How Trump Is Remaking Evangelicalism
This fall, Christian students at Princeton dropped the word “evangelical” from the name of their fellowship. They felt the term is increasingly “confusing, or unknown, or misunderstood,” the director, William Boyce, told The Daily Princetonian. In the year since Donald Trump became president largely thanks to the support of white, self-identified evangelicals, this kind of quiet marketing shift has been happening in many elite Christian circles. As Allen Yeh, an associate professor at Biola University, wrote in a recent collection of essays called Still Evangelical?, “Evangelical Christianity has a PR problem.”
Under President Trump, the word “evangelical” has been tossed around a lot, used interchangeably with other broad terms like “conservative Christians” and “the religious right.” Evangelicals are portrayed as cohesive, all-powerful, and monolithic; they are almost always discussed in the context of politics, and the unspoken assumption is that they are white. This is a regrettable failure of description, since it does not remotely cohere to reality. But more importantly, this way of talking about evangelicals papers over significant disagreements among those who claim the label—fractures that will fundamentally shift how evangelicalism is perceived and expressed in the coming years.
, a new book from InterVarsity Press, captures the way a certain segment of Christian leaders are thinking about this moment of evangelical identity crisis. All of the writers hold prominent positions in the worlds
