The parts I highlighted in red are the core beleifs of christianity in general, whether an evangelical or not. Evangelicals are the people who come to your door, Mormon missionaries and Jehovah’s Witnesses are to good examples of evangelicals regardless of anyone’s stance on those being christian religions or not.
Um, no. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. Also wrong.
I don’t know where you got the idea that Christians in general subscribe to inerrancy and literalism, but it’s simply not true.
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In some languages like German, it simply means Protestant, especially mainline.
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In the US and some other countries, it means a Protestant who has some specific beliefs. This usually includes being “born again” and an emphasis on salvation by faith. Conservative politics are normally included but not always (e.g. Jimmy Carter). It does not require literalism, that’s a subset of evangelicals called fundamentalism. Prosperity gospel is a minority opinion by number of churches, though the churches that practice it tend to be megachurches.
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Mormons and JW practice evangelizing. That’s not the same thing. In this case it refers to active recruitment. They are not included in Evangelistic Christians for demographic purposes. In both cases, their doctrine is very heterodox from Protestantism.
Orthodox churches are considered Catholic but with a not insurmountable disagreement, and their sacrements are generally considered valid by the RCC. Anglicans/Episcopalians are mostly valid in practice. Protestants may not be, but Lutheranism is generally considered the closest.
Since this is a GQ thread, would you mind backing up that statement with some facts?
mc
Not to turn this into a Great Debate or a BBQ Pit thread, but a citation was requested. Here is one.
Fears of Sharia Law in America Grow Among Conservatives
Here is another.
“Evangelical” literally means “of or pertaining to the gospel”; the root is of course the Greek εὐαγγέλιον, gospel.
About the time of the Reformation the word was adopted by certain groups to indicate that their take on Christianity was more true to the gospel than that of their rivals. Their rivals, naturally, did not accept this characterisation, but nevertheless the usage stuck; in German evangelisch still has a meaning which basically corresponds to the English word “Protestant”.
In the eighteenth century a still narrower meaning began to emerge. “Evangelical” was used to designate those Protestants who stressed that the essence of the Gospel lies in the doctrine of salvation by faith in the atoning death of Christ, and who denied that either good works or the sacraments could have any salvific efficacy.
As theological fashions have changed, this view came to be associated with other views - biblical literalism, the importance of being born again, the necessity for individual acceptance of Jesus as your “personal Lord and Saviour”. None of these beliefs is necessarily essential for someone to be considered an Evangelical Christian but, basically, Evangelicals will tend to subscribe to some combination of them. The term can be used with respect to an individual, a congregation or an entire denomination.
The RCC use of the term isn’t what was intended above, which really relates to a desired connection to the Nicene creed version of the term.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
It is more about a claimed connection or continuity to what they view as the original universal church. As it is also defined by each denomination independently there isn’t a singular denotative meaning.
Your first cite is about conservatives, not evangelicals. There is only one occurrence of the term “evangelical” in that piece, and it’s not about any folks in fear of Sharia Law.
Your second cite is an advocacy site, not a hard news site.
Just to be clear, I’m sure that some (many?) Evangelicals are “terrified of Sharia Law”, but to say that is a defining characteristic of that group is a political statement, not a factual one.
I agree.
mc
I don’t know of recent immigration to Dearborn, but the historic population has been Arab (Lebanese mostly) and Maronite (Catholic). So it seems their Islamophobia might be misplaced. Not that Catholics are much higher on the fundie totem pole.
Intended where? I was not referring to uppercase vs lowercase “c”
You missed some cases then, because lots of Protestants don’t consider them Protestants, although growing up in the church we called ourselves protestants and “anglo-catholic”
You can’t use Protestants with any church that broke with Rome out of protest since it would include the Orthodox who are not Protestant. Or the Utrecht Old Catholics Mar Thoma etc…
It is not base on the reformation or the actions of Martin Luther, so while Roman Catholic Church may like to claim ownership of the big “C” version, but the “universal” usage predates the usurpation by Rome.
I grew up in the Episcopalian church, we use to joke that it was Catholic-lite; All the ceremony, none of the guilt.
Just like the OP, it is a complex topic.
That’s the one breakup which has always been admitted to be political. It was about whether the “Rome” that counted was the city or the empire.
I think a very broad and fairly safe differentiation is that Evangelicals are born again, or experience a *new birth *as a separate pivotal happening before baptism.
It is probably better to assign Fundamentalism as a parallel or separate trait that relates to a more conservative and often literal reading of the scriptures.
There are Evangelicals who are not Fundamentalists.
“Protestant” generally refers to the various traditions of Western Christianity which separated themselves from Rome at the time of the Reformation of the sixteeenth century - the Lutherans, the Reformed/Calvinist/Presbyterians, the Anglicans, the Anabaptists - and to traditions which in turn emerged from them - e.g. the Methodists.
All, or virtually all, Christians are agreed that the church is catholic, i.e. universal. The term arose in the second century and was contrasted with “schismatic” - i.e. churches which severed their relationship with the worldwide church, as opposed to being in communion with it. Where the various Christian traditions disagree is over what constitutes this catholicity. For some, the catholicity of the church is assured by the almost universally-shared sacrament of baptism; for others, baptism and the eucharist. Still other see catholicity as requiring, and being constituted by, a higher degree of communion, with shared mutual accountability, a shared episcopacy, shared sacraments, etc, etc. At the risk of oversimplifying, the view of the Roman Catholics is not that the various protestant denominations are not catholic; they are catholic by virtue of baptism and the other elements they share with the universal church. It’s just that they are not as catholic as they should (in the Roman Catholic view) be.
In other words, as far as Roman Catholics are concerned, catholicity is not a simple binary. It’s not that you are either catholic or not catholic; it’s that you are more or less catholic. Orthodox Christians are more catholic than Anglicans, who are more catholic than Lutherans, who are more catholic than . . etc. But none of them are quite as catholic as the Catholics.
In practice, from my direct experience with people who self-identify as evangelical, they would appear to be people who believe that the road to salvation is entered via an on-ramp with a toll-booth, at which the requirement for passage is the verbatim recitation of the phrase “I accept Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior”.
Like an ATM, the toll-booth does not recognize other formulations, such as attempting to express one’s own understanding in one’s own words. It’s a passcode and has to be done exactly as provided.
However, a succinct “I have been saved” can be utilized as the equivalent of EZ-Pass at any subsequent toll-booths that one encounters farther on down the highway, a phrase that indicates that one has already uttered the on-ramp recitation.
One point I haven’t seen mentioned is that the biblical literalist/fundamentalist tendency seems to focus on propagating the admonitions of the Old Testament rather to the detriment of the New. When I hear some of the ranting that goes on, I want to ask “And how do you reconcile that with the Sermon on the Mount”? (or whited sepulchres and all that).
And the Apocalypsis. Many of them really really like the notion of Heaven having limited elbow space; note that at the same time they completely disregard that the same description which gives an exact number for the amount of people in Heaven says they come from the twelve tribes of Israel (Revelations 7). Both the headcount and the disregard of the tribal rolls are shared with the JWs.