Evangelical Conundrum
Eighty-one. This number likely haunts many American evangelicals today. Just last week, the exit polls revealed that 81% of our white evangelical brothers and sisters voted Trump. [Check out ChristianHeadlines' comment]
In response, several self-identifying evangelicals bemoaned the state of American evangelicalism. Some even began to reconsider their identification with evangelicals.
I imagine the line of thinking to go something like this: “If evangelicalism is in any way associated with support or even tolerance of the racism, sexism, ableism, and xenophobia exhibited by Donald Trump and many of his supporters, then I must renounce it.”
For some, the 2016 US Election signaled the final nail in the coffin. To them, “evangelicalism” has become a term broken beyond repair, hijacked by the liberal media, overly-politicized, and continually dying the death of a thousand qualifications. And this is in addition to the handful of voices who were already critiquing the “evangelical” label. It would seem that D.G. Hart and Carl Trueman were right all along when they helpfully pointed out evangelicalism’s fuzzy boundaries and lack of solid definitions.
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