Search for "evangelical left"

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

By Diana Butler Bass

…m” services started in the 1970s (and are drawn from even older streams of evangelical politics, especially in the 1920s and 1950s). The specific sort of evangelical politics reported upon is now three generations deep—it is a maturing political-religious movement. To depict it otherwise is to miss the point. Why do conservative evangelicals love Trump, live in an alternate information universe, and believe that a great revival is at hand? They be…

Still Left Behind: What the Endurance of the Left Behind Cinematic Universe Can Tell Us About Conservative Moral Psychology

By Christopher Douglas

…lowed by three prequels and a sequel over the subsequent three years), the Left Behind series has sold 80 million copies and continues to be the basis for evangelical films and video games. The series has been adapted to film six times. Preceding the 2023 and 2014 films mentioned above were the 2000, 2002, and 2005 iterations with Kirk Cameron, and a sixth 2017 spinoff of the 40-volume adolescent series Left Behind: The Kids, featuring young peopl…

‘Purity’ Guru Joshua Harris May Have Left Evangelicalism But He’s Still a Member of the Church of Patriarchy

By Sara Williams

…to God. Courtship was the answer on offer, though not only from Harris. My evangelical youth group, the church it was a part of, and later my evangelical campus ministry and bible college, were all purveyors of the logic that relationships should be centered on the possibility of marriage from the moment of inception. During my years at Moody Bible Institute in the early 2000s we even had a slogan: “Ring by spring or your money back.” Spoiler aler…

Dinos and Demons and Swedes, Oh My! It May Be Cartoonish, but Evangelical Radicalism Isn’t Just a Sideshow

By Chrissy Stroop

…arian ethos and ideology shared among the vast majority of America’s white evangelicals. Evangelical authoritarianism is a problem that the American mainstream as a rule fails to treat with the seriousness it demands, in part because it’s easy to laugh at the antics of a Robert Jeffress while assuming that conservative evangelicals who cultivate a more respectable image are not only genuinely less theocratically oriented, but also more representat…

It Is About the Hijab: Wheaton College and the Narrowing Criteria for Evangelical Belonging

By Hollis Phelps

…, since I would suggest that it evinces more a desire to outline what some evangelical leaders want evangelicalism to be rather than what it is. The fact of the matter is that, according to other surveys, evangelical Christians in the United States tend, as a whole, to be overwhelmingly white and lean politically to the right. Perhaps such overall trends can be chalked up at least partially to the problem of self-definition that the NAE’s research…

The 50 Shades of Evangelicalism

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…But for so many of my friends and family members who hold tightly to both evangelical theology and some variety of evangelical culture, this is too great an acquiescence. For current evangelicals, then, it’s important that the rest of us begin to see and understand the differences between the various shades of evangelicalism as a means of ensuring that their voice, and the voices of religious people of all denominations, does not become marginali…

The Evangelical Abortion Myth: An Excerpt from ‘Bad Faith’

By Randall Balmer

…. In 2011, an early antiabortion activist reflected on his reception among evangelicals in the 1970s. “While we evangelicals were dithering,” Robert Case recalled, “the Roman Catholics were bearing the torch of salvation for America’s unborn.” He described his “lukewarm” reception at a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society and lamented, “Here we were four years after Roe v. Wade and evangelical Christians were still ambivalent about abort…

‘Politicized Religion’ Doesn’t Explain Evangelical Support of Donald Trump

By Daniel Miller

…icing the birthright of their religious identity. Or as Prothero sums up: “evangelicals just aren’t that evangelical anymore.” Prothero’s assessment is noteworthy for its intuitive appeal. The idea of “politicized religion” is everywhere in both journalistic and academic discussion of everything from evangelical Trump supporters to Islamic extremism and beyond. But is this common understanding of the relation of religion and politics truly useful?…

Should Evangelical Trump Critics Leave The Movement? Who Cares?

By Daniel Schultz

…y definition of Evangelical as over-simplified. Indeed there are non-white Evangelicals, and Evangelicals opposed to white male patriarchy. That’s worth clarifying, and I’m grateful for the reminder. I do think my point stands. When we talk about [white] Evangelicals as a political force, we’re talking about a group 80% of whom voted for Trump. That’s the solid bloc that has to be called to examine their own commitment to white male privilege, if…

Repent, Hillary: Trump’s Evangelical Backers Play the Sin Card

By Hollis Phelps

…to evangelical identity. A recent proposal by the National Association of Evangelicals and LifeWay Research defines “evangelical” as one who accepts four key statements, two of which deal with sin: -It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior. -Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin. While belief is often invoked as a marker of re…