The question used to identify evangelicals in today’s exit polls is “Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian?” Unfortunately, this is not a great survey question. One problem with this measure is that it produces estimates of the evangelical population considerably larger and different from estimates based on measures more commonly used by scholars. The measure originates with the Gallup Organization, which has been using it since 1986 to track the size of America’s evangelical population. It was introduced into presidential election exit polls in 2004. Despite Gallup’s reputation, the measure has several flaws. It is a double-barreled question that implies that “born-again” and “evangelical” are interchangeable labels, which may not be true for all respondents. It does not offer respondents alternate ways of expressing religious identity, which no doubt inflates estimates of the evangelical population. In this respect, a better question would be “Would you describe yourself as an evangelical Christian, another type of Christian, or a non-Christian?”

This measure produces inconsistent estimates about the proportion of the country that is evangelical. In 1998, Gallup estimates suggested that about half of the U.S. population was evangelical (47%). In 1986, they estimated the evangelical population at 31% of the country, and in 2007 Gallup estimated that 41% of the country was evangelical. Furthermore, the measure is used inconsistently. Sometimes the question is asked of all Americans, as is the case with Gallup surveys. In such surveys, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish respondents often identity as evangelical, although evangelical identity is usually classified by scholars as a Protestant category. In other surveys, only self-identified Protestants are asked whether they are evangelical. In discussions of voting behavior, analysis of this measure is often restricted to white respondents, who tend to vote differently than non-white evangelicals. I believe that tonight news agencies are only reporting on the exit poll results for white evangelicals.

Despite the above problems with the Gallup measure of evangelicalism, those it identifies as evangelical do tend to be distinct from the rest of the population in terms of their voting behavior and religious commitment. However, many social scientists prefer to measure evangelicals based upon their affiliation with a denomination in the Evangelical Protestant religious tradition, roughly captured by the membership of the National Association of Evangelicals. John Green of the Pew Center for Religion and Public Life, along with frequent co-authors James Guth, Lyman Kellstedt, and Corwin Smidt, for instance, use the denomination-based approach to make claims about evangelical behavior. Another way of measuring evangelicals is testing adherence to a series of belief measures, which is the approach used by University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter in his studies of evangelicalism in the 1980s and in recent surveys from the Barna Research Group.

In the current issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, D. Michael Lindsay and I discuss the consequences of using these various measures to gauge the evangelical population. A straightforward but important observation we make about these measures is that they often lead to conflicting claims about the size and characteristics of the evangelical population. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues produced an excellent study of evangelicals in 1998, which claimed that evangelicals were “embattled and thriving.” By design, Smith’s study defined evangelicals as those who described themselves as Protestant, regular churchgoers, and who chose “evangelical” from a list of Protestant identities. A footnote on the first page of his study notes, however, that these evangelicals constituted 7% of the country, a far cry from the Gallup estimate in that year that 47% of the country was evangelical.

As claims are made about the evangelical voter in the coming days, readers should consider how the evangelical population is measured in various surveys. Inevitably, the measure will change from survey to survey, likely leading to different interpretations of the evangelical vote. Readers should consider which people are included and excluded from the measures of evangelicalism in question. One of the most interesting aspects of the evangelical vote is likely to be the extent to which younger evangelical voters indicate that they voted for Obama, and the issues which they identify as motivating their vote.

[See also: Mapping the evangelical vote.---ed.]

Fears of heresy and infidelity have long exercised the electorate.  In the election of 1800 Federalist opponents called Thomas Jefferson a wicked non-believer.  In more recent years, as Randall Balmer recounts in God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, the 1960 election provoked a new wave of anti-Catholic fear.  Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and other leading evangelicals wondered whether a Catholic could be appropriately loyal to his country. In 1960 the largest pentecostal denomination in America, the Assemblies of God—which Sarah Palin later belonged to—jumped into the fray.  A church representative asked emphatically, “Haven’t the American people enough ‘security risks’ as it is without placing another in the President’s office?”  In the months before the election, thousands of churchgoers sent letters to the pentecostal Church of God’s headquarters in Cleveland, Tennessee, asking how they should vote.  The denomination’s general overseer warned his flock that if Protestants sat by idly, no one could complain if a Catholic assumed the nation’s highest office.

But by the late 1960s, after Vatican II and a whole range of social changes, it no longer mattered if politicians crossed themselves and prayed the rosary. Anti-Catholicism was gauche even in conservative evangelical circles by the 1970s.

Before the 1960s pentecostals were personae non gratae at the evangelical and fundamentalist table.  Even shouting jack-leg Baptist preachers thought holy rollers a rowdy bunch.  A black preacher led the pentecostal revival that irrupted at Azusa Street, Los Angeles in 1906.  It featured interracial and cross-class worship. Early initiates at the Azusa meeting and converts from across the country wanted nothing to do with politics.  At best political activity was a waste of time, and at worst it was a diabolical delusion, better left to wicked reprobates.  Tongues speech, prophecy, and healing—based on a literal reading of the New Testament and a belief that miraculous works of the Spirit marked these “last days”—shocked the living daylights out of other conservative Christians.  Pentecostals sequestered themselves from much of mainstream culture. To some anti-pentecostal folk “tonguers” were ridiculous, to other opponents they were demonic.

Yet after World War II pentecostals made a kind of pilgrimage to respectability.  Rising incomes and a rising profile made followers more self-conscious of what other Christians thought of them and more acutely aware of their stake in society. In 1960 Thomas Zimmerman, the general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, became head of the National Association of Evangelicals.  Once shunned by such groups, pentecostals were now welcomed into the conservative Protestant fold.

By the time the conservative charismatic televangelist Pat Robertson ran for president in 1988, many pentecostals had already become politicicized.  They were largely united in their opposition to the social revolutions of the 1960s. The 1962 Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale, forbidding prayer in public schools, outraged them.  A little more than a decade later the Roe v. Wade case legalized abortion, adding urgency to their cause.  Pentecostal and non-pentecostal conservatives alike now championed Christian civilization and public virtue.  Great Society liberals, critics warned, wasted the nation’s fortunes on undeserving poor and turned a blind eye to soaring crime rates and rampant immorality.

Today, by almost every measure, pentecostals rank among the most conservative of America’s Christians.  A large number say the government should take steps to make the U.S. a Christian nation.  A Pew survey conducted in 2006 showed that “pentecostals often stand out for their traditional views on a wide range of social and moral issues, from homosexuality to extra-marital sex to alcohol consumption.”  Sixty-four percent of American pentecostals say that abortion can never be justified. By the 1990s, denominations like the Assemblies of God were issuing far right edicts on a range of political issues: environmentalism, feminism, human origins science, human cloning, law and crime, capital punishment, and euthanasia.

A progressive activist in Alaska once asked Palin if she believed that doomsday was right around the corner. Philip Munger comments, “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.’”  She’s not alone. Ninety percent of pentecostals register particularly strong views on the last days and the rapture.  Only 53% of nonpentecostal Christians express similar concern.  Whether that means that pentecostals favor a scorched earth policy with regard to environmentalism is another matter.  Commentators often read far too much into millennialism, though that novel eschatology shapes the worldviews of adherents in subtle ways.

Nondenominational or Bible-believing churches, like the one that Sarah Palin and her family now attend, are also overwhelmingly conservative.  Many such groups are intensely restorationist.  They hope to restore an uncluttered New Testament church of the Bible, freed from the apostate innovations of the last 1,700 years and loosed from the straightjacket of creeds and dogmatism.  Ironically, though, such churches develop their own creeds and theological peculiarities that often go unacknowledged: biblical literalism, premillennialism, a strict understanding of baptism and of who can and cannot be ordained.

So what role will Sarah Palin’s faith play in the November contest and, perhaps, beyond?  On one hand Americans are treated to Sam Harris’s fire-breathing polemic—equal parts H. L. Mencken and Richard Dawkins—against her in Newsweek.  Led by the Spirit, Harris implies, Palin would unleash the United States’ nuclear arsenal on infidels, perhaps hoping to speed Armageddon.  On the other hand Americans read glowing testimonials in the Weekly Standard and other conservative outlets hailing the Alaska governor as a scrappy saint or Ronald Reagan in a dress.

John McCain’s handlers have been wise to downplay Palin’s pentecostalism while stressing her born-again, non-denominational bona fides.  The image of a tongues-speaking, rapture-ready, creationist, hockey mom doesn’t play so well with nonpentecostals.  Yet her Bible-believing Christianity has mattered a great deal to the base.  While the Azusa Street roots are downplayed, Palin’s evangelicalism is front and center, reassuring millions of her fitness for office. Christian culture warriors have embraced her and have decided that McCain is not so bad after all.  Sins of commission and omission are washed away in a second.  So what if it turned out that Wasilla was not quite Main Street USA.  So what if comments about earmarks were only vaguely “truthy.”  Palin was one of us, conservative Christians seemed to be saying. When news broke that her seventeen-year-old daughter Bristol was pregnant, James Dobson called for healing and restoration.  Those were not the first words to come out of conservatives’ mouths in the early 1990s when fictional TV character Murphy Brown was with child and without husband.  So, through the alchemy of religious partisanship—and just as Jimmy Swaggart was viewed as “honest” for asking forgiveness for sexual dalliances—Bristol Palin’s conception has become an immaculate one.

Maybe all this has shown that religious identity politics is alive and well in America.  The tidal wave of evangelical moderation that pundits predicted in the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere looks more like a ripple now.  Many are waiting to see how these issues will play out when Palin and Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden go head to head.  As team McCain-Palin trains, one wonders if they have crafted answers to questions like: Have you ever spoken in tongues?  If so, what’s it like?  What will it look like when Jesus returns?  Did humans harness the power of dinosaurs in ancient times?  Was America founded as a Christian nation?  What kind of books should libraries pull from their shelves?

That would make for an interesting debate.

[See also: The Immanent Frame's web roundup of pieces on Palin and religion, at here & there.]

In the late 1970s, coming out as a gay person was indistinguishable—for me—from the arduous project of developing a secular self-understanding.  Since I wish to understand the relation of sex and secularity, what is important for the purpose of this discussion is just how arduous this development of a secular self-understanding was.  The difficulty of this process is something that people routinely forget about secularism, especially when terms like “secular rationality” come into play.

I had come from that wing of American Protestantism that had only learned in the 1970s to mobilize itself.  After a long history of isolation through fundamentalist self-understanding, the Protestants of my milieu had shifted to a more evangelical political style.   The elements of this style lay deep in American history, but this was the first time that a movement context not only united charismatics such as Pat Robertson with fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell, but created a pan-Christian alliance—that is, Protestant and Catholic activists working together.  Interestingly enough, all the issues that enabled the creation of this alliance had to do with sexuality in one way or another: the ERA, Roe v. Wade, gay rights, teen pregnancy, the pill, and so on.  These Christians needed sex in order to exist as a movement.  They also needed a narrative, and the main storyline was that they were fighting a hegemonic force.  In the 1970s, they learned to call that force “secular humanism.”

As I was coming out of this evangelical fundamentalist self-understanding toward something that would afford more scope for coming out, I looked around for that secular humanism that I’d heard so much about.  Imagine my surprise and disappointment—despair, nearly—when I discovered that it didn’t exist.

Most of the movements that these religious mobilizers were fighting—that is, the social movements of the ’60s—had not been organized around an idea of secular humanism.  Instead, many of them were anti-humanist.  Many of them didn’t really think about whether they were secularist or not.  Many of them, in fact, had a lot of play for religious activists, including gay liberation, which, as we’re now discovering, had a large role for various church organizations and religiously-minded folk.  So the story of secular humanism was, in large part, a kind of ruse, one that seems to have been developed by Francis Schaeffer and then picked up by others.  But learning that it was a ruse was a key insight for me in choosing to research the history of the secular.

The development of my secularity was more than the intimate pain of sacrificing family membership, of being thought to be a backsliding sinner.   There was also the sense—whenever I looked at the situation with my old eyes—that in going secular, as it were, I was joining the enemy that was “secular humanism,” that great and powerful antagonist that had given such heroic significance, in this world and the next, to the pious struggles of my family and the network of churches that was our world.

Not only that, the transition was difficult because the language of normativity seemed to be only on the side I was leaving.   The conflict between evangelical Christians and secular humanism was imagined—and here the evangelical apologists were greatly abetted by the liberal proceduralism in which American secularists usually justify themselves—as a conflict between norms and license, values and no values, ethical purpose and appetitive dissolution (one finds this same antinomy, upended, in such queer theories of sexuality as Leo Bersani’s influential notion of “shattering”).

What, then, could motivate this transition?  What could carry one through the struggles and conflicts of dissolving one familial and social world in search of another?  And how could that other world be imagined, since it seemed so averse to avowing itself?

There are of course many answers to these questions, but all leave something to be desired as an articulation of that affective/corporeal struggle.  An ethical language of autonomy was something, to be sure, though it didn’t explain much about sexuality, since monkish abstinence can just as easily be autonomy, and (as Bersani reminds us) self-shattering in sexuality isn’t fully in line with norms of autonomy, either.

My situation was admittedly unusual.  Most people, in America or elsewhere, do not encounter religion and secularism as such mutually exclusive worlds as they were for me in the moment of coming out, and even in my own situation I now recognize that the evangelical mobilization from which I emerged was in many ways already a profoundly secular one.  My point here is that the main paradigms for understanding the secular still leave us with little to say about the corporeal, affective, and ethical reeducation through which I, like many others, had to plunge.

Talal Asad, in a very important essay called “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?”, calls people to think of the secular not just as a legal or governmental ideology of neutrality or distance, not just as an institutional framework for coordinating private religiosity, but as a culture that has its own practices, its own sensorium, its own hierarchy of faculties, its own habits of being.  It’s not clear to me that one can, in fact, identify something like a secular subject with quite the confidence that he seems to believe (one reason being that modern secular societies, in the sense expounded by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, include quite religious subjects; one cannot locate the difference between the religious and the secular simply at the level of “the subject”).  But Asad rightly shows that it is important to understand the secular as something having a lot more thickness and inhabitable subjectivities.  What is the lived and embodied dimension of the secular?  In what ways does secular culture exceed the governmental-legal framework?   And how is this bodily secularity related to the thin accounts of “secular rationality,” “Enlightenment rationalism,” or the other trends generally invoked to describe the rise of the secular?

It would be vain to try to associate sexuality as closely with the secular as the anti-secularists would like to believe.  It is not the case—as I was led to believe by all the rhetoric in my family—that there is a real unity between a secular humanist philosophy and the process of secularization that culminated in the sexuality movements of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.  But the sexual body has long been the scene of barely articulate struggles to imagine a post-Christian order—as for example in the seventeenth century appearance of libertinism, which was very often associated with atheism by its detractors; or in the development of what Taylor calls an immanent counter-enlightenment.   These struggles mark both the internal histories of the West and its relation to the rest of the world.  In another post, Elizabeth Povinelli asks us to remember that the very idea of sexuality carves up the space of carnality so as to make the antinomies of Christianity (and the inversions of those antinomies in late Christian culture) seem natural.   Neither secularity nor sexuality quite makes sense without this history.

At present we are again seeing a rise in anti-secular rhetoric in which sexuality is taken to be indicative of the secular order.  But that rhetoric is now globalizing; it is no longer the idiom of American evangelicals alone.  These struggles, and the need to understand them, are likely to deepen.

[See also: Michael Warner's "Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood."]

But who are—or what are—evangelicals? Clearly they are not the monolithic group that a one-word signifier, a noun, implies. On this blog in recent weeks John Schmalzbauer, Brian Howell, Joel Carpenter, James K. A. Smith and Corwin Smidt have pointed to variations in theology, religious practices, racial identity, political affiliation, and political ideology among those who get labeled “evangelical.” Christian Smith, and Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, in various books, have shown many ways in which “evangelicals” display the similarities and varieties that make up “average” Americans. And historians remind us that some of the denominations that we now call “mainline” were once considered “evangelical.”

But the temptation to use “evangelical” as an all-purpose descriptor remains. For example, in the 2006 film Jesus Camp the participants are all described, when described at all, as “evangelical.” The one exception is Becky Fischer, who is the more-or-less central character of the film, who at one point is described as “Pentecostal” without any definition of what that means. Several narrator “script-overs” (done with words on the screen, rather than “voiceovers”) begin “Evangelicals believe . . . .” And put “evangelical” into amazon.com—you get about 70,000 responses—many titles that address small slices of the population and others that purport to speak for a “whole.” Clearly the term is useful in some ways, given its wide use in both scholarly and popular writing, but its meaning certainly seems to expand or contract dramatically.

Why is this a problem? If one wants to sell books, it may not be a problem at all—every author knows the value of a title that has a specific referent but also implies interest to a broad audience. And sweeping claims sell more books than carefully nuanced and qualified argument. On the other hand, if one really wants to understand American religion, as an institution and as an integral part of American culture, one needs more textured analysis than the broad-strokes implied by current use of the term “evangelical.” What it is one wants to know influences how useful the cover term can be.

It is instructive to think about the similar dynamics that shaped a couple of other ideas in recent American religion. Both the idea of the “Catholic American,” and more recently, the term “fundamentalist” have been examined, expanded, and eventually mostly abandoned. For example, up until the early 1960s, political scientists were writing books about, and pundits were referring to, “the Catholic vote.” No one would do that now—but why? Well, for one thing, in last 40 years Catholics have moved in considerable numbers into the middle-class, moved into all sorts of suburbs and exurbs, and now vote in a myriad of ways. In short, they have become such “average Americans” that they defy classification with one-word labels. Also, Catholics were not so homogenous even back in the day, when “the Catholic vote” came in reliable blocs to particular parties and candidates. If one thinks about all the subjective and ethnic cultural differences that are contained within the Catholic population of the U.S., the homogenizing assumption of “the” Catholic vote was even then masking differences among Irish, Poles, Mexicans, and others—differences now further accentuated by the immigration numbers since the 1965 changes in immigration policy.

The term “fundamentalist,” perhaps more than either evangelical or Catholic, has had its normative and analytic meanings tightly connected. Born in theological and social controversies that accompanied the industrializing and urbanizing U.S. in the early twentieth century, “fundamentalist” has been used as a pejorative by at least some almost from the inception of the term. There have been periods, of course, when those within the community used the term with pride as a self-description. And from the late 1980s through the late 1990s there was a significant academic industry in writing about fundamentalists, fundamentalism, and fundamentalisms (full disclosure—I participated in and benefited from that industry). But an examination of recent scholarship shows that the word has faded a bit from book titles and the keywords of published articles. And ethnographic research with many religious communities shows that they themselves use the term infrequently, often because of its negative connotations and perceived stigma. This may be post-9/11 concern about religious radicalism, or it may be an unwillingness of American Christians to recognize any comparisons with conservative groups among other faith traditions, particularly Islam. It may also be connected to a feeling of over-identification between conservative Protestants and the Republican Party, perhaps mixed with some disenchantment with the Bush Administration.

This dilemma emerged in discussions at a conference I attended recently. Although the word “fundamentalisms” was in the conference title, a significant number of participants expressed discomfort with it. Even finding the proper scope of the term sparked disagreements. Some noted that if defined by theological beliefs (such as premillennial dispensationalism, a doctrine used as a definitional component by some scholars), fundamentalism should be confined to Christianity. Others noted certain religious practices, such as rigid rules for scriptural interpretation and a focus on scriptural authority, made the term reasonable for the three Abrahamic traditions. Others went for more sociological and political definitions that defined the term broadly, but largely lost sight of the phenomenology and self-understanding of religious fundamentalists themselves. This ambiguity, combined with the seemingly inseparable normative issues, may be why the academic literature on fundamentalism has waned (and, of course, the need for academics to move on to new topics and ideas).

In any case, similar issues dog “evangelicalism” as a category. It is well known, at least among scholars of American religion, that there are several different ways of defining who is an evangelical (see Corwin Smidt’s recent posting for more detail). There can be self-definitions, and in several surveys people have shown themselves willing to distinguish between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” and “mainline” and “liberal” when describing themselves religiously. Or one can use denominational affiliation; that is, some denominations are defined as “evangelical” and any person who attends a church within those denominations is thus tagged). Or one can list a set of core beliefs, or religious practices, and define those who subscribe to them as “evangelical.” Conrad Hackett and Michael Lindsay have an article coming out in the September 2008 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that shows that the estimates of how many evangelicals there are in the U.S. can vary widely, depending of the definitions and measures used.

These definitional matters, and the nuance they afford, are useful for scholars, and those wanting to understand the variation in the American religious landscape. And they give us understandable caution about responding to such basic—and simplifying questions—as “how many evangelicals are there?”

But in the end, whether this matters really depends on why one wants to know. Those who have traced historically or sociologically the emergence of evangelicals in the U.S., either in the nineteenth century or in the mid-twentieth century, have carefully delineated theological, doctrinal, and denominational distinctions. But how much does that all matter, either in everyday life, or in politics? James K. A. Smith, in an earlier post on The Immanent Frame said that evangelicalism “is defined by a contingent constellation of practices and institutions.” “Evangelical,” Smith claims, “is an identity forged at a level more visceral than doctrinal.” Thus, Smith goes for an “it takes one to know one” definition—a basic cultural knowledge and compatibility that is embedded in a variety of little things. Corwin Smidt, in his recent posting on the “measurement of evangelicals” mostly advocates a “movement” definition; that is, people who are evangelical when they identify with the religious tradition as a “movement”—although he is quick to point out how nebulous measurement can be with such a definition.

That makes pretty good sense, and respects the wide variation that scholars find in the details of what evangelicals believe doctrinally, how much money they make, how educated they are, and the like. It helps to make some sense of arguments made by Michael Lindsay and Rebecca Sager, also on The Immanent Frame, that there are “new types” of evangelicals, often relatively progressive in their politics. And with the newly articulated concerns on, for example, poverty, AIDS, and global warming, by Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and others. So, understanding variation, and finding shades of gray in the “evangelical” monolith, may have significant political implications.

Moreover, the idea of evangelical “identity” as primary and visceral also helps make sense of the affection conservative Protestants showed for both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. They may not have agreed on all the issues and policies, and there were even some questions as to how explicitly religious President Reagan was. But both men spoke a language—and were comfortable in the assumptions of a faith—that connected at a visceral level with evangelicals. Those things were often absolutely incomprehensible to many on the other side of the current political divide, and who don’t share those religious sentiments. This identification wasn’t a cognitive agreement, or a matter of instrumental or material interests, as much as an alignment of identities. It worked—there was a connection.

But the implications of this last point undercut the commitment to maintaining a focus on evangelical variation. Evangelicals are people of diversity and wide variations, I don’t doubt that. But in an election one gets to choose one or the other. A lot of variation gets condensed, by necessity, into an either/or choice. One can have doubts, questions, or be “leaning” one way or the other. But the voting choice itself records the committed partisan and the leaner the same way.

As a variety of scholars have shown, in the end the lever gets pulled for reasons that often are difficult to articulate in terms of ideology, issues, or cognitive alignment. Certainly voters explain their votes after the fact based on those factors. Few people openly admit that they voted for George Bush over John Kerry (or Al Gore) because he seemed like he would be a better person “to have a beer with” (a popular claim)—but there is no doubt that a form of that emotive identity alignment deeply influences huge numbers of voters. There is an ideological presumption behind it—our democratic, somewhat populist ideology frowns on the idea that some are “born to lead” and therefore encourages identification between the populace and their leaders. But how is that connection via the “common” established? Not through policy white papers and close examination of interests. It is established through a version of “it takes one to know one.” When people feel a connection—particularly people for whom the subjective experience of religion is highly emotional and highly legitimate—it is real for them. Thomas Frank may heap scorn on Kansasans because they fail to see what their “true interests” are—but just as surely, Frank fails to see that often people pull the lever from their gut. How else can a multi-racial man who was raised by a single mother and went to school on scholarships be thought to be “elitist” compared to white men who grew up in families of privilege? It is because we find the “common” or the “elite” in a cultural style. We know it when we see it.

Now it is true that in an electorate fairly neatly divided, one need not persuade very many people in order to win an election. Just a few cracks in the Republican base, including that part composed of conservative Protestants, may tip the balance. So perhaps I should not doubt the importance of the actual variation among those Christians who consider themselves “evangelicals.” But after the Saddleback Church “conversations” hosted by Rick Warren, where Obama spoke easily and sincerely about his faith, few churchgoers who attended (and spoke to reporters afterward) seemed to be persuaded to actually vote for a Democrat. He was still too different, too unknown, and, some said, still not right about the “core” social issue of abortion. For many people, there is now almost 30 years of associating evangelical Protestantism with voting Republican—it may well have become a part of evangelical identity for many, a core affiliation.

Thus, at least in an election year, when elected officials, aspiring candidates, consultants, and media all have a lot at stake on shaping their appeals effectively, this practical outcome seems to me to swamp the scholarly concerns scholars have with precision and definition. If we want to know who evangelicals are, how many there are, and what they believe and how they practice, I am all for precision, nuance, and variation. But if we need to know how “they” are going to pull a voting lever regarding an either/or choice in a divided electorate, it seems to me that the global term bandied about in the media tells us what we want to know.

What I want to suggest is that to understand the nature of the evangelical world, we need to listen for the distinct evangelical “public narratives.” I borrow this term from Margaret Somers, who writes about public narratives as the stories that identify all cultures and institutions, the shared tales that are constructed out of collective experience and orient the action of those who recognize and participate in them. These “public” stories aren’t just the civic and political ones, but all the explicit and implicit plots that coordinate the actions and expectations of groups large and small.

That is, each situation has its own story, a public narrative shaped by the culture and institutions of which it is a part. When evangelical political figures are interviewed by broadcast journalists, there is a script, and we are rarely surprised. When evangelical parents encounter recalcitrant school boards, or even when everyday evangelical workers try to witness quietly to their faith, there are mutually shared expectations (by insiders and outsiders alike) about how the story will go.

But like all stories, the public narratives that identify a group are multi-layered and subject to twists of plot. Existing narratives about who we are both constrain action and enable innovation. The strands of the existing story give direction to the future, but the fact that there is never just one theme allows new directions to emerge. There often are surprises, dilemmas that create gaps in the script or cast doubt on the implied storyline. More about those gaps and dilemmas in a moment.

If we are to understand evangelicalism, then, we must begin by attending to the shifting store of narratives within which evangelicals live, looking for the actors, plots, and experiences that are taken to belong there. Sometimes those narratives are distilled and institutionalized into experiences that evoke individual and collective memories and mutual recognition (singing “Just as I am” perhaps). Sometimes they are distilled into objects that suggest to those who see them that there is a shared story to be told (quilted bible covers come to mind). Sometimes it is a turn of phrase that suggests a larger story about the world (“I’m so blessed . . . “).

People who use these symbols signal to those who have ears to hear that they are part of the tribe. And once accepted as part of the tribe, their actions (until proven otherwise) will be read through the script that shapes that tribe’s way of living in the world. No elaborate arguments are necessary, simply a knowing nod and smile that says, “I know that story. I could tell you what comes next and how it is supposed to end.”

For instance, George W. Bush had to say almost nothing about gay marriage during the 2004 election for his supporters (and detractors) to be convinced this was a central issue in the campaign. One part of the story—being a born-again leader who shares personal prayers with fellow believers who visit the Oval Office—led inevitably to the next part of the story: we stand together in defense of the family and against the forces of evil that would destroy it.

People who spend a lot of time together—as evangelicals certainly do—build up a large store of such stories and symbols and phrases. Because they attend church with much more regularity than their liberal counterparts, they simply have many more ways to recognize each other and to talk about the world.

So what sorts of public narratives have identified the evangelical world? The longest and deepest set of stories in fact has to do with being born again. It’s no accident that we call these people “evangelicals.” There is a “metanarrative” of sin and redemption at work shaping much of the rest of the evangelical story. They are unsurprised to find the world a flawed place, and they expect that lives can be transformed when people accept the Jesus story as their own. There is both a fundamental fatalism and a boundless hope in how they talk about life.

It is worth noting that the “sin” part of this story is not uniquely theirs. Where they differ from more liberal Christians is in insisting on the singular path—belief in the saving blood of Jesus—away from that sin. On the other side of the Protestant family, it is both the sin and the salvation parts of the story that bind evangelicals together with the Pentecostals and African American Protestants with whom they otherwise differ enormously.

That metanarrative of sin and salvation has, at least in the last couple of generations, become intertwined with an equally pervasive American public narrative about how we get along in a diverse society. From Christian Smith to Alan Wolfe and Michael Lindsay, researchers in the evangelical world have listened for a strident hellfire message and heard instead the everyday stories of people who want to be liked and don’t want to make waves, who translate their story about eternal destiny into a more visible story about kindness and honesty. They declare with their lives, more than with their words, that people who have been saved from eternal damnation are the sorts of caring, hardworking friends and colleagues who don’t succumb to life’s pervasive temptations to cheat and cut corners.

Alongside the narrative of salvation, the narrative of “defending biblical truth” has been the other defining theme in evangelicalism. Yes, this includes knowing a prodigious number of actual bible stories, but more importantly, it means describing what is good and right in the world as “biblical.” That may include being able to cite a verse in scripture that supports the claim, but most of the time, it is the rhetorical use of the word that does the narrative work. It evokes a story of persons and faith communities who spend significant time studying the bible, perhaps stirring up memories of the groups in which that study has been done. It also evokes a longer historical story (a “myth,” if you will) of a world that no longer believes the bible standing against a faithful remnant that knows the bible to be true.

Precisely because “biblical” has come to signal being part of an embattled remnant, the bible itself has been very difficult to use as a tool for undermining the political positions of those who claim to be “biblical.” Liberal evangelicals can muster utterly unassailable scriptural claims about the need to care for the poor or protect the planet, but they do not participate in the “embattled remnant” story that goes with being “biblical.” Disrupting one plot in favor of another is much more complicated than simply engaging in a proof text competition.

But disruptions and complications do happen, and stories do take new directions. In a variety of ways, the ‘60s and ‘70s had begun to undermine the stories evangelicals had been telling about themselves for half a century. They had become everyday participants in a middle-class and culturally diverse world where the “old time religion” of their grandparents sometimes didn’t fit. As they developed everyday strategies for getting along, they also developed an ear for the sorts of stories Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were offering about the threats and opportunities of this new world.

Over the last thirty years, those new stories have taken hold. When the sins of the nation are invoked, people know what list to expect. When the possibilities for redemption are imagined, “taking back” the statehouse or Congress or the courts is part of the story. And the Republican party is routinely cast as an indispensable ally, if not the actual hero. From the grassroots to the federal bureaucracy to the presidency itself, a cohort of politically active evangelicals has signaled to other members of the tribe that God’s work is unfolding in the American public arena.

But there are potential disruptions afoot again. What happens when the Republican nominee is tone deaf to the stories of the tribe, but the Democrat isn’t? What happens when apocalyptic stories about global enemies seem to have done more harm than good? What happens when a critical mass of younger evangelicals starts to make “biblical” and “environmental” stick together in the same story? The stories of the last thirty years are highly entrenched in the lives of the myriad publicly-engaged evangelicals who populate the Bush administration and the courts. No matter what happens at the grassroots level, their positions will give the existing story staying power.

For the disruptions of recent history to result in a new re-telling of what it means to be an evangelical, one or more charismatic figures will likely need to find and re-weave the strands of the story for a new generation. It will have to be convincingly about sin and redemption, about being a biblical people. Within those narrative constraints, however, there are endless possible variations. This is a fascinating moment for watching an old story unfold in new ways.

I am not asking whether or not evangelicals practice what they preach. I simply want to propose that there is more to the everyday meaning of evangelicalism than theological beliefs. In a recent post at The Immanent Frame, James K. A. Smith asks us not to fear using sociology rather than theology alone to define evangelicalism. He asks us to understand evangelicalism as a set of social practices and institutions, rather than trying to divine a specific set of beliefs that reliably and cleanly mark off evangelicals from other Christians. Appreciating Smith’s appeal to a sociological definition, I want to take the next, practical step. If we understand evangelicals’ social practices as realities themselves, and not simply as predictable derivatives of first-moving beliefs, we can better understand what it means to be evangelical in local public life and perhaps beyond. We can, for instance, get a better handle on inter-religious conflicts that we sometimes over-simplify as a clash of beliefs. The point is not that beliefs don’t matter in everyday life, but that we should understand how evangelicals themselves relate beliefs to acts in everyday contexts, rather than assuming from a safe distance that theologies on paper tell us everything we need to know. To begin what I intend as just a bit of a cantankerous contribution to The Immanent Frame’s ongoing discussion of evangelicalism, please indulge a quick scenario from my larger study of religious community service groups in a Midwestern city.

The Religious Anti-Racism Coalition, made up mostly of evangelical and mainline Protestant pastors, decided to hold a celebration of diversity during the time a Ku Klux Klan group from a distant town was going to be marching in their city. The celebration needed a statement of purpose, so a subcommittee that included an evangelical pastor with a Charismatic bent, a lesbian Unitarian minister, and an administrator from a regional synod of the mainline Lutheran (ELCA) church took just twenty minutes to write one. “We want to unite as people of religious faith,” they affirmed, “united in believing that all people are created in the image of God.” Evangelical and mainline Protestant members alike agreed that they, and everyone in town, ought to confess the personal sin of racism in their own lives, and they agreed too that “structural,” institutional racism is itself a sin—in addition to the racism of interpersonal prejudice. Now, the coalition had only to decide whether to identify as Christian or interfaith. The group compiled a list of activities that they agreed not to carry out together if the coalition was to be officially an interfaith group. After that agreement, however, most of the evangelical pastors still said their congregations could not participate in an officially interfaith coalition against racism. Two mainline Protestant pastors said in turn that they could not participate in a coalition that was officially ecumenical Christian but not interfaith.

Agreement on the group’s religious and anti-racist principles took literally just minutes, while arguments over how if at all to include non-Christians in a counter-Klan event took months, and nearly dissolved the coalition. A precarious compromise allowed the counter-Klan event to take place in a cinderblock-walled meeting room attached to the local sports arena. Some observers might suppose the issue was that evangelicals really weren’t strongly committed to anti-racism. Rather than look for hidden racist beliefs or weak religious rationales in evangelicals’ credos, however, we can find a more immediate reason for tensions between the pastors.

When we try to understand what any religious people do in public—from voting and volunteering to acrid debating, protesting and even committing acts of terrorism—we often assume it is deeply held beliefs and sacred texts that “make them do what they do.” Social studies of interaction add something very basic but counterintuitive to this understanding of how religion works, and I think Smith’s earlier post opens to just that point: in social life, we don’t just “apply” religious beliefs as if the beliefs existed in some pure, pre-social world separate from us, telling us what to do.

In sociological terms, applying beliefs always means taking on a religious identity in relation to other people. In any modern, complex society we construct religious identities in relation to other identities near to or far from us. People of different faiths perceive “near” and “far” identities, and draw sharper or fuzzier lines between themselves and other identities in different ways, depending on the context and the religions involved. Pastors in the Religious Anti-Racism Coalition had assumed they simply needed to agree on their beliefs about racism. As a result, they could not understand why the work continued to be so frustrating. My close-up study shows that it was this subtle but very powerful social process of self-identification and boundary drawing that made it so difficult for pastors of seemingly like minds on this issue to work together. I call this social process “mapping.” I contend that by examining the distinctive way that evangelicals do mapping, we can gain insight into conflicts that we may easily and misguidedly attribute to clashing beliefs alone.

Evangelicals in the counter-Klan coalition imagined a different context, a different map, from the one that mainline Protestants were assuming. Each side defined the coalition’s insiders and outsiders differently, despite their shared, religiously-motivated anti-racism. Evangelicals did not worry seriously that contact with non-Christians would threaten their Christian commitments. As one pastor told me about associating with Hare Krishnas: “Oh, being at the same event—that’s fine, fine. I rub shoulders with them. We’re in the world together.” The issue, rather, was that he and other evangelicals defined non-Christians—more than racists—as the “outsiders.” Evangelicals did not want to be known publicly as associating closely with non-Christians; that would dilute their reputation as sincere Christians. Mainliners for their part defined racists—not non-Christians—as the outsiders. They did not want to be known as working ecumenically only, rather than interfaith, for that would dilute their reputation as inclusive anti-racists. At stake on each side was public identity and the right sense of distance on the map.

Scenes such as these suggest that being an evangelical means drawing fairly strong cognitive boundaries between Christians and non-Christians, even when Christian beliefs lead evangelicals to agree with non-Christians on some issues. That does not necessarily mean evangelicals who say racism is a sin don’t really believe it. It means they believe that statement in a different context—in relation to a different map—from the one that mainline Protestants and perhaps many social scientists take for granted. Mainliners were not “less” Christian and evangelicals were not “less” anti-racist, because “less” would imply a shared starting point. A better interpretation would point out that the two sides really were on different maps altogether. No wonder each side sometimes found the other simply unfathomable.

To understand evangelicalism’s public presence and its public consequences, we need terms of discussion that help us grasp these social dynamics. The “mapping” idea can help. As Christian Smith argues, American evangelicals generally adopt a powerful, sub-cultural identity. That social fact would be hard to glean from an exegesis of the Bible or evangelical texts alone. One might counter that in the case of the Religious Anti-Racism Coalition’s evangelicals, “beliefs about Christ” simply were more important than “beliefs about race.” Yet we can learn more about people by watching closely and looking for patterns in what people say and do together. If we translate what religious people say and do directly into pre-existing beliefs that we then assume must have motivated those people, then we bypass the social, practical process of religious action. By beginning with beliefs, we turn lived religious sensibilities into a silent list of items that we impute to religious people ex post facto. From a social-science point of view, beliefs and texts don’t talk or act; people do. If we want to understand what it means to be an evangelical in practical terms, we need to investigate not only evangelicals’ beliefs, but also their distinctive ways of wearing their beliefs, building groups and ties around beliefs and assigning reputations to other groups. These social facts are not mere add-ons to the “real” evangelical sensibility underneath. In the sociological view, they are inextricably part of what it means to be an evangelical.

It would be easy to assume that evangelicals are even more strongly creatures of their theological beliefs than other Christians are, since evangelicals focus intensely on faith and the Word. Adding to the confusion is a compound of common-sense notions that detract from a fuller, more socially-grounded view of religion in general: first there is the widespread, common-sense understanding that sees religion ultimately as a matter of pre-social, God-given beliefs and values in the head. In this common-sense view, the more authentic religious beliefs are, the freer they are from any social embodiment. It does not help that this common-sense definition quite often has seeped into American social science writing. To add an extra twist, this default approach to religion, with its emphasis on individual beliefs and strictness of adherence to beliefs, ends up mirroring rather than giving us reflective distance from evangelical Protestants’ self-understandings. Listening to evangelicals in local community service groups, I heard people talking to one another about their “faith levels,” and referring—as inscribed on popular bracelets and bumper-stickers—to “what Jesus would do.” In this context, it is especially easy to go on our default assumptions and treat religion as essentially a matter of adherence to beliefs, ignoring the social processes of identification and mapping that are always going on even as people are professing a deeply individual faith. This beliefs-centered, decontextualized approach does not fit all religions equally well, and in any event it risks naturalizing rather than highlighting interesting features of evangelicalism in the U.S. Public debate, as well as research on evangelicals, benefits when we approach religion as a social process of identification and communication, not only an individual process of maintaining and applying beliefs.

Of course, this is hardly to say that evangelicals’ beliefs do not matter. Whether or not the group dynamics I saw in a Midwestern city would hold for evangelicals in national arenas or only local ones is a question for more research. But if my ethnographic work is some indication, evangelical mapping affects how evangelicals ally themselves with or separate from other public entities, apart from what their Christian beliefs tell them about public issues. Surely that should help us piece together a more accurate, if more complicated, picture of what it means to be an American evangelical, and how those meanings intersect with politics and public life.

The starting point of this confusion and the primary source of disagreement is whether the core definition of evangelicals should be based on (1) adherence to distinctive religious beliefs, (2) affiliation with specific denominations and churches, or (3) association with a particular religious movement.  While related, each of these definitional approaches captures different segments of American society.  Moreover, one’s choice among these three definitions implicitly embodies an underlying assumption—namely, whether evangelicals constitute little more than a categorical group (whose unity is largely created on the basis of the stipulated criteria employed) or whether they form a social group exhibiting a certain level of social cohesion.

Some scholars have focused their emphasis on identifying evangelicals in terms of the expression of distinctive religious doctrines or beliefs.  For example, the historian David Bebbington is frequently cited for his definition of evangelicals in which he identifies four major qualities that define evangelicals: (1) biblicism, a high view of the authority of the Bible, (2) crucicentrism, a focus on the atoning work of Christ on the cross, (3) conversionism, the belief that human beings need to be converted, and (4) activism, the belief that the gospel needs to be expressed in effort. While helpful in specifying certain distinctive emphases of evangelical religious perspectives, however, such a listing (1) suggests that all evangelicals hold identical core religious beliefs, (2) leaves unanswered whether those who may subscribe to most, but not all, of the four specified beliefs are nevertheless to be considered evangelicals, and (3) implies that evangelicals represent little more than a categorical group unified simply by the stipulated criteria employed.

Let us consider, for example, the approach that the Barna Research Group uses to denote which respondents in its surveys are to be classified as “evangelicals,” since Barna basically follows the logic of Bebbington’s approach.  For respondents to be classified as an evangelical, Barna requires that they first indicate that they have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today and then, secondly, that they believe that they will go to Heaven when they die because they have confessed their sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior (Barna labels respondents who pass these two initial hurdles as constituting “born again” Christians). Then, after meeting this two-fold requirement, respondents must also indicate agreement with seven other criteria in order to be labeled an “evangelical”: (1) saying their faith is very important in their life today; (2) believing they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; (3) believing that Satan exists; (4) believing that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; (5) believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; (6) asserting that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; and (7) describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today.  Only those who meet these specified criteria are then classified as evangelicals.

While this approach creates a grouping of respondents who share the same religious beliefs, the resultant group of respondents reflects basically a categorical, rather than a social, group.  Such so-called evangelicals do not necessarily share any historic commonality or social unity. Anyone who meets these criteria is placed in an “evangelical” category (including those who are Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or Latter-day Saints by religious affiliation).  But social groups (whether they are religious or not in nature) are not defined by all members holding the same beliefs; rather, they are defined by patterns of affiliation and social interaction. As a result, many of Barna’s “evangelicals” are unlikely to recognize each other as fellow members of the same religious group.  Nor is the resultant group likely to exhibit much social and political cohesion—given that many African-Americans are likely to meet these stipulated criteria.  Consequently, by this definitional approach, evangelicals would appear to be rather divided politically, as there is likely to be little similarity in the political attitudes and behavior between white and black evangelicals so defined.

In contrast, when linking religion to public life, journalists and social scientists have typically treated religion primarily as a social, rather than a cognitive, phenomenon.

As a social phenomenon, religion is expressed through affiliation with a local church, a specific denomination, or a religious tradition. Thus, Catholics are defined by their affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church—not whether they stand in conformity to the distinctive theological teaching of the church.  As a member of a social group, individuals share certain common experiences that derive from their group affiliations. Through distinctive patterns of association and interaction members of different religious groups acquire divergent political attitudes and behavior. They may experience distinctive patterns of communication, receive different kinds of information, experience different levels of social acceptance, be exposed to varying interpretations of political events, and be subject to different political recruitment and mobilization patterns. But these particular experiences and interactions are not necessarily uniform across all members of the group, and consequently the particular attitudes and behavior linked to group membership are not uniformly acquired or expressed.  In this sense, however, religious groups are not distinctive—they simply function like other social groups.

Of course, considering evangelicals as a social group does not specify the kind of social group it represents.  Many social scientists treat evangelical Protestants as being affiliated with a specific religion tradition in which religious traditions are viewed as comprising a set of religious denominations and congregations that exhibit similar beliefs and behaviors and which are interrelated in some historical and organizational fashion. Accordingly respondents are classified as evangelicals based on their affiliation with particular denominations and types of non-denominational congregations.  Certain objective criteria can be utilized in making such assignments (e.g., denominations associated with the National Association of Evangelicals are deemed to be evangelical denominations, while denominations associated with the National Council of Churches are deemed to be “mainline” Protestant denominations).

Religious traditions exhibit several defining characteristics. First, they have a legacy rooted in specific historical events, and traditions develop and change slowly. Second, religious traditions have negotiated social boundaries that place limits on what any individual can do at a particular point in time and still remain within the tradition. And, while religious traditions are humanly constructed, it is also true that religious traditions can serve to shape and construct individuals and cultures. As a result, members of a religious tradition exhibit a characteristic (rather than some uniform) way of interpreting the world, based on common beliefs and practices, though not all members necessarily hold these particular beliefs or exhibit these behaviors. Nor is conscious identification with a tradition necessary for inclusion; many Southern Baptists, for example, may not choose to label themselves as “evangelicals,” although they share religious beliefs and practices with members of denominations much more comfortable with the label. Likewise, Roman Catholics, by virtue of their religious affiliation and the history of the Roman Catholic Church itself, cannot be classified as evangelical—even if such Catholics hold similar religious beliefs and exhibit similar religious behavior as evangelical Protestants.  This concept of religious tradition, along with its particular meaning and measurement of evangelical Protestants, has proven to be to be a powerful predictor of political attitudes and behavior.

There is, however, a second way in which evangelicals may be viewed as a social group.  Here evangelicals are considered to be members of, or associated with, a particular religious movement that transcends historic religious traditions. In addition to affiliation with local churches and denominations, individuals may claim affiliation with religious movements by means of identifying with the movement. Religious movements often cross denominational boundaries and, on occasion, even cross religious traditions (the charismatic movement, for example, includes both Protestants and Catholics).

“Membership” in a religious movement, however, is more nebulous than church or denominational membership, and identification with movements is something different from identification with a specific congregation or denomination, as these former types of religious associations are less concrete and more amorphous in nature.  As a result, when respondents are presented with labels related to various religious movements (e.g., fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic) and then are asked whether they consider themselves to be such, respondents can assign whatever meaning he/she desires to the particular label advanced (as what embodies the charismatic movement is less evident than what constitutes either a specific congregation or a specific denomination).  Thus, at the mass level, this ambiguity has three important results: (1) the meaning of religious movement labels is likely to vary considerably from one individual to another, (2) individuals experience much greater latitude in their assessments of their association with these movements than they do with congregations or denominations, and (3) there is likely to be much greater measurement error in responding to movement labels than to denominational affiliation.

That said, because evangelicals are defined in relationship to a movement and not in relationship to affiliation with specific denominations, this definitional approach will reveal that evangelicals are found across many religious traditions.  Accordingly, some members of mainline Protestant denominations as well as some members of Roman Catholic parishes will self-identify as an evangelical. Conversely, many who are members of what might be labeled evangelical denominations will not claim the label as necessarily describing themselves.

Because many Protestants affiliated with “evangelical” denominations do not necessarily identify as evangelicals, some analysts have championed the use of “conservative Protestantism” to designate members of the religious tradition  However, affiliation and identification are two analytically distinct phenomena, and, as a result, there is no reason to expect that all, or even most, affiliates of an “evangelical” religious tradition (a sociological phenomenon) would identify with a religious movement label (a psychological phenomenon), just as many affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations do not choose to identify as “mainliners” despite scholarly use of that designation. Moreover, the label “conservative Protestantism” is even more problematic than that of “evangelical Protestantism.” Not only is it unclear whether “conservative” is a theological or a political designation (the two are often conflated), but the term itself is ahistorical, suggesting that characteristics that which seemingly define the tradition currently are inherent to the tradition rather than some characteristic that may change with time (thereby precluding, for example, any recognition of the fact that, less than a century ago, evangelical Protestants were among the leading social reformers within American public life). Furthermore, the “conservative Protestant” label can easily encompass groups such as Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses which, though “conservative” in some sense, fall outside the evangelical Protestant tradition on almost every social, theological, and organizational indicator.

Finally, while generally known but frequently forgotten, it should be noted in conclusion that the choice of one’s definitional approach has important consequences with regard to one’s resultant findings.  For example, the estimated proportion of evangelical Protestants within American society varies considerably by the approach adopted.  Roughly speaking, evangelical Protestants constitute about a quarter of the population when measured in terms of affiliation, about one-seventh when defined in terms of identification, and less than one-tenth of the population when specified in terms of Barna’s list of requirements.  Similarly, the political characteristics of those falling within the evangelical Protestant category will vary greatly by the approach adopted.  And, because many more African Americans will fall into an evangelical category when based on religious beliefs than when based on denominational affiliation or religious self-identification, the reported proportion of evangelicals voting Democratic in an election is far higher and the group less distinctive (and thus exhibiting lower explanatory power) than what is revealed when evangelicals are defined in terms of self-identification or religious affiliation.

The recent unveiling of “An Evangelical Manifesto” was an occasion for me to once again express reservations about theological definitions of the term “evangelical” (see here). I have two worries about these normative, theological definitions. First, such theological definitions have a sort of centripetal force about them: they often feel like a conceptual circling of the wagons, intended to de-fine a group by marking off its differences from other groups—and usually from other Christians. In my experience, this almost always ends up being an anti-Catholic move, a repristination of the Protestant Reformation. Now, I don’t mean to say that such theological definitions of evangelicalism are shaped by a rabid anti-Roman Catholicism (though we academics who make claims about a “generous evangelicalism” would do well to attend a few prophecy conferences in order to be reminded of the still-rabid anti-Romanism dispensed by dispensationalist radio preachers and embedded in all those charts hung up in church basements). We have seen a flourishing dialogue between Catholics and evangelicals over the past decade, to the extent that Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom could jointly ask, “Is the Reformation Over?” But the very project of defining and continuing to define “evangelical” should be an indicator that the answer to their question is still, “No.” Theological definitions of evangelicalism assume that there is something about being “evangelical” that is different from being “Catholic,” an older, more ecumenical label that was meant to indicate a commitment to a certain core orthodoxy (as when St. Augustine the preacher would admonish his congregation, “Remember, you are Catholic…”).

This first concern about theological definitions of evangelicalism points to a second: if such definitions are sometimes too narrow, they can also be too broad. For instance, if someone suggests a theological definition of “evangelical” which actually could include Roman Catholics, then one has to wonder just what work the term “evangelical” really does. This tension came to a head when Joshua Hochschild, a convert to Rome, could not remain employed by Wheaton College because the college’s “evangelical” statement of faith was taken to de facto exclude Roman Catholics, despite Hochschild’s assertion that a Catholic could affirm the statement’s primacy of Scripture. If “evangelicals” can be Roman Catholic, we have to wonder why the historic term “Catholic” couldn’t do the same definitional work. So attempts to broaden “evangelical” to include Roman Catholics fail for this reason.

But there is another kind of vague breadth in recent theological definitions of “evangelicalism” that concerns me—namely, the demographic sleight of hand that enfolds Pentecostals, charismatics, and the explosion of “world Christianity” under the label “evangelical.” I worry that there is a covert conceptual colonialism at work here, which lumps vibrant expressions of faith in other parts of the world together with the revivalism behind North American and British evangelicalism. This is painting with a very broad theological brush indeed; worse still, it paints over important differences in practice and implicit theology that serve as more significant identity markers in Christian expressions like Nigerian Pentecostalism. Theological definitions of evangelicalism are, we might say, poorly calibrated: they see certain theological similarities and conclude that we’re seeing the same phenomenon. But I’m suggesting that this is a poor theoretical filter; or rather, we might say that it is a poor theoretical net. Designed to catch “evangelical” fish, it assumes that any fish that get through must be evangelicals. But I would suggest that what “defines” global Pentecostalism is a set of practices—and a tacit theology within them—which is quite different from the Euro-American “evangelical” paradigm.

For these reasons and others, I find myself both skeptical and suspicious of theological definitions of evangelicalism. Such definitions have a normativity about them, which assumes that the doctrinal markers of evangelical Protestantism—marking it off from other Christian traditions—are something worth celebrating and preserving. I think such distinctions and divisions are lamentable. In our secular (or post-secular) culture, we’d do better to encourage all Christians to see themselves as “Catholic” rather than continue to assert a sub-Christian identity.

But does that mean that evangelicalism is left as a free-floating signifier, an empty term that tells us nothing? I don’t think so. Rather, I think it leaves us with something like a sociological definition of evangelicalism. On such an account, what defines “evangelicalism” is not some sort of direct link to the essence of the Gospel (behind most theological definitions of evangelicalism is some sense that “we” are the real Christians), but rather an appreciation that evangelicalism represents a contingent style, a sort of accent within Christendom. It is not simply a “recovery” of the so-called essence of the Gospel and the New Testament church. It is a style that has a history and genealogy that is contingent, particular, and geographically situated. It is a distinctly modern, post-Reformation configuration of Christian discipleship that engendered practices and institutions which closely mirrored the development of what Charles Taylor describes as “the modern social imaginary”—a focus on individual salvation, a valorization of the autonomy of the local congregation, an entrepreneurial spirit that fueled ambitious programs of church and parachurch expansion, a kind of Christian materialism that generated its own markets, and other distinctive features.

What I mean to suggest is that “evangelicalism” is defined by a contingent constellation of practices and institutions that elude theological formulation or definition. This is why I think a sociological definition of evangelicalism is the only viable option. Admittedly, this approach can seem a little fuzzy, on the order of “it takes one to know one.” But here again, Taylor might help us to get a handle on why this is the case: if evangelicalism is not a theology but an imaginary, then that means what “defines” it can never be adequately articulated or expressed in theological formulae. Instead, “evangelicalism” would be a sort of ethos, a sensibility, a contingent set of practices and institutions within which one lives and moves and has her being. “Evangelical” is an identity forged at a level more visceral than doctrinal.

It is in this sociological sense that I own up to being an evangelical, despite all my theological reservations. I still pick up Christianity Today before I pick up the Christian Century or First Things. I get the jokes, jabs, and sly references in the orbit of conservative Protestantism. I’ve taken friends to a Billy Graham crusade and still revere Nonconformist saints like Jim Elliot and Corrie ten Boom. I know the words to Michael W. Smith’s “Friends are Friends Forever” (sung when departing every Bible camp), as well as all the words to Keith Green’s anthems. I still understand the inner workings and issues of evangelicalism better than the labyrinthine machinations of American liberalism or Catholicism. I still feel at home in evangelical circles—if you understand being “at home” like coming back to a small town Thanksgiving dinner, with all its charm and awkwardness, all its arguments and hugs.

For theological reasons, I think even we who self-identify as evangelicals ought to embrace the contingency and historicity of a sociological definition. But even such sociological definitions will need to be better calibrated to the on-the-ground shape of lived religion in evangelicalism. Social scientists observing evangelicalism will want to avoid the red herrings of theological definitions without ignoring the implicit theology—the social imaginary—that is “carried” in the habits and practices of evangelicals. For that reason, I do think there is a sense in which “it takes one to know one;” if evangelicals can put aside their inclination toward theological definitions, they might become critical partners for a more nuanced sociological definition of evangelicalism.

There are good reasons for seeing the historic black churches as a tradition unto themselves, both as a sociological fact and in their worship and outlook as well. But very soon if not already, the standard Protestant categories we have been taught to use—mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, and black Protestant—are going to become decreasingly clear, either for political purposes, or for understanding American religious life more generally. It is confusing enough to note that there have been Spirit-filled “charismatic” evangelical movements among American mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics for more than forty years now, or that several of the Orthodox communions in the States—most notably the Antiochian Orthodox Church—have become havens for evangelicals seeking more ancient roots. But I am thinking of yet another level of complexity in sorting out who’s who in American religion. It comes from recent patterns of immigration.

The conventional wisdom about immigration is that it has increased religious diversity. Mosques and temples are now more visibly part of the American landscape than before, even here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Yet the most important religious dynamic of recent immigration, sociologist Steve Warner argues, is that it has brought even more diversity to American Christianity. Two-thirds of the new immigrants are Christians. The most prominent factor in this realm is Latin American immigration and the burgeoning Latino population in the United States. The conventional wisdom is that Latin America is pervasively Roman Catholic, and so are Latinos in the United States. Indeed, some 68 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are Roman Catholic and Latinos now are 30 percent of all U.S. Catholics. More than half of Latino Catholics in the U.S., however, identify with the charismatic movement. Another major piece of news is the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos. In both Latin America as a whole and among U.S. Latinos, about 15 percent are now evangelical Protestants.

Although Latin Americans make up half of the nation’s foreign born, the other half of the story is even more interesting and complex. Arab Americans, both foreign- and U.S.-born, constitute about 3.5 million in the United States, and more than 60 percent of them are Christians (35% are Catholics, 18% are Orthodox, and 10% are Protestants). The Philippines—Asia’s one nation where Christianity is in the majority (85 percent)—is the second largest national source of immigrants to the U.S., after Mexico. And although most Asian Americans come from a region where Christianity is mostly a small minority, Asian immigrants to the U.S. often include higher percentages of Christians than the populations at home. Christians constitute 30 percent of the South Korean population, but in the U.S., the Korean community is 80 percent Christian. China is the third-largest national source of immigrants. Christians there total less than ten percent of the population, experts estimate, but Christians appear to be much better represented among Chinese immigrants to the U.S. Chinese Americans have founded well over 1,000 new Christian congregations in the past 25 years, most of them evangelical and Pentecostal. Koreans now have more than 2,000 American congregations.

African-born American residents make up one of the smaller new immigrant groups, at 1.2 million, but it is growing rapidly. Seven percent of new immigrants each year come from Africa. Unlike the African migration to Europe, which is weighted toward predominantly Muslim North Africa and Francophone West Africa, the majority of the African immigrants in the U.S. are from Anglophone sub-Saharan Africa and the majority are Christian. Recent news stories about support for Barack Obama in the African immigrant communities mention the natural affinities that these recent migrants feel for the candidate, but they do not mention another important source of affinity: Obama’s “born-again” Christian experience. Churches founded by African immigrants are springing up by the hundreds. One Nigerian denomination, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal denomination founded in 1952, has 250 congregations and home worship groups meeting regularly in the U.S. African immigrants are among the nation’s best educated new arrivals, and their leadership potential is emerging already. The dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, one of the largest evangelical seminaries in the U.S., is Dr. Tite Tiénou, from Burkina Faso, West Africa.

The growth of evangelical Christianity among the new immigrants is affecting homegrown evangelical ministries too. In the past few years, some of the most prominent churches representing evangelical Christianity in America have been either slowing in growth or not growing. For the fifth year in a row, the Southern Baptist Convention has reported declining baptisms. But some smaller evangelical denominations are sustaining their size and growth rates by welcoming immigrant congregations. Both the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the Evangelical Covenant Church now report that a quarter or more of their adherents in the U.S. worship in immigrant congregations. Larger bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Baptist Churches, report that were it not for growing immigrant and ethnic minority congregations, their annual statistics would be even more negative.

One area where the new immigrants—Asian Americans in particular—are making a dramatic difference is in campus ministries. According to sociologist Rebecca Kim, the number of Asians in the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship has nearly tripled over the past 15 years. At Yale, the local chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ was 100 percent white in the 1980s; today it is 90 percent Asian American. At UC Berkeley and UCLA, where 40 percent of the student body is Asian American, 80 percent of the students in the evangelical campus ministries are Asian American. These student Christian movements have been important seedbeds for the next generation’s evangelical leaders, so we should expect to see more Asians in the movement’s leadership in the years to come.

What might be the political impact of this growing diversity among U.S. evangelicals? Only citizens may vote, so today’s political analysts may feel justified in leaving these complicating factors out of their equations. But today’s immigrants and their children are tomorrow’s voting citizens. And it is quite clear where the United States is headed demographically. In another quarter-century, the United States’ general population will look like that of California, with no ethnic or racial group comprising a majority. Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census, states: “We’re on our way to becoming the first country in history that is literally made up of every part of the world.”

As American evangelical Christianity is increasingly made up of people and movements from every part of the world, some things may change in evangelical Christians’ outlook. One can expect that the modest current trend, especially in the rising generation, toward more concern about poverty at home and abroad, will continue to grow. So might interest in foreign policy; today’s evangelicals are already growing increasingly concerned about human rights abroad, and the many new immigrants in their midst likely will support those views. Concern about fixing the broken immigration system will also grow. Other things that currently characterize evangelical opinion and outlook will likely be fortified, such as traditional views about sexual behavior and families.

Among Latinos, the one politically important group today with a large immigrant population, these trends are already clear. Latino evangelicals support government programs to help the poor and vulnerable, but also strong “pro-life” and “traditional marriage” social views. Which political party benefits? Latino evangelicals are fairly evenly split at the moment, Pew polls show, with 32 percent favoring the Democrats and 37 percent favoring the Republicans. Latino evangelicals going Republican has been a much-discussed trend, but neither party at the moment lines up as a perfect match for the group’s concerns. For many, the subtitle of Jim Wallis’ recent book, God’s Politics, pretty much sums up how these views cross-cut current partisanship: “the right gets it wrong and the left doesn’t get it.”

So John Schmalzbauer is right to suggest that evangelicals’ social and political views are more varied than is commonly supposed. One of the reasons why this is so, and will remain so for a long time, is that evangelicals are more culturally varied than is commonly supposed. They are coming from all over the world, and they are expressing revivalist Christianity in more ways than ever before.

But these terminological challenges are more than a conceptual nuisance to be overcome; they are keys to understanding the cultural field in which religious practice takes place, as well as its social and political engagement. My research in Venezuela shows how Evangelicals position themselves vis-à-vis Catholicism and how that positioning has taken on political relevance during the government of Hugo Chávez, who has embraced Evangelicals as part of his larger assault on Venezuela’s existing social institutions.

Almost nobody refers to themselves as “Protestante” in Latin America, as the root of the word is much clearer in Spanish than in English—not many Evangelicals want to refer to themselves as “protestors.” Indeed, Evangelicals consciously seek to demonstrate peace and tranquility in the midst of the worldly conflict and chaos of the ungodly. Above all else, being Evangelical in Latin America is associated with a disciplinization of the body. Evangelicals cannot drink alcohol, take drugs, smoke tobacco, engage in sexualized behavior (outside of marriage) or aggressive, violent interaction. Avoiding these “works of the flesh” allows for the cultivation of a “deep self”—a sense self based on self-examination and self-domination.

At least two thirds of Protestants in Latin America are what in North America would be called Pentecostal. Latin American Pentecostals themselves do not dislike the term Pentecostal but generally refer to themselves as Evangélicos, to denote their professed prioritization of the Bible and especially the gospels, the first four books of the New Testament that tell the story of Jesus. Indeed, in Spanish, “Gospel” is translated as “Evangelio,” so the Gospel according to Matthew becomes El Evangelio según Mateo.

Evangelicals often simply refer to themselves as “Christians.” But they do not do this in a broad ecumenical sense of being part of a universal church. Rather, they say this to denote their “Christo-centrism” and to imply that Catholics are not actually Christians, but worshippers of Mary and followers of men. For Evangelicals, Catholicism is a “religion” since it is made by humans, while Evangelicalism is “salvation” revealed by God through the Bible. Following a doctrine of men, like Catholics do, leads to a life of conflict and turmoil. While following the Word of God leads to salvation in this life (peace and well being) and the next (eternal life).

Unsurprisingly, Catholics conceptualize their differences with Evangelicals quite differently. In the dominant Catholic discourse, the Catholic Church is located on one pole of a continuum between civilization, morality, and virtue on the one side, and barbarism, disorder and immorality on the other. The Church is the bastion of dignity in the midst of chaos. In most of Latin America’s “dual societies,” the Church (with the important exception of liberationist Catholicism) maps onto the existing class structure of radical inequality. The upper middle and upper classes that enjoy the benefits of modern citizenship, political representation and economic viability, are also the same ones most likely to have access to, participate in and identify with Catholic institutions. As one descends the social ladder and moves further into the informal context of neighborhoods and economic activities not recognized by the state, and social and political needs with little representation, one also gets further from the authority of the Catholic Church. Here people identify as Catholic, and may know the outlines of Catholic doctrine, but do not see Catholic morality as realistic for people like themselves.

Contrary to common conflations of religious practice with morality, this does not mean that nominal Catholics are amoral. It simply means that their moral sense is not adequately described as a deep self guided by abstract principles or constrained by a moral order. Rather, average Venezuelans are better described as engaging in moral practice based on a sense of relational self. What matters for the relational self is not firm adherence to transcendent principles, but how your actions affect concrete, identifiable individuals and collectivities in your social network of family, friends and acquaintances. Thus, the majority of Venezuelans who are nominal Catholics understand the outlines of Catholic morality and the possibility of a deep moral self, but see it as only possible for religious virtuosos, and largely undesirable for average people embedded in family, work and neighborhood commitments in an unpredictable social environment.

This is the context Evangelicalism confronts and breaks with. It presents an option that says a deep moral self is possible for average people. It is especially attractive to people whose lives have somehow deviated from the equilibrium of the dominant culture because of problems with substance abuse, crime and violence, poverty or family conflict. As fieldwork consistently shows, Evangelical participation can help people suffering from these issues to develop projects of self reform to address them. In the last three decades in Venezuela, Evangelicalism has arguably been the single most important form of civil society in Venezuela, representing the lower classes’ alternative to the civil associations that largely developed among upper-middle classes in the neoliberal period.

It should not surprise, then, that populist President Hugo Chávez has, since the beginning of his ascent to power, sought and made alliances with Evangelical groups. In his 1998 campaign he made public calls for their participation. In his first years as president he made numerous policy moves expanding religious freedom. And since then he has continually sought to make Evangelical groups into interlocutors with the state on an even footing with the Catholic Church. This outreach is also, of course, part of his continued attack on the historically dominant institutions of Venezuelan society, of which the Catholic Church is one of the most important.

All of this is wildly popular with Evangelicals of the lower classes. But it has also become a rhetorically successful way for Venezuela’s (former) social and political elite to disparage Chávez as unstable, erratic and uncultivated by suggesting he has become an Evangélico. For example, when, in January 2002, Chávez told reporters he was “a proactive member of the Christian, Evangelical Church” as he was leaving for regional meetings in Bolivia, the press had a free-for-all for the next week regarding his “religious conversion.” Journalists interviewed Catholic officials to see if Chávez would be excommunicated and Evangelical pastors to ask whether Chávez had ever attended their services. Upon his return to Venezuela, Chávez declared that while he strongly sympathized with Evangelicals, he was in fact a practicing Catholic. Indeed he had not misspoken, as the concept of “Evangelical” is frequently used in Catholic discourse to refer to an orientation towards spreading the faith. But anti-Chávez sectors still confidently point to the incident as a demonstration that he is unfit to lead the country.

Chávez’s outreach to Evangelicals is one manifestation of a broader shift toward ideological forms of political mobilization in Venezuela and Latin America in general. Through the second half of the twentieth century in Venezuela, political discourse was dominated by the master narrative of state-led development that would produce a modern nation. This narrative was based simply on an expectation of modernity-to-come and had little ideological content. Even this narrative fell into disuse during the neoliberal period of the 1980s and 90s when political parties took an inward turn and relinquished what little ideological leadership they had in favor of self-preservation and expediency.

Chávez rose to power using a Manichean critique of the previous regime and its institutions, supported by elements from multiple ideological discourses. While Chávez’s discourse is centered on nationalist myths of heroic nineteenth-century figures such as Simon Bolívar, it also includes elements from pan-indigenous as well as Afro-Venezuelan ideologies, liberationist Catholicism, socialism, neo-fascist thought, as well as Evangelicalism.

This ideological bricolage has served Chávez well, but as the government has consolidated itself, the mutual incompatibilities of many of these discourses have surfaced. Already in the first couple of years, Evangelicalism came into conflict with the government’s nationalist attempt to bring together different religions into what it called the “Bolivarian Inter-religious Parliament.” The initiative sought to funnel some of the public money for social services that traditionally had only gone to the Catholic Church to other religious groups. However, the main Evangelical associations were not interested in becoming part of a “national project” and rejected the “religious” label that would have obliged them to sit at the same table and recognize as legitimate some religious groups that they consider aberrations, such as Afro-Venezuelan spiritualists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Moonies.

The contradictions between Evangelicalism and pan-indigenous ideology and liberationist Catholicism came to the fore over missions in the Amazon region. In October 2005, on the day formerly known as Columbus Day and now celebrated as the National Day of Indigenous Resistance, Chávez announced a decision to expel the “New Tribes” missionaries that have long worked with indigenous groups in Venezuela’s lightly populated Amazon region. These missionaries, he said, were spies and represented an “imperialist invasion.” Taken aback, the major Evangelical associations condemned the measure and sought allies. But Catholics of all stripes applauded the measure, including liberationist Catholics who often collaborate with Evangelicals. It came about because of the pressure of indigenous legislators in the National Assembly.

Finally, the contradiction between Evangelical and socialist discourses recently came to the fore in the run up to the constitutional referendum in December 2007, which would have brought about centralizing reforms deemed necessary to “Twenty First Century socialism.” A public document released by some Evangelical leaders in the weeks before the referendum opposed the reform as a threat to pluralism and freedom and thereby inimical to Evangelicalism. Chávez responded by condemning these leaders to Hell on national television.

But perhaps the central contradiction in Venezuela is still between a relational self oriented toward concrete others and a deep self that follows abstract moral principles. Most Venezuelans do not participate in or identify with any of the ideological systems just mentioned and regard them with a skeptical eye. Evangelicalism still only garners the sympathies of a small minority, as does Chávez’s new socialist party. These ideological systems succeed in mobilizing atomized, marginalized populations in a de-institutionalized context of rapid social change. But that does not mean they have become deeply held cultural templates, or even competing moral orders in a burgeoning culture war. Rather, most people are still guided by the moral practices of the relational self. They will tolerate accentuated ideological systems as long as they do less harm than good to the people in their immediate social network and imagined community. They will reject them if they seem to be undermining their social equilibrium without any corresponding gain.