In her 2014 orientation video for new and prospective members of Pinky Promise, Heather Lindsey does not identify the women’s parachurch organization as evangelical, but as a Christian, non-denominational ministry committed to helping women honor God with their life and body, discover their value and worth in Jesus Christ, and remain pure in every single way. Connecting approximately sixty thousand women through a network of more than three hundred small groups in cities across the country, Pinky Promise has a membership that is comprised predominantly of Black women. Lindsey describes the organization as “an amazing sisterhood” of born-again Christian women gathering together to encourage each other in their relationship with God through transparency, accountability, and godly friendships. “I feel like for so long, women organizations have been a bit catty,” she explains. “We don’t do that here at Pinky Promise. There’s no cattiness. There’s no drama…All this is, is us coming together and encouraging each other in this walk and saying, ‘You know what, you’re not alone. I love you sister.’”
This paper will focus on Lindsey’s non-use of “evangelical” to interrogate scholarly use of the term. In a significant way, such non-use is not surprising given the broad number of “born-again” Christians for whom “evangelical” is neither a primary nor colloquial means of self-identification. What’s more, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez observes in Jesus and John Wayne, tensions between popular and “proper historical and theological” understandings of the term create conditions whereby self-identification is one of many ways that scholars define someone as an evangelical. This definitional vastness means that we must take seriously the lived religious experiences of communities who affiliate, believe, and behave according to scholarly definitions of “evangelical,” even when those communities do not claim the mantle of “evangelicalism” for themselves. To focus only on self-identification is to risk missing a whole swath of communities and believers for whom “evangelical” helps contextualize their belief and practice.
Consider further the critical example of Pinky Promise. Founded by Lindsey in 2012, the organization’s core values map onto the four-point definition scholars often use to establish evangelical identity: conversion, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism (Bebbington 1989). Furthermore, its cultural and market orientations “associate authentic Christian faith and authority within an individual’s own experience, judgement, and personal relationship with God.” (Vaca 2019). In small groups, at national conferences, and through content created and shared across social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter), members hear and (re)produce a gospel message that promotes gender difference and sexual conservatism as key tenets to living purely as a woman of God, whether married or single. Taken together, these qualities suggest that though Pinky Promise does not deploy “evangelical” as a label, their practices and sensibilities align with cultural and theological understandings of the term.
I argue that reading Pinky Promise as evangelical allows for both a fuller understanding of the organization and a critical assessment of American evangelicalism in the twenty-first century in two ways. First, by framing Pinky Promise as an evangelical women’s organization, I am able to contextualize the multiple histories and narratives that played a part in its emergence and the various ways that Lindsey has leveraged its popularity to access established evangelical figures and institutions. Rather than understanding Pinky Promise through an isolated or exceptionalist framework, this approach helpfully situates the organization’s development, growth, and sensibilities in relation to other single-gender evangelical parachurch organizations. Second, the language and framework of “evangelical” facilitates a critical interrogation of how a hegemonic whiteness informs Pinky Promise’s focus on sexual purity and submission as key facets of godly womanhood. I demonstrate how Black women in Pinky Promise navigate unspoken assumptions about the impurity and excess of Black female bodies alongside connected assumptions about the purity and appropriateness of white female evangelical bodies. As Sara Moslener rightly explains, such an insight draws necessary attention to the ways evangelical purity culture and its supporting ideologies rely on historical and religious formations of sexual and racial embodiment (Moslener 2023).
Despite Heather Lindsey’s non-use of the term evangelical, it is useful to frame Pinky Promise as an evangelical organization in order to contextualize the movement within a broader historical and cultural context. Likewise, situating Pinky Promise within the evangelical imaginary demonstrates how Black women, in particular, produce and participate in a Christian public that often brackets their participation as marginal. Claiming and naming Pinky Promise as evangelical in my scholarship thus represents a critical effort to center the lived experiences and institutional importance of Black born-again women. Far from ignoring or overwriting the ways Lindsey and Pinky Promise members label and speak of themselves, this paper demonstrates how attention to the use and non-use of “evangelical” reveals the multiplicity of voices and meanings to which this term is always accountable.
This paper analyzes the work of Pinky Promise, a nationwide parachurch organization that boasts a membership of approximately sixty thousand women, the majority of whom are Black. Though founder Heather Lindsay describes the organization as broadly “Christian” and “non-denominational,” I observe that Pinky Promise promotes cultural and theological understandings that scholars commonly associate with the term “evangelical.” Furthermore, I posit that we must take seriously the lived religious experiences of communities who affiliate, believe, and behave according to scholarly definitions of “evangelical,” even when those communities do not claim the mantle of “evangelicalism” for themselves. In the case of Pinky Promise, doing so allows for both a fuller understanding of the organization and a critical assessment of American evangelicalism broadly. Situating Pinky Promise within the evangelical imaginary demonstrates how Black women, in particular, produce and participate in a Christian public that often brackets their participation as marginal.