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hey my friends i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour and i've got a question for you right now loosened up here we go what's an evangelical and give me a second and time's up it's harder than you figure isn't it my guess is that your initial response was oh yeah i know what an evangelical is everybody knows what an evangelical is it's like the most normal run-of-the-mill protestant kind of christianity that you hear about all the time and they vote a certain way and they like the bible comes up and okay maybe i don't know exactly what an evangelical is was your answer something like that if so i think you're in the same boat with most people it's a tricky word that is a very old word and that has very significant theological implications that represents a very large group percentage of western christianity and that also more recently now has political implications oh this means two things one the definition of evangelical is probably pretty important and two the definition of evangelical is probably pretty slippery well in this ongoing thing that you and i are doing together where we go around we learn about different expressions of christianity and try to figure out where all these different expressions fit together in the grand scheme of history i went and tracked down dr mark noll one of my personal academic heroes this is a guy i have looked up to and tried to emulate for my entire adult professional life got a ton of his books back here on these shelves he's one of if not the foremost experts in the history of christianity in the united states and canada and particularly in the history of evangelicalism so i caught up with him at wheaton college at their tv studios which they were nice enough to let me use for a few minutes in wheaton illinois and we talked shop about what an evangelical is where evangelicalism came from and where evangelicalism is going next all of this happens on the occasion of him releasing this new book evangelicals along with david bevington and george mars and two other rock stars in this field we'll talk about this stuff more a little bit later on so let's go try to nail down an important question what is an evangelical and then let's look at the bigger picture of where they came from and where this group is going next i'm matt is the 10-minute bible hour here's me and dr noll talking about evangelicalism let me ask maybe an obvious question that i think is hotly debated what's an evangelical i'm glad that made you laugh i think a lot of people feel that so i'm a professional historian so i've got to say it's complicated answering the question who or what is an evangelical depends upon how the question is asked if you're asking the question what groups associate over time with evangelical forms of christianity that's a pretty clear answer david bevington's famous four-fold characterization of evangelicals provides the end evangelicals are people who in general value the authority of the bible place the authority of the bible or other authorities who have had a conversion experience to christ or at least some kind of deep personal commitment to christ who who make the death of christ and the cross the center of their view of salvation and who are active usually in evangelism or mission but but in other ways are well with those characterizations you get one answer of who are evangelicals you get another set of answers if you ask who identifies themselves as evangelicals or with related terms like maybe bible believers or or spirit filled and then you get another answer if you take the current political climate and ask are you an evangelical when it comes to american public life so an evangelical in my historian's view would be someone who characteristically shows the qualities the characteristics that have stood the test of time explaining who evangelicals are but when survey researchers do any one of those three ways of approaching things by beliefs and practices by how people are are aligned and then how people feel politically the answers are different and it's historian explaining things you know it's not really my job to tell people what they must think but it isn't my job i think to try to make people speak as clearly as possible so based on the definition that you just threw out from bevington i guess i'm an evangelical that sounds right although if you put my thinking about public life and politics under a microscope i don't look like an evangelical or not an event well i look very other but by the definition you just threw out i know a lot of catholics i know a lot of people who historically would have been considered to be on the fringes of what is orthodoxy who would be called evangelical so how how big is this tent that's really a really important question but also one very difficult to answer and i i take an example from american political life so it's been well publicized and it's often very repeated that 81 of evangelicals voted for donald trump in 2016. people a little more sophisticated they say 81 percent of white evangelicals but as soon as you say white evangelicals then you have to raise your question now are there black evangelicals also are there church going serious-minded african-american christians who put the bible as the supreme authority trusted in christ for salvation find the death of christ in the cross the key thing interactive there are so these people they must be evangelicals but in american political history the only group that has voted more consistently for the democratic candidates for president than white evangelicals who voted for trump are black church-going protestants so we have a conundrum if you say evangelical means trump supporter what about the great majority of black churchgoers who look like talk like walk like evangelical christians so you can see the complications when people simply use the word evangelical and don't specify in particular what the word means so there's almost two different categories that we're running here though i mean if somebody's goal is to advance a political argument or make a case right or exalt or disparage a group then this kind of lumping is going to benefit that it's not nuanced or sophisticated but the historians using a different set of lenses if you're trying to analyze something that happened and you can you can see the pull of gravity there in this spot in history to say that there's some kind of movement you can't call it catholic and you can't just call it reformed and you can't just call it baptist and it's certainly not orthodox it's it's something well then it falls to i guess you and people who do what you do to say what is that thing well even if no one listens to us but i do think that there is reasonable clarity about the nature of evangelical christianity so evangelicalism in use in general and used in terms of constructing categories would be a word used for people who show these these characteristics the evangelical word has been used in so many different ways that you have to have clarity and then the world situation complicates thing david bevington contributes a real nice chapter to our book about recent british evangelical political life and it turns out that though there's a little bit of leaning toward the conservative party evangelicals in britain are just about as likely to vote for the liberal party or the or the the liberal democratic party or the labor party as they are for the conservative party so another tricky thing about nailing down who evangelicals are is the historical question because off camera a minute ago you were talking about evangelicalism dating back to the 16th century i'm guessing there's some people who are sitting here with us who are going it's not that old is it that old where did evangelicalism come from interestingly enough the first recorded instance in kind of modern western history or western history of the term evangelical was applied to the franciscans of the of the 13th century the people who gave up everything to live in poverty to service for god were those who were evangelicals who had evangelical characteristics and that would have been the usage right up into the 16th century when martin luther and other leaders of the protestant reformation tried to say that the gospel the message of good news salvation in christ had been obscured by the difficulties the corruption in the catholic church their emphasis on the gospel and of course they were good greek scholars meant that they were emphasizing the good news the evangelion of the message of salvation in christ and so very early on in the 1520s and 1530s you find the the word evangelical being used as an adjective to explain what kind of message the protestant reformers were presenting and then in british history the evangelical adjective would would be applied to those people who were closest to the reformation and then eventually in british history the term evangelical with capital e which is unusual the term evangelical would refer to those people in the church of england who felt the greatest kinship to the protestant reformation to the work that thomas cranmer had done in the 16th century so there's not really a whole lot of controversy on the use of the adjective historically from the 16th century maybe into the 19th century things began to get a little complicated they get complicated in america but evangelical means these kind of emphases on the gospel message of free grace in christ for needy sinners that's pretty clear complications start later you get into the late 18th century you got the liberal western revolutions that happened right i feel like that was kind of attached in this country the united states to calvinism there's that strong reform thread where that sort of individualism born out of the first great awakening somehow gains momentum politicizes and this this mindset that is conducive to a western liberal revolution gets enough steam but then i've also been taught that it kind of loses steam that that calvinist impulse in the early 19th and then we see restorationism then we see the beginnings of the holiness movement we see a second great awakening with charles finney as one of the highlighting characters who has none of the suspicions or cautions that edwards felt about what was going on with his great awakening where is evangelicalism in the 19th century is it is it all one thing or is it kind of off on one branch and we have the holiness restorationist thing over here in the 19th century you got uh what we would today look back and say evangelical protestants fighting each other on all sorts of issues except that they were almost all anti-catholic they almost all turned to the scriptures for their authority they almost all practiced some kind of attention to the new birth so looking back we can say well those were fairly well united in the 1840s robert baird wrote a book on protestant christianity in the united states and he said the vast majority of the protestants are evangelicals then he went through all these groups the calvinists the presbyterians new england calvinists the new england congregationalists the methodists he didn't say too much about the disciples of christ though he could have because they were rising he said basically in the united states all the christian groups are evangelicals except the catholics the mormons who were new then he said the unitarians but that too is tricky because way into the 19th century some unitarians call themselves evangelicals unitarians many unitarians way through the 19th century to the 20th century believed that the bible was inspired believe that jesus had been raised from the dead believed that the biblical miracles really took place but they were unitarians they believed that whatever jesus was he wasn't fully god as the father was god and that that makes things really complicated because you have people who we would say looking back well they're not evangelicals because they're not trinitarian protestants they call themselves which which screws things up for people who want meat categories it is very problematic for my categories so certainly i think since the uh 2012 election where romney was the republican candidate right it looks like what used to be called the mormon church made this very concerted effort to say lds latter-day saints they put up billboards in the towns where i lived and really made an effort to just normalize the idea and i don't say this with criticism or not criticism but certainly the non-trinitarian non-creedal theology of mormonism mixed with the addition of you know an extra prophet an extra scripture they kind of shot the moon in in the by comparison to the other 19th century groups but i've been sitting here thinking about the mormon thing and going all right well how does that work i think many mormons would say i guess i'm an evangelical then right if we kind of look at some of those groups that come out of that 19th century just very odd time in the fragmenting of the protestant world and we use bevington's right descriptors i think we get very different categories and if we just use criticalism right which is always kind of where i guess i've put it so by that factor you could have someone who a group that is a bebington evangelical but not a historically orthodox creedal christian is that crazy talking it's not we're going to get into the 20th century because with the formation in the early 1940s of the national association of evangelicals there was an outreach to serious christian groups who would never have considered themselves evangelicals the christian reformed church missouri synod lutherans although in germany they were the evangelists america they were they were set apart um mormons as as as we know from things that happened just very recently used to call themselves simply the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints now all mormon publicity that i'm aware of calls itself the church of jesus christ yes of latter-day saints and my friend rich mou who's been engaged with evangelical mormon dialogue for for years and years says that there'll be some mormons that have really come very close to having the bevington characteristic other mormons who insist upon joseph smith as a kind of equal author of scripture would be would be further away and i think in the in the mix-up of american religious life where nobody's in control the people who can gain a crowd gain a crowd the people who are effective communicators have influence it's very difficult to have a kind of creedal definition of evangelical that can actually work to designate a separated category we met you mentioned earlier the the fact that in contemporary united states surveys that emphasize the bevington categories will turn up a surprising number of roman catholics who again apart from loyalty to the pope are people who will use the languages filled with the holy spirit talk about their desire to live by the bible believe that christ on the cross is the only possible way to salvation and and there are groups in the united states that actually call themselves not evangelical catholics one of the things that's really interesting is again listening to you list off those four bebington qualifiers i i think evangelicals and catholics again listening first person to them i think we overwhelmingly agree on the equation of the cross what was jesus doing there what happened with the resurrection has the sin and fallenness of humanity resolved i think the disagreement is in how that's handed off the nature of the church this remains remains a major distinction but but badminton doesn't right it doesn't matter for the definition and the world that we live in is a different world than when catholic evangelical tension was at the forefront we live in a world now where in the united states there are more non-christian populations we live in in the united states where upwards of a quarter of the population responds that they have no religion and and in the broader world it's obvious that the the forces of christianity of any variety are in competition or or live in places where uh non-christian forces are very strong so when when you have 100 people and 98 of them are christians then intra intra-christian divisions mean a lot if you've got 100 people and 40 of them are christian believers then and some of the 60 are pushing in then it's easier to see some similarities that maybe were obscure right when your tribe and their tribe were the only tribes in the room well you take away the the power dynamic effect so much historically yeah if what you had in 1950 were four or five different christian tribes obviously a christian tribe is going to have the sword and the authority but they're kind of fighting to see who's going to get to wield it now no christian tribe's getting the sword you can just forget that right now right we're not going to run the state right it's a lot easier now that the stakes are lower to be like hey you seem all right well timothy george during these years when he was the dean of the beast and divinity school in alabama coined the phrase the ecumenism of the trenches and he coined that phrase to describe the way in which evangelical protestants and catholics as pro-life supporters found themselves kind of backing into each other and and turned around hey what are you folks doing here and it turned out that there was on that basis that kind of social action basis then a platform to discussing in a profitable way some of the other chris some of the other religious theological and practical differences that had separated catholics and evangelicals where does evangelicalism fit in with the the rise of german higher criticism and then the fundamentalist response to that in the late 19th century george marsden's 1980 book on fundamentalism was called fundamentalism and american culture the shaping of 20th century evangelicalism and george was making the point that while there was other things involved the fundamentalist movement is the provided the groups out of which the modern american national association of evangelical came and that fundamentalist movement gave a kind of impetus to the naming of evangelicals in the world war ii era and and after and he george in his book and later many times well that's not the whole story because there were there were non-fundamentalists conservative protestants mennonites lutherans christian reform who later on are recognized as evangelicals that really had very little to do with fundamentalism the holiness movement pentecostal movement could be seen as fundamentalistic in some ways but we're really quite different today we say well of course those people were evangelicals the fundamentalist movement did respond to german higher criticism and responded maybe over aggressively to the idea that evolution had to be atheistic even though there were a lot of really conservative protestants at the end of the 19th century said no no no no just wait there's there's atheistic evolution and there's evolution studied in other ways that was a technical discussion fundamentalists and their opponents didn't have a whole lot of time for technical discussion but but certainly the the fundamentalist response to even if it was extreme to a approach the bible that read out the miracles that said the bible is basically an account of the religious feeling of the people that wrote the bible rather than something that actually happened i mean the fundamentalists could smell a rat when they when they saw it they they knew that to take an extreme approach toward biblical criticism was to eviscerate christian christianity looking at things from my angle much later i kind of worry at the fundamentalist overreaction because there were americans there were british scholars there were some german scholars who said well of course we need to take advantage of the the historical new information that's coming of course we have to take advantage of linguistic information of course we have to at least partially question the settled truths that we have about how we interpret the bible a moderate approach a moderate acceptance of biblical criticism but those moderate voices as in almost any time and space get out shouted by the extreme voices extreme modernist christians would say well all that old supernatural thing was just somehow adapting the christian faith to hellenistic german terms fundamentalists we don't want to save anything to do with modern biblical criticism and then the clash between fundamentals and monitors particularly in the american north became really serious and led to a kind of divide my own sense and i think historians of different denominational traditions conclude that although the really extreme modernist the really extreme fundamentalists got a lot of press there were awful lot of christian believers in the middle who said well we've got to be sort of open to new ideas but we also have to hang on to the fundamentals of the faith the foundations of the faith the supernaturalism of christianity the need of sinners for divine rescue but those middle people were just drowned out and they were drowning out in the time and they until fairly recently have been drowned out in the historical accounts as well well to use modern terms that stuff doesn't get clicks doesn't get clicked i don't quite know what that means but i i it sounded good when you said it people want to see the you know the hyperbolic nuclear hot take that just burns down and owns the people who are wrong and it you know we're a little bit more transparent with wanting to see that smackdown kind of language now but i think we were the same people a hundred years ago just had different means for communicating and that secret impulse to really enjoy my tribe crushed your tribe my champion hit your champion and you know it's satisfying but i've been doing homework on the tradition that i've been a part of for a long time the the free church movement yeah definitely evangelical free church which is that's if i have a tribe because that's it that's where i went to school and it's fascinating for me to look at what they did in terms of a doctrinal statement in the 20th century it seems like that was a product of the frictions you just described where they're one of these groups that try to go oh big tent historical protestant orthodoxy we don't really want to pick a fight on these other things we have a real nice contribution in our our book uh from thomas thomas kidd who's a really good historian at baylor university and actually he published his own book on on modern evangelion or what does evangelical mean i think is a title something like that and his emphasis is very much along the lines that you just said that um although there's other perhaps legitimate way of using the term evangel what it really means is a theological tradition a christian tradition with certain emphases his his list is not quite the bebington list but it's very close and and he is saying book published by university press listen people when you in the public is large when you talk about evangelicals let's have a little bit of historical responsibility then the free church i was quite uh taken just the last year or two am i not don't have this correct that the free church has dropped in its doctrinal statement the the the stance that ministers at least need to be pre-millennialist that's correct the reason that that plank is in there is because in the fundamentalist modernist clash pre-millennialism was a way of saying well we we believe the bible is really true we believe that prophecy actually predicts things that are going to happen and the opposition was the kind of squishy post-millennialism that said well by human effort things will just get better historically there's a lot of post-millennial positions that are much different than that modernist one so you have in a scandinavian derived pietis movement coming to america picking up what are the american points of clash pre-millennialism versus kind of squishy postmodern and in the doctoral statement but over time it becomes less and less obvious that that plank discriminates between people who love jesus think christianity is a supernatural religion believe that jesus rose from the dead believe that the holy spirit can empower believers to live lives of godliness and if all those things are shared it just was not valuable to retain a legacy of a remnant of the past that had made a discrimination in the 1920s but was not making any discrimination in the 2020s yes i remember i came home in 10th grade to my dad wearing a set of blue jeans that i had sliced up because i mean that was cool yeah i guess and so i did that and dad was like take him off dad come on i'm finally cool he's like no you look like a gang member well now that sounds ridiculous everybody's got their genes all gassed up who cares but he was right i mean that maybe not gang member but it communicated something that my dad didn't want me to communicate in the early 1990s whereas now i mean come on just it just means something different whereas fundamentally the genes are either still ripped up or not ripped up fundamentally the millennium is going to work one way or another and it remains actually the details about the second coming of christ remain important matters for christian self-understanding but i think what the preacher's decision basically says is these questions remain important but they're less important now than we thought they were when they're instituted and i i believe that that way of thinking can be multiplied in many instances evangelical protestants talking to catholics americans who are tied up in how religion affects politics talking to people around the world for whom the american political situation is almost completely irrelevant and we have other first order matters high on their christian agenda well and and that's why that's why i brought up the free church thing do you do you see this impulse toward looking back at the history of these various evangelical groups do you see an impulse toward people saying you know maybe we we drew our lines with a little thicker marker than we needed to and maybe that isn't top priority we're willing to divide over this and and more of an impulse toward a gospel and collegiality kind of mindset or do you think we're going to continue to like really get after each other over the details that's that's well i'm torn to answer because as a historian you could conclude well we're shifting our places where we draw the thick lines but boy we still we've still got some pretty thick lines so evangelical groups that i know about some of them are really exercised still about say whether women can be ordained to the ministry a few of the evangelical groups although not as nearly as many as before are really concerned about having your interpretation of biblical prophecy down so i think objectively you can find still quite a few issues where people are dividing their tribes on the other hand by contrast i think you can find and maybe i'm just speaking now as a hopeful christian myself out of my background i'm hoping i'm thinking we can find a lot more instances where people recognize their differences aren't ready to give up their differences realize that they are important but also realize that a common trust in christ a common belief in the divine character of scripture a common witness about positive christian life in the world a common affirmation that all people are made in god's image even when we must disagree with how certain lifestyles i i see a lot of that and maybe i see a lot of it because i'm looking for it but i hope that there's a lot more than i'm that i'm just imagining is there do you think people are just going to start dumping the term evangelical and try to move on to something else or do you think there's a future for this movement there certainly is a future for the kind of emphases that characterized evangelical christianity through the years and the the strongest proof of that is how how rapidly and how deeply evangelical type movements are taking root in other parts of the world i'm not as confident about the use of the e-words in the american public scene if for whatever reason popular media christian media link the word evangelical with a certain white political stance then to me that's that's such a huge deviation from the historic religious connotations of the word that i would i would rather see the word pass away at least for a while because if when i say evangelical i want people to think about a message of a divine grace in christ rescuing sinners aware of their need of a savior if that's what i'm thinking about evangelical and you hear well i'm a supporter of a certain political group there's a fundamental breakdown in communication and if the one word is tasked with bearing that burden it's too much for that one word i suspect the same it's it's fascinating to to have the opportunity to sit with you and let you unpack all of this and i can tell that you are skimming the very top of this deep deep well of knowledge in this content thank you for putting in a way that i can understand but what an interesting thing to try to track a 500-year tradition that doesn't have a pope doesn't have a headquarters no one's in charge of it it has kind of run parallel to the whole western post-enlightenment experiment of let's see how this individualism thing works let's see how freedom of association works and unsurprisingly it has been a little bit tricky and it's a little bit tricky to pin down but i feel like i've got a much clearer sense of it talking with you so thank you for gaming it out with me it means a lot let me talk about the book one more time though so i'm guessing we get a lot deeper into this content here definitely where do people pick this up just amazon wherever amazon write to william b erdman's publication and let me just mention one of the essays in the book that i think is is so important for our discussion jamar tisbee is a young african-american theologian and historian he's published his own book the color of compromise he has an essay that we ask him to write are african-americans evangelicals the people who vote 90 for the democratic candidate it's a very careful essay he makes you know he's an academic too so he makes qualifications but he says of course african americans who believe such and such act in such a way are evangelicals so there are uh there's a there's quite a bit of history of history writing there's quite a bit of attention also to the current american situation a little bit of attention to the problem of how american circumstances relate to world circumstances and all of those need a library books and not just one well i mean this is fairly thick this will at least get us started right now we'll get it started mark this is a treat great thank you so much have you been hanging out with me while we do these go and learn about other expressions of christianity conversations you know this is the part where normally we do the after party and we sit down and we process it all out it's one of my favorite kinds of conversations that you and i get to share together but this time around i think i want to put that off for a follow-up video i think this merits more thought and more conversation and just more time than we have right now so i'm going to sum it up saying this one mark knoll is every bit as incredible as he came off there this guy is brilliant and humble at the same time and he is just an absolute fountain of knowledge about this subject matter it's like one of those things where everybody's got an opinion about evangelicals and what that word means but does anybody really know has anybody really put in the work or paid attention to the conversation for the last 10 20 30 40 50 years to know how that conversation has evolved well the answer is yes someone has these guys mark noll david bebington george marsden and to sit with one of these guys and watch him humbly process that out not just drawing on stuff he's read in books but stuff that he's attentively lived through and even contributed to that's humbling and that's helpful and the only way for somebody like you or me to catch up on that conversation and not just understand a list of facts about evangelicalism but understand the history of the conversation the ebbs and flows where it went who responded to what how we got here in the discussion the only way to do that is a book like this i highly recommend this thing what you're going to get here is not so much a beginning to end textbook history of evangelicalism dr noel has a book like that and you can check that out as well what you're going to get here is a book that thick that can bring you up to speed and make it like you were paying attention to the conversation with a whole deep reservoir of knowledge yourself over the last half century and that is the best way to really understand where it's at and to think about where it's going next and where you might fit into that conversation as well i cannot recommend this book enough i hope you will check out evangelicals by mark knoll david bevington and george marsden also i hope you will click that subscribe button and the obnoxious little gray notification bell so that the internets will tell you when i post this follow-up video so that we can process this more together thanks to dr knoll for doing this thanks to wheaton college once again for letting us make use of their facilities and thank you to you for caring about things like this and for being up for learning about things that maybe aren't your thing because you suspect that there's value in that that there's value in the people who practice something different than you what you are doing right now and thinking outside yourself speaks tremendously highly of your character it's an act of grace even choosing to watch a video like this and to think about someone else's history and story of their particular expression of faith and ideas i respect that about you i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour let's do this again soon