On Non-Christian "Evangelicals"

Much has been written about evangelicals. I have complained about how some authors use the term evangelical. I have raised the concern that just because someone self-identifies as an evangelical doesn’t necessarily mean they are an evangelical.

However, I am just one guy with a small website yelling into the void. Even though there was prior data showing that people who identify as evangelicals don’t necessarily hold orthodox beliefs associated with historic evangelicalism, it seems to be a popular myth to blame anything that anyone doesn’t like about evangelicalism on people who hold to historic evangelicalism.

Ryan Burge provides some excellent posts about the religious landscape in the United States, and he recently shared data that shows the massive problem with people self-identifying as evangelicals. According to the Cooperative Election Study in 2022, significant numbers of people from other religions are claiming to be evangelicals. The survey asks, “Would you describe yourself as a ‘born-again’ or evangelical Christian, or not?” As you might expect, 58% of Protestants answered yes. That makes sense. 36% of people who identified as “something else” answered yes. Initially, I was confused by this, but Burge writes, “I can tell you what’s happening there. A lot of people don’t know that they are Protestant. They know that they are Baptist, but that’s not a top level option. As a result, they select ‘something else’ and provide their denomination in a free response.” This is concerning for the education at those Baptist churches, but at least it makes sense. 24% of Orthodox Christians identify as evangelical, which is strange since they do not fall under the realm of Protestantism, where evangelicalism has historically lived. Even stranger is that 23% of Mormons identify as evangelicals, even though most evangelicals reject Mormonism.

14% of Muslims identify as evangelicals, along with 14% of Catholics. 12% of nothing in particulars and 12% of Hindus identify as evangelicals. The numbers decrease for believers in Buddhism, Judaism, atheism, and agnosticism.

This information is wild. The question asks if you explicitly identify as Christian, and you have over one in ten Muslims and Hindus agreeing to identify as Christian. That is a contradiction in terms, and it shows the massive problems associated with any self-reported data regarding evangelicals.

I have previously written that I am not ready to throw out the term evangelical, and that remains true. I appreciate it for its historical definition, and I understand that absolutely any definition can be corrupted through ignorance, abuse, a lack of precision, or laziness.

Nevertheless, I wanted to share this with you because it is further evidence that when you see statistics that are generated by surveys where people have to self-identify as evangelicals, you are getting a lot of noise in the data set. Having an evangelical Buddhist is a contradiction in terms, but they apparently exist in the land of survey data.

What does this mean?

If a survey asks who is an evangelical, there needs to be a follow-up question. What do you mean when you say that you are an evangelical? Books like Jesus and John Wayne as well as The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory want you to believe that evangelicals are only Christians and are incredibly fast to apply the general characteristics of all evangelicals to even the subset of evangelicals who agree with the theological tradition of evangelicalism. From this data set, we can at least confirm, as I have argued for a long time, that not everyone who identifies as an evangelical is actually a Christian.

I’m not saying throw away the term evangelical, but when you see a survey about evangelicals or when you meet someone who identifies as evangelical, dig a little bit deeper. Find out what that person means by using the term evangelical. When you see a survey that says that 90% of evangelicals believe something or 20% of evangelicals believe something else, figure out what the survey means. Are these people who simply apply the label but don’t believe in any of the tenets of Christian evangelicalism? If so, does that tell you anything about Christians? Probably not.

Be careful how you interpret your data and the generalizations you make in a world that wants to make traditional Christians look bad in any way it can. To use the words of Aaron Renn, this is part of living in the negative world.