“Evangelical” has always been a tricky word, but in recent years it has become even trickier. Scholars of evangelicalism have sought not merely to expand the scope of the field but also to interrogate its normative assumptions and to imagine new frameworks. The papers in this panel aim to contribute to this conversation by moving away from longstanding definitions of evangelicalism and toward concrete and contextual understandings of the term through four case studies in the United States. Utilizing ethnographic, historical, rhetorical, and theological methods, this panel examines the deployment of the word “evangelical” both as a self-identification for communities of Christians and as a scholarly term that connects communities to historical traditions and to other contemporary movements. Each paper contends with the use or non-use of “evangelical” in a specific context to address the question: What are the stakes of this term in our scholarship and beyond?
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.
This paper begins by considering contested definitions of “evangelical” in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. I focus on progressive White evangelical activists who voiced their opposition to vast White evangelical support for the Trump-Pence ticket. These activists sought to publicly define faithful evangelicalism as a commitment to social justice highly attuned to embodied forms of identity and difference. I demonstrate this through close readings of popular books by one such activist, Shane Claiborne, arguing that Claiborne constructs an alternative to right-wing White evangelicalism through narrative depictions of racial-ethnic otherness. He writes his definition of evangelicalism through recurring stories about the embodied experiences of his Black and Brown neighbors. I contend that Claiborne exercises in this way a definitional freedom and narrative license fraught with contradiction. His stories criticize a normative White perspective in mainstream US evangelicalism and also narratively reproduce a similar norm.
This paper examines post-evangelical feminist authors and readers who have disidentified with evangelicalism in the twenty-first century to explain their disidentification in historical context. Using published blog posts, social media posts, and Substack newsletters, as well as 75 semi-structured interviews I conducted from 2021-2023, I argue that post-evangelical feminists’ primary reasons for disidentification with evangelicalism are the interconnected issues of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia they consider to be dominant within white evangelicalism. Yet, as a scholar, I assert that post-evangelical feminists continue to embody evangelical tenets including the centrality of scripture, belief in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and the motivation to spread Christian messages. The term “post-evangelical” reflects this tension of continuity and discontinuity, history and present context.
At the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1976, Dr. Ralph Blair launched an organization called Evangelicals Concerned. The mission of this organization was to persuade evangelicals that homosexuality was morally neutral and that churches should affirm (monogamous) same-sex partnerships. Through EC, Blair distributed two quarterly newsletters and a host of booklets, organized regional conferences, and oversaw local chapters across the nation. In the late 1970s especially, Blair was one of several evangelical gay activists who unnerved leaders of evangelicalism. This presentation will analyze EC’s evangelical gay discourse and, in the process, offer several insights about how scholars use the term “evangelical.” Centering historical subjects like Blair—that is, those who have been ostracized by evangelical institutions even as they earnestly identified as evangelical—invites us to conceive of “evangelical” not as a stable, uniform theological construction, but as a dynamic, perennially contested discursive construction.
| Daniel Vaca | daniel_vaca@brown.edu | View |