WILL THE REAL EVANGELICALS PLEASE STAND UP?
By Mark Wingfield
(ABP)

Few American Protestants want to be called fundamentalists or liberals anymore, but it seems almost everyone wants to be classified as an evangelical. This has not always been true. In fact, in the past Southern Baptists have shunned the evangelical label for a variety of reasons but now are among those rushing to claim it.

“Obviously, the word ‘liberal’ and the word ‘fundamentalist’ have been demonized,” explained Mark Coppenger, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., and a former professor at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Illinois. “People avoid those labels.” “Evangelicals,” however, “is one of those labels people like to bear,” he said. “When it’s an attractive label, you have a lot of folks who like to assume it.”

So just what or who is an evangelical?

“An evangelical is a fundamentalist who’s not mad at anybody,” said Leon McBeth, church history professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. “As a historian, I can demonstrate that the new evangelicals originated from the old fundamentalists in an effort to rehabilitate, to overcome the awful, awful public image of fundamentalism,” he said. “The evangelicals are fundamentalists once removed and sometimes twice removed.”

On the right end of the spectrum today, finding the difference between where the evangelical category begins and the fundamentalist category ends is a matter of subtle degrees, McBeth said. “It’s like looking at pastel colors. Sometimes it’s hard to know when you’ve passed from pink to rose.”

Classical fundamentalist have embraced the evangelical label in recent years because of the highly negative associations in the press between the word “fundamentalist” and bomb-throwing international terrorists, noted Timothy Weber, church history professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. In the early days of this century’s evangelical movement, evangelicals “went to great lengths to assure fundamentalists they believed the same things, but they believed them in a nicer way,” said Weber. “The difference is not so much theological as it is attitudinal.”

Evangelicals are “less combative, more open to scholarship and have a much more positive view toward culture in general” than fundamentalists, Weber said. “Evangelicals were not content to remain marginalized. They wanted to enter mainstream American life.” The desire to move into the larger world created a major rift between evangelicals and fundametalists beginning around the 1940s, Weber said.

“This is what got Billy Graham in trouble,” he explained. “He was preaching what they were preaching but throwing his arms wide open and allowing even liberals to support him.” That did not sit well with true fundamentalists, who insist on maintaining separation from those who claim to be Christian but do not act or believe exactly in the same way as fundamentalists, Weber said.

Thus the National Association of Evangelicals emerged as an umbrella group about mid-century with the motto: “Cooperation without compromise.”

The coalescing of the modern evangelical movement is linked directly to Graham, many scholars assert. “In American religion, the one most important event of the 20th century has been the rise of Billy Graham,” McBeth said. “Billy Graham is the primary catalyst who extricated Evangelicalism out of the clutches of old-style fundamentalism. The fundamentalists rejected Graham because they think he is a liberal.”

Another distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists is the subtle difference between calling the Bible “infallible” or “inerrant,” said Nancy Ammerman, a Baptist sociologist teaching at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. “Fundamentalists differ from evangelicals on being more insistent on inerrancy (a belief that the Bible contains no errors and should be read literally) as the primary way of understanding Scripture,” she said. “Evangelicals, while they take Scripture very seriously, are not as united on a certain way of understanding Scripture.”

Affirming the Bible as infallible, meaning trustworthy in all it teaches, is the basic minimum belief about Scripture to define an evangelical, Webber added. “If you are not willing to call the Bible infallible or in some sense absolutely unique and authoritative, you are probably crossing the line” into liberalism.

The National Association of Evangelicals uses the word “infallible” but not the word “inerrant” in its seven-point statement of belief, yet many of the association’s members subscribe to the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as well. The NAE has spent the last three years attempting to define who is an evangelical, said David Melvin, the association’s associate director. In the end, a document to be presented at this spring’s annual meeting sticks with the current statement of faith, he said.

“There’s a lot of diversity, even within the conservative evangelical association which NAE represents,” Melvin explained. “When you pull together Reformed Episcopalians and Assembly of God and Mennonite Brethern and others, it is a pretty diverse group.”

April 1996