I am an evangelical Christian. The word "evangelical" is a good one. At least, it used to be. It has its origin in the root word "evangel," which means "good news." In fact, the word translated in the New Testament as "evangelist" is the noun from a verb which means "to announce the good news."
To be an evangelical Christian, then, means to identify oneself with the good news that Jesus preached, namely, the gospel of the kingdom of God. Christ's inaugural sermon in the little town of Nazareth made clear how, why, and to whom his message was such good news:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.
To set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
(Luke 4: 18-19)
To the Jewish masses under the yoke of Roman domination, the message was good news indeed. The ruling religious and political authorities, however, found this evangel very bad news and set themselves against Jesus right from the beginning.
Today, the greatest number of the world's people are also poor and oppressed. They too would find the evangel of Jesus to be the best news they had heard in a long time.
But is that the message heard today from our evangelical preachers? Do the affluent millions who comprise the burgeoning American evangelical movement find their identity in the promise of salvation, freedom, healing, and liberation proclaimed by Jesus at the outset of his ministry? Does the word "evangelical" conjure up the vision of a gospel that turns the social order upside down? Listening to modern evangelical proclamations leaves one with the distinct impression that the content of the message has been changed.
The image of American evangelicalism that goes out from the pulpits and over the air waves is a religion for those at the top, not those at the bottom of the world system, and bears almost no resemblance to the original evangel.
It has not always been so. Evangelical movements have in England and the United States led struggles for the abolition of slavery, for economic justice, and for women's rights. Eighteenth-century English preachers and 19th-century American evangelists deliberately linked revivalism to social change and proclaimed a gospel that was indeed good news to the poor, the captives, and the oppressed.
However, in what sociologist David Moburg has called "the great reversal," 20th-century evangelicalism in the United States came to thoroughly identify with the mainstream values of wealth and power. As the country became rich and fat, so did its evangelicals, who soon replaced the good news of Christ's kingdom with a personal piety that comfortably supported the status quo.
For many years now, U.S. evangelicals have implicitly endorsed a vision of America that is white, prosperous, and number one in the world. In the last few years, however, that vision has been made much more explicit and highly politicized.
Conservative political forces have successfully penetrated and recruited a large segment of evangelical Christianity by forging an ideological alliance with a new breed of evangelists: the television preachers of America's electronic church. These forces have for some time seen in the nation's growing evangelical population fertile ground for a new right-wing movement.
The preachers and their political friends say they have just begun to harvest the crop. Their program is to "restore American morality," interpreted as strengthening the power of the American capitalist system, military establishment, and the affluent majority. These political religionists can be called evangelical nationalists.
Their problem is not in mixing faith and politics (biblical faith does have political meaning), but in the fact that this patriotic religion does not stand for the same things as the original evangel. If we are to evaluate every claim to Christian politics by the standard of the gospel, this evangelical nationalism is not genuinely evangelical. The long accommodation of evangelicalism to the values of American power and its recent hardening into a religious vision of zealous nationalism have all but destroyed the integrity of the term evangelical.
Evangelicals in our day are not known as friends of the poor. Rather, evangelicals are known to have a decided preference for the successful and prosperous who see their wealth as a sign of God's favor.
Ironically, a movement which once fought to free slaves, support industrial workers, and liberate women now has a reputation for accommodating to racism, favoring business over labor, and resisting equal rights for women. In our nation's ghettoes, barrios, and unions, evangelicals are generally not regarded as allies.
Of particular danger is the way the evangelical message has served to further rather than lift the blindness of the nation. Evangelicals have helped to buttress the myths and illusions which have led the American people to believe their nation is the best, greatest, and most blessed nation on earth. With God thought to be on our side, or, rather, with our being the last line of defense against God's enemies, our cause becomes righteous and our foreign policy noble.
Specifically, the evangelical nationalists are perpetuating a theology of empire. Ours is not the old kind of imperial system with occupied colonies named after conquering heroes. Rather, our American empire is based on a complex global system of economic and political domination which guarantees for us the largest share of benefits and goods by insuring that we have our way in the world. Our control over world events is declining, but America still leads an international economic system where 20 per cent of the world's people control 80 per cent of the wealth. Most modern-day evangelicals have never challenged that system but, on the contrary, have been on the side of every commercial conquest, political intervention, and military action undertaken by the United States in this century.
The "acceptable year of the Lord" Jesus came to proclaim was, many New Testament scholars suggest, a reference to the Jubilee year of the Old Testament which provided for a periodic redistribution of land and wealth along with the freeing of slaves. The Jubilee was a corrective measure aimed at our sinful human tendency toward the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the poor.
However, evangelicals today have not been the ones calling for economic redistribution. Instead, they have tended to favor tax breaks for the middle class and for big corporations, as well as increased military spending and budget balancing by cutting the amount of public resources allocated for the poor. Simplicity, stewardship, and redistribution are all biblical values no longer associated with the evangelical message.
As an evangelical, I am deeply grieved by the evangelical image presented to the public by the television preachers and their New Right allies. The super-patriotism of their movement flies in the face of the biblical vision of the people of God who know no national boundaries but live among the nations as ministers of reconciliation.
The evangelical nationalists exalt the nation at a time when America needs to be humbled. They extol the virtue of wealth and power when most of the world is poor and powerless. They call for unrestrained economic growth in a world where resources are running out and much of God's creation is ravaged by industrial exploitation. They join in the national frenzy of fear and hostility toward our adversaries and call for more military buildup in a world already on the brink of total destruction; acceptance of nuclear weapons and strategy has made evangelicals morally complicit in a potential holocaust.
We must recover the evangel. The public image of evangelicalism in this country is a distortion of the best of that tradition. The evangelical nationalists offer a political vision that is a corruption of the original gospel message and the radical impulses of evangelical movements in more recent times.
Meanwhile, those in the evangelical center have become alarmed by the excesses of the evangelical nationalists. However, after serving so long as apologists for the established order and lacking any alternative social vision of their own, evangelical centrists now have nothing much to say. Their leadership has been eclipsed by the evangelical nationalists, and they will not regain it without decisively breaking away from their past conformity and embracing the social vision of the evangel.
The civil rights movement in the South was one place where the evangel was upheld in recent decades. That movement was initially led not by northern white liberals but by Bible-believing, black Christians who appealed to the Old Testament prophets and the teaching of Jesus for their inspiration and authority.
There are other evangelicals in the land today. For more than a decade, a radical evangelical movement has been quietly growing that seeks to return to the original meaning of the evangel. It is an evangelical movement with strong affinity to the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries which spawned great movements of social compassion. It is a movement in which biblical faith is transforming former class biases and where Christians are learning to view their society and their world from the bottom up instead of the top down.
Radical evangelicals are remembering the simple biblical truth that the gospel is to be good news to the poor and that the children of God are to live in the world as peacemakers.
In Christian congregations and communities around the country, a new style of evangelical faith is emerging that is a clear alternative to the evangelical nationalists and centrists.
Its numbers are still small, but its circle is already substantial and is growing. The radical evangelicals have captured few headlines. Their concerns are more long term and deeper than the pursuit of political power that always attracts the attention of the secular reporters and much of the religious media.
Radical evangelicals didn't have any candidates running for election. They have been busy changing their personal lives, cutting their consumption, building community, raising families with new values, creating marriage patterns based on mutuality, learning to cope with the daily stress and tension of living and working among the poor, organizing for economic justice, working against racism, standing up for women, and speaking out for peace.
They often can be found working for subsistence salaries in housing shelters, medical clinics, daycare centers, halfway houses, food cooperatives; or struggling within larger institutions to challenge vested economic interests and unresponsive political policies. Together they are seeking to forge a new shape for the church's life.
It would be a great tragedy to allow a militant religious nationalism to change the meaning of the evangelical tradition. Rather, we must stand in that tradition and build a confessional movement in this country that testifies to the presence of the kingdom of God, and in so doing, opposes the American power structure.
We long for evangelicals to once again be friends of the poor, adversaries of evil in high places, and makers of peace. We can still redeem the evangelical tradition and recover it from the corruption of right-wing ideology.
Radical evangelicals are deeply ecumenical, drawing from both Protestant and Catholic evangelical traditions and welcoming all who would proclaim and live by the evangel of Jesus.
We want to restore the true meaning of the word evangelical. Our defense of the unborn must be connected to defending the lives of enemy populations targeted for nuclear genocide. Our concern for the family must be extended to children of families who are starving because of the present way the global economic system is arranged. Our support for sexual morality must include support for women in a culture that still exploits them and refuses to grant them equality. Our criticism of welfare bureaucracies which control the poor must be linked to a radical call for economic justice. Neither "conservative" nor "liberal," we call for an evangelicalism that espouses a radical social vision rooted in the Bible's concern for the poor and for peace.
The evangelical preachers and strategists claim credit for the victory of Ronald Reagan and the conservative Congress. Whether or not their influence was decisive is less important than is their public identification with that new regime and its nationalistic vision for America's future. Their enormous support and energy expended on behalf of the political Right has now saddled them with responsibility for the results of the 1980 elections.
The evangelical nationalists will not go unchallenged. The resistance will not simply be from "godless secular humanists," as they frequently describe their opponents, but from their fellow evangelical Christians whose public dissent to their agenda is rooted firmly in the gospel that once was good news to all the afflicted.
The compelling evangelistic power of the early church, many historians agree, was due in large part to the reputation of the Christian community as a radically open, inclusive, caring and sharing fellowship where the poor and oppressed were especially welcomed.
Aristides, a non-Christian, described the Christians to the Roman emperor Hadrian in this way:
They love one another. They never fail to help widows: they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the man who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take him home, and are happy, as though he were a real brother. They don't consider themselves brothers in the usual sense, but brothers instead through the Spirit, in God.
To live in such a way is to be evangelical indeed.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!