The Growing Problem with “Evangelical”: A Call for Clarity and Charity

It’s been a minute.

Life has been full lately. We welcomed a baby girl into our family about eight months ago, and she has been an incredible blessing. With everything that comes with that season, I just haven’t had the space to record like I would have liked. But today, working from home while my oldest is on spring break and not feeling great, I felt the need to step away for a bit and share something that has been on my mind.

Before I get into it, I want to say this up front. Some of what I’m about to share might be uncomfortable, especially for people I genuinely love and respect. That’s not my goal, but it may be the result. I’m sharing this because I think it matters, and because I hope it might help someone think a little more clearly or at least a little more charitably about an issue that continues to shape how we relate to one another in the church.

I want to talk about the word evangelical.

At its core, evangelical Christianity is pretty simple. It is a faith centered on the gospel, committed to Scripture, personally following Jesus, and eager to share that faith with others. That is the best and most faithful definition I know.

The challenge is that words do not stay fixed. Over time, they pick up new meanings depending on culture, context, and the moment we are in. And in recent years, the word evangelical has shifted in a significant way. For many people, it no longer primarily describes theological convictions. It signals something else. It signals a political identity, a cultural posture, or even a social category.

A lot of that shift became more visible around the 2016 election. As people paid closer attention to how different groups were voting and identifying themselves, it became clear that a large number of those who called themselves evangelical were also aligning politically in a particular direction. For some, that created tension. For others, it created distance. And for many, it led to a decision to step away from the label altogether.

I saw this play out up close. I had a friend who had recently come to faith and was trying to figure out what it meant to follow Jesus. And in the middle of that process, he found himself navigating all of this confusion around identity. At one point he said to me, I do not think I can call myself a Christian. I definitely cannot call myself an evangelical.

That moment stuck with me because it revealed how deeply our categories can shape someone’s ability to even hold onto the name of Jesus. When the labels get tangled, people can lose sight of the substance.

In response to all of this, I have watched a lot of people begin to rediscover the broader story of the church. They have started to explore traditions and expressions of Christianity that remind them the faith did not begin in the West and does not belong to any one culture or group. That has been a good and needed correction. It has helped many see that Christianity is much bigger than the categories we often inherit.

But even with that, there is still an uneasiness around the word evangelical. And over time, I have come to realize that part of the problem is not just political. It is theological, or at least how theology is being approached.

In some circles, evangelical no longer simply means a gospel centered, Scripture committed, Jesus following people. It has come to imply something like having the right theology, or even more strongly, having a pure theology.

That is where things begin to get dangerous.

Because once we start talking about purity, we almost always move toward exclusion. If my theology is pure, then anything that differs from it is no longer just different. It becomes suspect. It becomes a problem. It becomes something that needs to be corrected or removed.

History has shown us over and over again that when people begin organizing themselves around purity, they also begin drawing lines that separate people into categories of acceptable and unacceptable. And that instinct, when brought into the life of the church, does not produce unity. It produces fear, suspicion, and division.

I have felt this tension personally. In my own journey, especially through my connection to the Anglican tradition, I have come to deeply value what is often called ecumenism. That is simply the idea that Christians from different traditions can come together around what is essential to the faith. It does not mean anything goes. It means we are rooted in the historic beliefs of the church, shaped by Scripture and affirmed through the creeds, while still allowing space for differences on secondary issues.

What I realized, though, is that when I would talk about this kind of unity, not everyone heard what I meant. Some people assumed I was talking about a kind of theological openness with no boundaries at all. But that was not the case. What I was trying to describe was unity within the guardrails of historic Christian orthodoxy.

The misunderstanding helped me see something more clearly. For many, the category evangelical had shifted so much that anything outside of their specific framework felt like a threat. And when something feels threatening, it is no longer something to be considered. It is something to be resisted.

One of the places this shows up most clearly is in conversations about the end times. Christians have always agreed on the essentials. Jesus will return. Evil will be defeated. God will make all things new. But beyond that, there has always been room for different interpretations.

In some spaces, though, those differences are not treated as secondary. They are treated as defining. If you do not hold a particular view, you are seen as less faithful or less biblical. That surprised me, because I had always believed that a broader, hope filled perspective that rests in the promises of Jesus would be welcomed. Instead, I found that for some, anything outside of a narrow framework felt like a compromise.

And that brings us back to the idea of purity. When purity becomes the goal, anything that does not align perfectly begins to feel like contamination. And when something is seen as a contaminant, the natural instinct is to remove it.

That is not a healthy way to approach fellow believers who are still operating within the shared foundations of the faith.

This also connects to something we cannot ignore in the American church. Many of our denominational lines were not only shaped by theology. They were also shaped by history, culture, and race. The existence of the Black church, for example, is not something that came out of preference. It came out of necessity. It was a response to real injustice and exclusion. And yet, what God has done through the Black church has been a profound blessing, not only to those within it but to the wider body of Christ.

That should not be dismissed. It should be honored.

At the same time, we can hope for a future where the church more fully reflects the unity we see described in Scripture, where people from every background come together not by erasing their stories but by being united in Christ.

So what do we do with all of this.

I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with calling yourself an evangelical. At its best, it still describes something beautiful and true. But I do think we need to be careful about what we mean when we use that word.

If it becomes a way of claiming purity, then it will inevitably lead us to see others as problems to be solved rather than brothers and sisters to be loved. It will narrow our vision of the church and shrink our understanding of what God is doing in the world.

There is a better way.

We can hold tightly to what is essential. The gospel. The authority of Scripture. The call to follow Jesus. And at the same time, we can hold our secondary convictions with humility. We can recognize that faithful Christians may see some things differently and still belong fully to the body of Christ.

My wife once shared something her grandmother used to say, and it has stuck with me. She would say that we are all going to get to heaven and realize we were wrong about something. That is a helpful reminder. It keeps us grounded. It keeps us humble.

In the end, the goal is not purity in the way we often define it. The goal is faithfulness, shaped by truth and expressed through love. Instead of looking for reasons to exclude, we should be looking for ways to build one another up.

Because the kingdom of God is far bigger than any one of our perspectives.

And that is just my two cents.