelicals” that miss the mark, to put it mildly. (Ron Sider’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience is a key case in point.)6 Having set out with a bad definition, they then find the wrong set of people and thus derive wrong conclusions about evangelicals. The classic case of this in Canada is the George Rawlyk / Angus Reid / Maclean’s poll of the 1990s, which that found large numbers of what George Rawlyk called “Catholic Evangelicals,” when all that they actually found were, in my view, reasonably faithful Roman Catholics. The poll questions failed to distinguish between Protestant and Roman Catholic views of the Bible and Tradition—a significant distinction observed by both sides since, well, the sixteenth century.
A major challenge here, then, is in specifying the criteria for inclusion. Bebbington’s quartet is a good place to start, even if one might quibble about terms. (I myself offer a couple of replacements in my eventual definition below.) Bebbington’s quartet must be supplemented, however, with American historian George Marsden’s fifth element: transdenominationalism. Such an attitude made possible the co-operation of evangelicals in the eighteenth-century revivals, which are the defining moment of the emergence of evangelicalism, as definition 2 indicates below, and ever since.
Transdenominationalism also helps to mark off evangelicals from the more generic category of “fervent orthodox Protestants,” a category that would include, say, conservative Lutherans or conservative Anglicans, who generally have little to do with any other kind of Christian. (More on the implications of this distinction below.)
Definition 2
“Evangelical” as an individual or corporate entity which belongs to a historical movement known as “evangelicalism.” This definition is based on the eighteenth-century revivals as the site of the emergence of a historical phenomenon: evangelicalism. For this sort of definition to be useful today, we must speak carefully. Evangelicals today would be those individuals and groups who
(a) descend from those revivals
and
(b) have not departed from the characteristic emphases of those revivals (which is where definition 1 does help us, if it is rooted in historical description, as Bebbington’s and Marsden’s definitions are)
or
(c) have since identified themselves with this evangelical tradition.
Canadian examples of (a) and (b) would be (most) Canadian Baptists, and some Canadian Presbyterians, Anglicans, and United Church people. Examples of (a) and not (b) would be most of the United Church of Canada. Examples of (c) would be the Mennonite Brethren and Christian Reformed Church.
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