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How Evangelicals are born-again and again: race, ethnicity, religion and politics in American culture

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How Evangelicals are born-again and again: race, ethnicity, religion and politics in American culture

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Content 1

HOW EVANGELICALS ARE BORN-AGAIN AND AGAIN:
RACE, ETHNICITY, RELIGION AND POLITICS IN AMERICAN CULTURE
by
Haven Abraham Perez

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

March 2013

2

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage 3
Autoethnography and Re-conceptualizing Religion 15
Growing Up In the Faith 20
Becoming a Calvinist, Remaining a Radical 31
When and Where I Enter as a Scholar 34

Chapter 2: Literature Review 41
Problems with defining the term Evangelical 41
Dominant Ethnicity 46
Racial Identity and Whiteness 51

Chapter 3: Anglo-Protestantism & the Rebirth of the Evangelical 60

Creating an Evangelical Identity 62
Anglo-Protestant Ethnic Identity 62
The Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy (1910-1930) 64
Billy Graham and the Neo-Evangelicals (1942 –1970) 72
The Evangelical and the Rise of the Religious Right (1970-1980) 79
Evangelicals and Political Power (1980-2000) 87
Evangelicals Today (2000-2012) 89

Chapter 4: Language and Meaning in Two Churches 92
Protestantism and Nationalism 94
Methodology 95
Two Congregations 98
The Interviews, Part 1: “When you hear “evangelical,” what do you think of?” 100
The Interviews, Part 2: Christian Nation and Historical Narrative 107

Chapter 5: Conclusion 123

Bibliography 130

3

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage
Since 1976, there has been a deluge of research on Evangelicals. This group has been
conceptualized in various ways. In fact, a multitude of portraits create this American religious
identity (Hackett and Lindsay, 2008). Despite lack of consensus over the meaning and definition
associated with the term Evangelical, the Evangelical label is powerful. The term is evoked
frequently in political discourse and public policy, and often yields a strong emotional and
intellectual response. And yet the term Evangelical has proven difficult to pin down. As a result, the
demographic and religious characteristics of Evangelicals in the United States are frequently
inconsistent and contradictory. For example, studies have estimated that the adult evangelical
population in the United States is as small as 7 percent
1
and as large as 47 percent
2
(Gallup and
Lindsay, 1999). This dissertation will demonstrate how and why there are such vast inconsistencies
in the way Evangelicals are conceptualized, focusing on a synthesis of academic historical narratives
of Anglo-Protestant ethnic identity in the United States and the historical narratives of modern
Evangelicals in the pews. In addition, I reflect on the meaning of the term Evangelical by drawing
on my own personal history and experience.
To understand the term Evangelical in the United States requires a review of the history of
Protestantism in this country. A study of Protestantism must also engage with White Anglo-Saxon
Protestant identity. In this dissertation I argue that the meaning of the term Evangelical is
contingent on historical trends and socio-political events within Anglo-Protestant identity, including
conflicts concerning how to interpret these historical narratives.

1
Barna Group, Ltd., “Survey Explores Who Qualifies As an Evangelical” January 28, 2009.
2
George Gallup and D. Michael Lindsay, Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs. Harrisburg, (PA: Morehouse
Publishing, 1999).

4

Evangelicals of color, by virtue of a shared religion and, in particular instances, close
proximity, develop relationships with the larger Evangelical community as non-white racialized
subjects. This identity develops among people of color who are Evangelicals as they enter the faith
as pastors and ministers attending seminaries, as congregants dealing with denominational
bureaucracies, and as “brothers and sisters in Christ” consuming religious media products and
shared religious identities. Rudy Acuna takes up the question of how this distinct identity may have
been at play among Protestant Mexicans in the post-War era in Occupied America: a History of Chicanos:
Ignacio Lopez, son of a Protestant minister, was part of that very important group of
Protestant Mexicans who represented a disproportionate number of Mexican
American leaders before and after World War II. They were very prominent in MAM
and other organizations and included leaders such as Bert Corona, Dr. Ernesto
Galarza, George I. Sanchez, and others. How much this Protestantism affected their
strategies is open to study.
3

Also, the history of the Black Church and its socio-political legacy is dominated by Black
Protestantism. This dissertation does not directly deal with Protestantism’s effect on political
strategies; however it does recognize that Protestantism confers opportunities, privileges and access,
which are not available to or at least different from than those of Roman Catholic, Muslim,
Buddhists, or Hindus of color.
Even though there may be some confusion about the term evangelical, there is less doubt
about the meaning and definition associated with Protestantism. Protestants of color, enter the
world of Anglo-Protestantism. The Anglo-Protestant world is rife with inner-ethnic conflict,
conflicting ideologies and clashing historical narratives. White conservative Anglo-Protestants
prioritize biblical truth. Their positionality as the dominant ethnic group, as well as their whiteness,
assumes a privileged space that is beyond race and ethnicity. Protestants of color, with close

3
Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

5

relationships with Anglo-Protestants, learn to develop strategies to maintain their ethnic and racial
identity, while remaining Protestant Christians.
In her analysis of Native American Protestants, Andrea Smith notes, “[e]vangelicals claim to
be speaking only biblical truth, repeating the inerrant word of God. If this were so, then all peoples
interpellated into evangelical culture would share similar religious understandings.
4
She goes on to
quote Stephen Seidman, “Because the self is always interpellated in many discourses and practices,
she is said to occupy contradictory psychic and social positions and identities--in principle, making
possible opposition to dominant ideologies... The self is assumed to be socially and historically
produced and positioned in contradictory ways to structures of domination and hierarchy.”
5
Smith
argues that participants shape religious precepts around their particular cultural backgrounds. She
concludes, “The result of people of color being integrated into white evangelicalism while
simultaneously being rooted in nonwhite cultural practices is that this reshapes the terms of
evangelical discourse”
6
. Two assertions guide this dissertation thus far. First, the term Evangelical is
a slippery one. Second, given this slipperiness, one might assume that racial background in part
determines the meaning of the term for most Americans.
In the last few decades academics of American religion have produced a large body of
scholarship on Evangelical communities. Scholars have studied Evangelicalism’s varieties
7
; the

4
Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (London: Duke University
Press, 2008), 94-95.
5
Steven Seidman, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997): 73.
6
Andrea Smith, 2008, 95.
7
James Hunter, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1983); Donald E. Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium: Inside Calvary,
Vineyard, and Hope Chapel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997).
6

dynamics of congregational life
8
; para-denominational and educational institutions
9
; the embodiment
of spiritual experience
10
; and strategies of Bible use and interpretation
11
. This torrent of research
grows every year as historians, sociologists, and anthropologists investigate American religious
traditions.
If such a large amount of research exists, why is there still so much confusion about the term
Evangelical? I begin this project by tracing the history of Protestantism in the United States. In
addition, I am aware of the “thick description” of a sign, and my responsibility to see and present all
possible meanings
12
. It is this attention to the multiple uses of certain signs, understanding that
language as well as text fall under the rubric sign, that a more fruitful and informative ethnography
takes place. Focusing on the variable uses and meaning of a term that is so common demonstrates
how multiple identities inform how the term Evangelical is understood.
The study of discourse inevitably leads to a study of social institutions.
13
Of course one
cannot ignore the social institution that is the Church in an examination of Evangelicalism. The
knowledge and orientations toward action and ideology are produced within the social institution of
the church through a process of signification. And yet, Protestants of color may still use a system of
language they share with Anglo-Protestants, while reorganizing them in their own way. The literature

8
R. Stephan Warner, New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small Town Church (Berkley: University of
California Press, 1988); Nancy T. Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press,
1997); Penny Edgell Becker, Congregations in Conflict: Cultural Models of Local Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); David Harrington Watt, Bible Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
9
Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture of America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989); Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998).
10
R. Marie Griffith, God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1997); Tonya M. Luhrmann, “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary US Christianity.”
American Anthropologists 106 (2004): 518-28.
11
Nancy T. Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1987); John Bartkowski, “Beyond Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy: Conservative Protestants and the Hermeneutic
Interpretation of Scripture.” Sociology of Religion. 57 (1996): 259-72; Vincent Crapanzano, Serving the Word: Literalism in
America from the Pulpit to the Bench. (New York: New Press, 2000); Brian Malley, How the Bible Works: An Anthropological
Study of Evangelical Biblicism, (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004).
12
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
13
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, Inc., 1970).
7

exploring the different uses of religious language among US Protestants, along racial lines is lacking.
This attention to language, within and along racial lines is important considering language is the
mode through which culture gets transmitted and language is also where selves and spaces are
made.
14

I place my work within a tradition of “native” ethnographers, following the work set by
“native” anthropologists.
15
I also recognize that my identity as a “native” or “insider” is tenuous in
certain social contexts within the sites I work. My position and identity as the grandson of a
Pentecostal preacher granted me access to intimate settings within a church. At the same time, one
youth minister in another church viewed me as a representative of a secular humanist institution
bent on destroying Christianity. In another instance, one men’s group counselor was intrigued and
disturbed by my relationship to a Calvinist tradition. This compliments Narayan’s observation that
“Rather than try to sort out who is authentically a ‘native’ anthropologist and who is not, surely it is
more rewarding to examine the ways in which each one of us is situated in relation to the people we
study.”
16

I have emotional ties to the Pentecostal tradition which cannot be ignored. I found that
there were many moments when I could be thrown back into time when, as a child, I heard a
particular hymn or witnessed a sister “fallout” or “dance in the spirit.” When a member of the
congregation became “filled with The Spirit” my instinct is to stand up and position myself to catch
the “sister/hermana,” just in case they fall back. This instinct is in turn informed by my training as a

14
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (London and New York: Routledge, 1969).
15
Kirin Narayan, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist,” In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Reina Lewis,
(New York: Routledge, 2003): 285-305; Lanita Jacobs-Huey, “The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the
Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability Among ‘Native’ Anthropologists,” American Anthropologist 104.3
(2002): 791-804, Lila Abu-Lughod, “Fieldwork of a Dutiful Daughter,” Arab Women in the Field, ed. Soraya Altorki and
Camillia Fawzi El-Solh (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1988): 139-161, Lila Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against
Culture,” Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard Gabriel Fox (Santa Fe, NM: American Research Press, 1991): 137-162,
Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1990).
16
Narayan, 2003: 294.
8

“brother/hermano” in the church and is an impulse that I associate with gendered responsibility in
my grandfather's church. There were moments in which members of the congregations I studied
went out of their way to create a situation where I would be filled/inspired to speak in tongues, an
act I have never experienced and consciously avoid. I went into these sites mindful that I may “go
native.” Such a state would not be the end of scientific knowledge,
17
but might interfere with my life
outside of academia and my current religious commitments. Although I am no longer part of the
Pentecostal tradition, I also know that mixing memories of childhood, swelling ecstatic music and
the everyday stresses of modern life, could create a potent brew of emotions and, hands raised in a
moment of divine ecstasy, lead to a “collapse of identity.”
18
It is in the world of Pentecostal
emotions that I am hesitant to tread.
19
I also know how the dynamics within a congregation change
when a person is “filled with The Spirit.” Since those moments of “being filled with the Holy
Ghost” are seen as a life altering experience, I would be expected to act and operate in a different
way.
In beginning this project, I imagined that since I came from an Evangelical community,
defining and understanding the beliefs and behavior of Evangelicals would come easy. I even
believed at certain points in this research that I would have an edge over other researchers and
academics because of my intimate knowledge. I started my research in an attempt to explain and
map the political differences between Protestants of color and white Protestants. As I began to
define my terms, I immediately realized the difficulty in using the label Evangelical. In my
interviews, there were many Black and Latino Protestants who fell under the definition of
Evangelical, and who themselves refused the label. In addition, I encountered many white
Protestants who claimed to be Evangelical, but who did not meet certain common criteria. As my

17
Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth the Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1991), 180.
18
Kondo, 1990: 17.
19
Rosaldo, 1991.
9

research progressed, I became more aware of how difficult it is to define an Evangelical, especially if
one attends to politics of race and ethnicity as well as beliefs and theology. More to the point, the
modern day usage of the term Evangelical is mostly tied to the developing ethnic identity of Anglo-
Protestants, and has less to do with the theological trends of the last century. It was apparent that
one fruitful way to explain why the term is so difficult to pin down would be to trace it historically
and link it to my own experiences.
I am not arguing for one totalizing definition for the term Evangelical. Instead, using an
insider’s vantage point, I have chronicled and traced the experiences of my own attempts at defining
the term Evangelical, using the qualitative methodology of autoethnography. By placing the self
within a social context like academia and religious communities, autoethnography connects the
person to the cultural experience through research and writing.
20
This dissertation will explain why
confusion and conflict are sometimes associated with the term, in part by emphasizing how religion,
religious terms and religious identities are usually tied to ethnic, racial and national identities.
I am a Protestant and I know some things about the term Evangelical. I spent my
adolescence in Pentecostal churches, as a young adult attended multiple Bible studies in multiple
denominations while I was “church hopping”, and in my middle-age became a member of an
Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. Until recently, it would have never occurred to me to use the
term “Protestant” to describe my religious and spiritual identity, although I always found myself in
some Protestant church or group. I had always understood my religious identity as simply
“Christian.” And yet, every religious group I attended to cultivate my Christian identity was
consistently Protestant. As an adherent of the Charismatic/Pentecostal and later
Reformed/Calvinist traditions, I attended reading groups that focused on liberation theology and
others that sought to defend the Fundamentalist movement, but all definitively Protestant. And in

20
Deborah E. Reed-Danahay, “Introduction,” Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social (Oxford: Berg, 1997).
10

each of these communities the term Evangelical was used and circulated in multiple ways, sometimes
resembling its use in the social sciences and media, but more often in less familiar ways.
Consequently, it was in my home Protestant churches where the seeds of my research questions
were planted and cultivated.
I began this research intending to use traditional archival and ethnographic research
methods, but as my research progressed I noticed that I would persistently draw upon reflections
and recollections of my youth within Pentecostal communities during the 1970s-1980s. In addition, I
could not help but incorporate my understanding of U.S. religious traditions and Protestant church
history, as each relates to my current identity as a Reformed Protestant (Protestant traditions
maintaining a Calvinist theological perspective). Furthermore, my political identity as a Leftist and
familiarity with the work of labor unions within the communities I researched also informed my
understanding of the congregant’s working-class environment. This identity and knowledge
provided me with questions concerning congregants’ views on politics and their union’s political
views. And lastly, my Puerto Rican identity, and the racial ambiguity associated with that identity also
played a strong role in shaping this project. My father identified as a Black Puerto Rican and held
political views tied to the political priorities of African-Americans. My mother identified as “just a
Puerto Rican” and as a Christian. She perceived a person’s religious identity and experience
(particularly whether or not one had had a born-again experience) as of primary importance. It was
virtually impossible not to use the knowledge and understanding provided by my upbringing and
socialization.
Traditionally, the scientific approach requires researchers to minimize their selves. The
traditional researcher was and is trained to place bias and subjectivity aside in the pursuit of scientific
research, and in the process is encouraged to deny his or her identity and life experiences. There
were no “[c]oncerns about the situatedness of the knower, the context of discovery, and the relation
11

of the knower to the subjects of her inquiry are demons at the door of positivist science. The
production of [what has always been considered to be] ‘legitimate’ knowledge begins by slamming
the door shut.”
21
But I couldn’t shut that door. I realized it was futile to attempt to conduct research
as if my identities were shadows that would recede if I situated the light of objectivity in the perfect
location. As a result, I turned to autoethnography.
An autoethnography “lets you use yourself to get to culture,”
22
allowing the autonomy of a
researcher to speak as a participant in a research project and to mix his or her experience with the
experiences of those studied creating an intimate relationship with the data gathered and knowledge
produced. Autoethnographies “are highly personalized accounts that draw upon the experience of
the author/researcher for the purposes of extending sociological understanding.”
23
My personal
struggle to understand how the term Evangelical is defined and applied will also reveal how
undercurrents within the academic community work to comprehend the subjects of their research.
Using this method, my voice will not pretend to be an objective narrator speaking above the
debates and arguments about the struggle to define and conceptualize Evangelical identity; instead
my voice will become part of the discussion. If a researcher’s voice is absent from a text, the writing
is reduced to a mere summary and interpretation of the works of others, with nothing new added.
24

Some have suggested that a social scientist who has lived through particular experiences and has
consuming, unanswered questions about them can use introspection as a data source and, following
accepted practices of field research, study him or herself as with any “n” of 1.
25
In other words, “I

21
Jill McCorkel and Kristen Myers. “What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field,”
Qualitative Sociology, 26.2 (2003), 200.
22
Ronald J. Pelias, “The Academic Tourist: An Autoethnography,” Qualitative Inquiry, 9.3 (2003), 372.
23
Andrew C. Sparkes, “Autoethnography and Narratives of Self: Reflections on Criteria in Action,” Sociology of Sport
Journal, 17 (2000), 21.
24
D. Jean Clandinin, & F. Michael Connelly, “Personal Experience Methods.” Handbook of Qualitative Research (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 1994): 413-427.
25
Carolyn Ellis, “Sociological Introspection and Emotional Experience.” Symbolic Interaction, 14.1 (1991): 23-50.
12

take myself and my existential experience as a data source.”
26
That said, the self is not my only
source, but it is where I start.
The need for the autoethnographic approach developed during the postmodern shift in
academia during the late 1970s. Postmodernism “distrusts abstract explanation and holds that
research can never do more than describe, with all descriptions equally valid . . . [Any] researcher can
do no more than describe his or her personal experiences.”
27
Postmodernism recognized there was a
“crisis of confidence” in scientific objectivity, when its limits became too obvious to ignore.
Proponents of postmodern attempted to reform the social sciences. The ontological,
epistemological, and axiological foundations of positivism no longer seemed absolute and
unchanging,
28
thus a “paradigm shift” was occurring. That which had previously been assumed
about the logics of scientific objectivity were now revealed to be “facts and “truths” inextricably tied
to the discourses and paradigms of particular social relations.
29
The postmodern turn in the social
sciences revealed grand narratives and universal presuppositions concerning human knowledge and
progress as social constructions tied to political and group-specific impulses and biases.
30
The
experiences, prejudices and rhetorical world of previous researchers put forth in the name of
objective science were now viewed as the product of the privileges of power.
31
Numerical data
analysis and observations from the field of research were criticized as privileging existing relations,
especially in the case of the colonized being placed under the microscope of the colonizer.
32
These

26
William F. Pinar & Madeline R. Grumet, Eds. Toward a Poor Curriculum (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co.,
1976), 52.
27
W. Lawrence Neuman, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and
Bacon, 1994), 74.
28
Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity,” Handbook of Qualitative
Research 2nd ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 2000), 733-768.
29
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Richard
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays 1972-1980), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
30
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984).
31
Foucault, 1969, 1970.
32
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann, (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Edward Said,
Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1977).
13

critiques have been influential in revealing the limits of positivism, the basis for objectivity in the
social sciences, and opening up research to subjectivity and other experimental forms of qualitative
research.
The postmodern turn in academia has its critics. Some argue that postmodernism is too
ambiguous and incomprehensible.
33
Others that it is amoral and indifferent
34
relativistic and
nihilistic,
35
or irrational and anti-scientific.
36
Although I can appreciate these critiques,
postmodernism created a strong context of doubt, announcing the God of positivism as dead. That
is to say, postmodernism placed the methods of positivism under the same microscope it placed the
world, and discovered positivism can act as another form of subjectivity. Postmodernism did not
claim traditional positivism as false, but it questioned the social and political context within which
truth is developed, further questioning whether positivism deserved its status as ultimate arbitrator
of all truth.
Autoethnography, a relatively unconventional method of developing knowledge in research,
is part of the postmodern turn in research and the sciences. As I began to embrace an
autoethnographical approach, I also recognized the controversy surrounding autoethnography. In
fact, the “emergence of autoethnography and narratives of self . . . has not been trouble-free, and
their status as proper research remains problematic.”
37
How knowledge is produced and who
produces it is important in terms of the status is attributed to knowledge (Muncey, 2005).
Importantly, expert knowledge, as it has been understood within the positivist tradition, is socially

33
Noam Chomsky, LBBS, Z-Magazine’s Left On-Line Bulletin Board, “The following was written several months ago
by Noam Chomsky in a discussion about po-mo and its contribution to activism et al.” November 13, 1995. Accessed
July 1, 2013. http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html.
34
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); Christopher Norris,
Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
35
Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
36
Alan D. Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (Picador USA: New York,
1998).
37
Andrew C. Sparkes, “Autoethnography and Narratives of Self: Reflections on Criteria in Action,” Sociology of Sport
Journal, 17 (2000): 22.
14

endorsed in a way that commonsense or personal knowledge is not. Despite there being a diverse
array of autoethnographic writings, they all begin with the researcher’s use of the subjective self.
And by using self as a source of data, autoethnography has been criticized for being self-indulgent,
narcissistic, introspective, and individualized.
38
The positivist tradition of objective and quantitative
data collection is so persistent, researchers who use qualitative research methods are consistently
told to defend their research as valid to the scientific process.
39
Intimate and emotive attempts to
appreciate the communities being explored are accused of being soft and fuzzy, unless they are
placed under the hard microscope of the objective gaze of the positivist. I have too much invested,
as both Protestant and academic, to undertake research using positivist methods.
I was hesitant to draw on personal experience, rather than traditional social science methods,
for several reasons, including that personal experiences may be fetishized and disconnected from
other voices in their social contexts. There is a “criticism of research in which narratives are
regarded as offering the analyst privileged access to personal experience. It is suggested that an
appeal to narratives too often includes inappropriate assumptions concerning human actors and
social action.”
40
I am sympathetic to this argument, but also believe that just as the individual is
biased, the “objective” observer also draws on his or her life experiences. Positivists who claim
objectivity promise too much. Proponents of objective formality are just as guilty of making
assumptions based on their social and political position. I demonstrate in chapter 2 that those who
have adopted a more traditional approach to studying Evangelicals contribute to the confusion
surrounding how researchers define and apply religious terms as they are used and understood by
the subjects being studied. Many of the researchers I criticize in chapter 2 use the definitions of

38
Paul Atkinson, “Narrative Turn or Blind Alley?” Qualitative Health Research, 7 (1997): 325-344.
39
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research.” Handbook of
Qualitative Research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000).
40
Atkins, 1997: 325.
15

evangelicalism informed by their own experience in a particular Protestant church tradition, and they
to mention why they privilege their own personal experience over others. In addition, the belief in
objective formality seems to have been another way for some researchers to confuse their personal
narratives with objective truth. And simultaneously, this does not eliminate objectivity, but instead it
recognizes the limits of scientific objectivity. In other words, a responsible autoethnography
recognizes the limits of all knowledge, while at the same time still utilizing knowledge, both
subjective and objective, to come to a more holistic and fruitful understanding. I use
autoethnography as a research method that is part of, but demarcated from, the much larger
category of autobiography. Conceptualizing it this way, personal stories can coexist with
autoethnographic research, complimenting my historical and ethnographic research.

Autoethnography and Re-conceptualizing Religion
Before my attempts at defining the term Evangelical, I had already been used to re-
conceptualizing religion in relation to the social contexts of race, ethnicity and national identity.
I grew up in Wilmington, a primarily Latino working-class neighborhood of Los Angeles. My
immediate environment was populated by Puerto Rican Pentecostals, but as far as I knew we were
“Bible-believing” Christians. Reflecting on the way we discussed our religious identity, I rarely heard
the term Pentecostal, instead it was taken for granted that we were “Christian”, while the rest of the
neighborhood were Baptists and Roman Catholic. And we framed our religious inquiries in such a
manner, Pentecostals, Baptists and Roman Catholics alike asked, “Are you Christian or Catholic?”
Although I barely understood what a Protestant was, I knew enough to assume that the Baptists
were “like us,” but Catholics were not “like us” that is—Christian.
As I grew older and began to explore the Christian world apart from my neighborhood, I
realized that the question was an underhanded swipe at Roman Catholicism, suggesting that
16

Pentecostals and Baptists were the real and authentic Christians while Roman Catholicism was not
an authentic Christian tradition. Even more surprising were the Catholics who seemed to agree with
this perspective. As an undergraduate at the Roman Catholic Loyola-Marymount University, I
realized that none of the Catholics there would have allowed that question to stand. At that
institution, students were informed that Western Christianity and its Bible were formed within the
bosom of Roman Catholicism. I discussed this with my political science professor, Father Welsh,
who suspected that the Roman Catholics in my neighborhood probably knew more than I expected.
He suggested that many Roman Catholics take it for granted that the U.S. is a Protestant nation, or
they were avoiding a theological argument. He observed that I may have heard the question as “Are
you Christian or Catholic?” but he suspected they heard “Are you Protestant or Catholic?” He went
on to explain that when he hears politicians exclaim that “the United States is a Christian nation”; he
understands that statement to mean Protestant nation. I laughed, then I shared with him my father’s
hermeneutical interpretation to the same statement. According to my Puerto Rican American
father, if a Republican is talking about Christian America, he really means “White America.”
This exchange revealed to me the importance of one’s social position when it comes to
interpreting and negotiating language and terms, especially in relation to religion. Father Welsh still
had fresh memories of the anti-Catholic sentiment he encountered while growing up in Protestant
America. He described how frequently he heard that Roman Catholics were not “real” Christians,
and that Ireland and Mexico would be thriving nations if they were “freed from Rome.” On the one
hand, as an Anglo-Catholic, he benefitted from sharing the same ethnic and racial identity with
Anglo-Protestants. At the same time, he experienced prejudices because he shared the same religion
with Southern Europeans. My father, on the other hand, who is Pentecostal, grew up in “Jim Crow
New York”, and frequently witnessed Christianity being used to justify forms of segregation. His
first American church experience, after migrating from Puerto Rico, was attending a white
17

Pentecostal church where he was immediately told that Black Pentecostal congregation existed
where his “type of family” would be better served. He shared the same religion, Protestantism, with
the dominant ethno-racial group, but his blackness limited the way he would benefit from this. In
addition, Pentecostals were positioned at the bottom of the Protestant social hierarchy of
denominations. Pentecostalism was associated with poor and uneducated Black and Anglo-
Protestants. For Father Welsh and my father, the understanding of “Christian” was contingent on
historical memory, and filtered through identities of ethnicity, race, class and religion. As we shall
see, the term evangelical is indeed contingent on the multiple positionalities of the person.
Religious meaning is often dependent on ascriptive characteristics like race and ethnicity.
The first time I had ever heard the term terrorism was in relationship to the underground war
between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.).
News reports and casual conversations almost exclusively explained the clash as Catholic versus
Protestant, and as a child I accepted this conceptualization, assuming this conflict was extension of
unfinished business of the Protestant Reformation. As I began to get involved with leftist politics
and anti-colonial movements of the 1980s, however, my conceptualization of the conflict in
Northern Ireland began to change. Although the dispute is usually framed as Catholic vs. Protestant,
I began to reinterpret Catholic as Irish and Protestant as British subjects (i.e., Scottish, English and
Welsh). I soon learned that Irish Protestants were discriminated against, along with their Catholic
co-ethnics, in Northern Ireland. And Anglo-Catholics had more privileges in Northern Ireland than
their Irish co-religionist. My initial introduction to the conflict, though, relied on religious categories
rather than on ethnic and imperial categories.
This mode of thinking of reinterpreting religious identities into ethnic, racial, and national
identities also extended to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. That is, I was socialized to conceptualize
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a struggle between Jews and Muslims, and Christians were
18

supporting the Jews. It was a shock for me to learn that 15% of the displaced Palestinians were
Christian. This new information disrupted what I had previously understood to be true. The
Pentecostal community I came from believed in a final Armageddon to take place in Israel, as Jews
returned to “their homeland.” Muslims and communist were standing in the way of God’s ultimate
plan. As I began to reject religion and become socialized into the American left of the 1980s, I began
to re-conceptualize the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as progressive social democracy versus reactionary
Muslim impulses. However, my involvement in anticolonial movements facilitated another
understanding, best explained by an Arab Christian friend who described the conflict as “European
Christians taking the land of Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims in order to apologize to
European Jews.”
I was open to this interpretation of the conflict because I just learned that many of the
American Indians who were displaced during U.S. expansion were Christian. In my history lessons
at an evangelical private school we were taught to conceptualize the U.S. project as a religious
problem. My teachers claimed that “Bible believing” Christians were in conflict with the primitive
pagan societies of Native Americans. In college, I learned that race was the determining factor for
determining who owned land in the Western frontier, and not religion. At this point in my academic
career, I became more open to how race, ethnicity and national identity inform how religion is used
to conceptualize imperialism and White supremacy, in addition to many other things. I began to
instinctively understand that religious identities and religious terms were contingent on who is doing
the talking and who is doing the listening, shaped by historical memories, filtered through identities
of ethnicity, race, and class.
Although the exchange between Father Welsh and I, the Troubles of Northern Ireland, the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict and the U.S. Imperial project had taught me to listen and reinterpret how
these conflicts and struggles are understood, it was still difficult for me to recognize that this method
19

should be used to re-conceptualize how the term Evangelical is used in today’s political discourse. I
kept assuming there was only one way to define what and who and Evangelical was and is, and yet,
the definitions provided for me in academia were not in sync with my own experiences as a
protestant Christian of color.
I will expand on this narrative of re-conceptualizing the role religious terms play in racial,
ethnic and national identity, in chapter 4, but the passages above provide an example of the
autoethnographic method I will be utilizing. Originally, I imagined this dissertation to be a socio-
political genealogy of the term Evangelical, written in the traditional detached and objective
scholarly genre. But so much of what I knew about Evangelicalism was also about my religious and
political identities. I had an intimate relationship with the term that would not vanish with the wave
of the objective wand. Once I was able to admit how much I had invested in how other people
understand and conceptualize the term Evangelical, I was then free to see the multiple ways the term
Evangelical is used today. Or to put it another way, once I admitted that my “authentic” theological
understanding of the term was not the singular definition, I had opened myself to see how it
functioned as a socio-political identity, as an ethno-religious identity, as a cultural stereotype, and
how race and ethnicity were as much a part of its meaning as theology.
I also came to the realization that the best way to demonstrate how the term Evangelical is
used today was to share my personal experiences researching the term, thus my decision to utilize
the autoethnographical method. I have placed myself within the text, utilizing a personal narrative to
describe my journey through the research to understand the term Evangelical. Qualitative
researchers are storytellers, and storytelling should be one of their unique characteristics.
41
This form
of qualitative research brings together my personal lived experience into dialogue with previous

41
Harry F. Wolcott, Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1994).
20

research on Evangelicalism.
42
I describe the personal situations and the subjective social context
shaping my experience while researching the history of the term. I will reflect on what is meant by
authenticity in religion. I place the relationship between religion and race and ethnicity at the center
of my exploration of the term.
What makes a good story scholarly? Answering this question is important if I am going to
claim this is a successful attempt at qualitative research. Is this personal narrative credible,
dependable and trustworthy? A story could be understood as scholarly if the reader recognizes the
experience is authentic, believable and possible.
43
However, I am attentive to the fact that that “mere
self-exposure without profound cultural analysis and interpretation leaves this writing at the level of
descriptive autobiography or memoir”
44
and thus am attentive to my analytic responsibilities.

Growing Up In the Faith
I spent most of my early life in Pentecostal churches. My grandfather was my first pastor and
my parents were trained to become missionaries. The church was called Puerta de Cello, the Door
of Heaven. Theology and scripture were a ubiquitous presence at home and conversations with
fellow church members were sprinkled with verses from the Bible. Many, every day family decisions
were justified by our ability to ground them in scripture. Fundamentalism and literalism were not
negative terms in my religious community. Spirits, holy and unholy, were ever present realities
swirling around personal choices and Armageddon was a shadow that loomed over our existence.
Across the street from our church was a Black Pentecostal church, and some Sundays it seemed

42
C. Arlene Raudenbush, Improvisation: An Autobiography of My First Year as an Administrator (Master Thesis, University of
Kansas, 1995).
43
Carolyn Ellis, Final Negotiations: A Story of Love, Loss, and Chronic Illness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
44
Heewon Chang, Autoethnography as Method (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008), 51.
21

there was a competition to see which congregation was more “fully, and in one accord” with the
Holy Spirit.
45

The members of Puerta de Cello were strictly Latin American and Spanish was the primary
language spoken. The congregation included members from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic,
Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala. Most of the congregants were aware of their African
and Indian backgrounds. Testimonials describing the pain of migration were common, as were
stories emphasizing the struggle of surviving in a new land with the temptations of divorce, drug
abuse, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, abortion and debt. Socio-politically it was solidly
working-class and attaining a union job was desirable for its security. Crossing a picket line was
considered despicable. Although the members were not actively political, most assumed that their
fellow congregants voted Democrat. I remember the election of Jimmy Carter, in 1976. The
Congregants remarked, “He’s like us, he’s born-again.”
In Sunday school, I was introduced to the term Evanglical. It was the act of spreading the
Gospel, and the Gospel consisted of the 5 Solas. The Five Solas were: Sola Scriptura—by scripture
alone, Sola Gratia—by grace alone, and Sola Fide—by faith alone, Solo Christo—by Christ
alone and Soli Deo Gloria—Glory to God alone.
46
The Five Solas were also taught at the Calvinist
Church I attended as an adult. In my neighborhood, you were either Catholic or Christian.
Evangelicalism is what separated us from Roman Catholicism. Evangelicalism, as far as I knew, at
that time, was synonymous with Pentecostalism.
A sense of being part of a racialized community in the United States was omnipresent in my
grandfather’s church. He as part of a wave of migration that included many Afro-Latinos who
migrated to the United States to New York prior to the 1960s. They identified in that context as

45
"And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place" (Acts 2:1)
46
Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Encyclopedia of Protestantism Vol. 2, Vol. 2. The Encyclopedia of Protestantism (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
22

Black or “mixed.” Their experiences in what was sometimes referred to as, “Jim Crow New York,”
made them aware of their Blackness. In Puerto Rico, they understood themselves to be mulatto, but
in the United States they were racialized as Black Puerto Ricans. My father would share stories with
the younger congregants about being told he was not allowed in many establishments because they
didn’t serve “niggers.” He said that he used to respond by saying, “I’m not a Negro, I’m Puerto
Rican” and their response was usually, “We don’t serve nigger Puerto Ricans, either.” Other
Caribbean Latinos in our Southern California church would tell similar stories. Although, these
stories were usually told with smiles and laughter, most members of the church recognized that our
racial identity was tied to these earlier experiences. The history of racial chattel-slavery, Indian
genocide, Jim Crow and the “one-drop rule” were interwoven into our racial memory. And we were
constantly reminded that no matter how well we spoke English and no matter light we thought our
skin was, “You are not white and ‘they’ will never see you that way.” The “they” was the dominant
white community, outside of the church.
In 1980, my parents and other first generation families decided to change churches. Because
many of the children of Puerta de Cello, including my siblings and me, were not fluent in Spanish,
many young parents decided it was time to integrate, or assimilate by joining a different church. And
so we traveled the short distance to the other side of Wilmington, CA, to a church called Harbor
Christian Center. Harbor Christian Center was a member of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal
denomination. I immediately noticed how white the congregation seemed. I had never seen so
many blue eyes and so much blonde hair in a Pentecostal church before, and never seen so many
children my age who resembled either a young surfing team or members of the Brady Bunch. And I
never realized how brown and black we were. I also remember how calm and reserved members
were when they spoke in tongues or were “struck by the Holy Spirit.” At Puerta de Cello, I would
hear a cacophony of “heavenly tongues” and congregants would dance or “fallout” during the “visit of
23

the Holy Spirit.” We experienced a bit of a culture shock. But, English was spoken at Harbor
Christian Center, and this was one of the primary reasons for the move.
There were a few Mexican families there as well, including Charismatic Catholics who would
say they “finally converted to Biblical Christianity.” A few Black families were also in attendance, but
Whites were by far the most numerous. Later, as a political activist, I would learn Harbor Christian
Center, established in the 1935 by White Southern migrants was experiencing the consequences of
White flight. Most of the old members were moving to Orange County from Wilmington and
becoming soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. These were the children of The Grapes of Wrath, who
successfully moved from working-poor to the middle-class. Years later my father would observe that
these were recipients of the New Deal. They would go on to become Reagan Revolutionaries,
attempting to undo the programs that helped them succeed, or as one Black congregant observes,
“Pushing over the ladder they used to get to the top.” However, Pastor Herb Ezell would not follow
his White congregants’ migration to Orange County, like many other churches during era of white
flight. Instead, he hoped to recreate the racially mixed spirit of the Azusa Street Revivals, actively
welcoming the new Latino and Black families moving to be closer to the Los Angeles Harbor. His
vision of Azusa Street, a multi-racial congregation to reflect the Kingdom of God on earth, spoke to
the new members of color.
When my family became members, the congregation consisted of business owners,
aerospace workers and members from the military bases sprinkled around the Los Angeles Harbor
Area and South Bay. There were members of the more established unions, as well; welders,
electricians and longshoremen. Socio-politically, it was primarily middle-class. The union members
of this congregation were also solidly middle-class. Testimonials highlighted struggles with divorce,
drug abuse, adultery, pornography, homosexuality, abortion and debt, breaking up the fabric of
families. But unlike Puerta de Cello, where the consensus was that society in general was sinful and
24

godless, at Harbor Christian Center evil had multiple names: socialism, secular humanism, feminism
and liberalism. These evils were “sinfully influencing” public schools, unions and the Democratic
Party. In addition, these “evil ideologies” were destroying the Christian foundation of America. One
could not assume the voting habits of this congregation.
In Sunday school, we were taught that, similar to Puerta de Cello, the Evangelical
encompassed the act of spreading the Gospel, and the Gospel consisted of the 5 Solas. This
definition was assumed to be consistent with “real” and “Biblical” Christianity. Evangelicalism is
what separated us from Roman Catholicism and other “non-Biblical” Christians. Biblical was
understood to mean “authentic” and Christianity was understood to be Protestantism, but not just
Protestantism generally—conservative, Bible-based, Protestantism. It was here I learned there was a
“liberal Protestantism” which should be understood as a corrupted form of Christianity, and as our
Sunday school teachers taught us, “not really Christian at all.” They explained that “Liberal
Protestants didn’t believe the Bible was the literal word of God.” Only Presbyterians, Lutherans,
Baptists, Methodist, Pentecostals and other Protestants who believed the Bible to be “God’s
thoughts on paper” were authentic, “the real deal,” and this was Christianity. At the same time, we
were reminded that the other Protestant denominations still needed to be infused with the “fire of
the Holy Spirit.”
In the more advanced Sunday school for junior high aged congregants, taught by Mr. Short,
we were introduced to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. The Controversy was not
explained in detail, but we learned that “the Liberals” took over the Christian churches and expelled
the Biblical Christians. They were attempting, according to Mr. Short, to “suppress the Evangelical
spirit of true Christianity.” After “the Liberals” took over the churches they embraced secular
humanism they slowly began to undermine “our Christian Nation.” Mr. Short went on to explain
that this inevitably led to forbidding prayer in school, in the early 1960s, a move which led to the
25

libertine and “anti-Christian” movements during that same decade. This development was then
linked to feminism and the Roe v Wade decision of 1973. These events, according to Mr. Short,
made the United States weak, destroying our moral character and chance at victory in Vietnam,
leaving the nation open to International Communism.
Sunday was not the only day we attended church. We also attended Wednesday night
services. This was part of the “church week.” In the middle of the week, Mr. Steve, a younger and
hipper youth leader repeated the Fundamentalist-Modernist narrative I learned from my Sunday
school teachers and Mr. Short. This is not to say the instructors only emphasized cultural politics.
Most of our Bible lessons emphasized theological themes concerning the Five Solas, sanctification,
justification, the Resurrection, redemption, the fruits of the Spirit and much more. However, the
narrative of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and the events of the 1960s informed the
socio-political world of my new fellow congregants. At one point, I asked Mr. Steve about racism in
America, and inquired about how it might signal a misguided Christian Nation. His response was
representative of the other congregants: “If people let Jesus Christ into their hearts, they would be
cured of their racism.” I would later learn that Billy Graham and other neo-Evangelicals would
answer in much the same way. Racism was the result, in Mr. Steve’s perspective, of a weak personal
relationship with Jesus.
I observed that Pastor Ezell would conflate the evangelical spirit with right-wing political
action in his sermons. Ezell would deliver sermons about “our” evangelical identity and the need to
battle secular humanism and liberalism “on all fronts.” Sometimes he would preach that one should
transform individuals and make efforts to transform culture. His message was that “We” cannot just
make individuals born-again and wait for them to change society. “We” must change individuals and
society. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” I still refused to see what this had to do
with the Five Solas.
26

Leaflets were placed in the foyer, published by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Dr. James
Dobsen’s Focus on the Family, with information about the anti-Christian activities of secular
humanists in popular culture. Other leaflets reminded us of our existential struggle with
Communism. Voting guides were available as well, usually supporting Republican politicians and
right-wing initiatives. The eldest son of Pastor Ezell, Harold W. Ezell, was a Commissioner for the
Immigration and Naturalization Service's Western Region under Presidents Ronald Reagan and
George Bush. He actively supported the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and was the
co-author of Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that many viewed as anti-immigrant. Harold
Ezell had, with his father’s support, left his father’s church in the mid-1970s at the genesis of the
white-flight from Wilmington. . Although, Herb Ezell was unapologetic of his son’s contribution to
the New Right, and despite his own vocal support of the Reagan Revolution, he still had the support
of most of the new (people of color) congregants who I would later learn despised his politics. In
the end, though, they agreed with his vision of a multiracial congregation and the spirit of the Azusa
Street Revival.
The narrative of a Christian America did not resonate with the members of Puerta de Cello
and did not align with the perspectives taught by my father and the other men and women in my
conservative Christian community at home. These people of color, all conservative Christians,
believed the United States was corrupted at its origins; African chattel-slavery and Indian genocide
were examples of this “fallen state.” The 1960s was the era of Civil Rights and the Brown Berets.
Social decay according to my father and others, was the result of “lack” -- as in “lack of money” and
greed by those with power who didn’t want to share. Once, at a domino game with my father’s
friends I asked those assembled, “Why don’t other members of Harbor Christian Center see things
this way?” Almost in unison the whole table of men shouted, “Because they’re White!”
Someone remarked, “C’mon Haven, I thought you were smarter than that.”
27

Deep down I suspected this, but even deeper down inside I wanted to believe that “true and
authentic Biblical Christianity” would open eyes and change hearts; I asked “I thought being born-
again was supposed to open your eyes to this stuff?”
“It should, but it don’t. The Klan was Christian; most of those racist crackers in the South
are Christian. White people don’t have to think about that stuff, if they don’t want to. They use the
Word to hide their racism. See, I knew Haven thinks he’s white!” laughed Carmelo, a dark-skinned
Puerto Rican who had always teased me about my full lips and remarked that I had the whitest skin
he’d ever seen on a Puerto Rican.
“Then why do we go to that church?” I asked, referring to Harbor Christian Center. “I
mean, they seem kinda racist. They act like history doesn’t happen. And they support Reagan and all
kinds of Republican stuff.”
Benny remarked, “They remember what they wanna remember. And when you have money,
you can forget all kinds of shit! We can’t afford to forget and remember just the good stuff. We ain’t
White. You’re a Puerto Rican, that’s like being a Black wetback, so you have more to remember.”
“Haven, we don’t go to church for politics. It would be nice if all those people would open
their eyes to what’s really happening….to what happened…but that’s not why we go to church. A
lot of men of God were racist, that doesn’t mean they don’t have other good things to share. Pastor
Ezell is really trying to go back to the Azusa Street Revival. He’s not talking about it; he’s actually
trying to get all the races at Harbor. Everybody talks about it, but he’s doing it. And he helps people
in the church get jobs and become citizens. He’s not all talk.” At that time, I didn’t know about
Pastor Ezell’s oldest son and his position at INS.
The tone of the domino game became a bit more serious. The men began to talk of the
founders of the Pentecostal movement, William J. Seymour and Charles Parham. Seymour was born
the son of former slaves and became a student of Parham, an avowed racist and Klan member.
28

Parham had recognized Seymour’s gifts and passion, and agreed to let him study at his bible school.
However, Parham wouldn’t allow Seymour to sit in the classes; he was seated in the hallway, and
listened through the open door. There he learned the theology of the Holiness Movement and
developed his belief in glossolalia—speaking in tongues, as a confirmation of the gifts of the Holy
Spirit. Parham and Seymour preached together at various Black churches. Seymour eventually went
on to Los Angeles, and started the Azusa Street Revival, giving birth to modern day Pentecostalism.
Parham attended the Revival, but broke with Seymour over the mixing of the races. Most
Pentecostal denominations trace their roots to that event. “Now that’s evangelicalism, not that right-
wing stuff they’re always talking about!” said one of the domino players.
Herb Ezell died in 1986 and his youngest son Don Ezell replaced him. The church steadily
grew into a mega-church and remained multi-racial, with Latinos becoming the dominant racial
group. I was in high school at the time, and had begun my journey into radical politics. I began to
question everything - gender, sexuality, American foreign policy, and Capitalism. I even questioned if
there was anything of value in ‘the American Project.” I grew tired of and bored with religion and
attended church only to get into political debates. Don Ezell was a charming and dynamic pastor,
but maintained his father’s political views, without the theological depth. He would go as far as to
question the spirituality of any Christian voting for a Democrat. And as much as I thought the
Democrats were just as useless as Republicans, I resented how Evangelicalism became synonymous
with Republican. I was finished with Harbor Christian Center, Pentecostals and Evangelicalism.
It was the 1980s and the crack epidemic was ravishing our neighborhood, gang violence was
the most vicious I could remember, and my brother had dropped out of school to join a new gang
that wasn’t strictly Mexican or Black. I joined a Socialist organization and began to get involved with
local and global causes: Anti-Colonialism, anti-apartheid, LBGT civil rights, and labor. And at the
same time I was attending the local community college and working full time at a full service gas
29

station. I held shifts on Friday and Saturday nights where I was witness to drive by shootings, gang
fights, liquor store hold ups, and dope dealing. I looked the other way as prostitutes used our
restroom to turn tricks. Faith and religion began to fade in importance in the face of real life.
My parents became worried about my relationship with God, so my mother introduced me
to a new member of her church, Willie McGee. Willie was a bit of a legend. In 1941, he came to
Los Angeles from New Orleans to work in the shipyards. He was part of the first cohort of Black
longshoremen, and was politically active in the Harbor Area. He took me to leftist events and had
life-long relationships with old school communist-types, supported LBGT civil rights, and hated
Reagan with a passion. Eventually, I asked him, “What the Hell are you doing at Harbor Christian
Center?”
He smiled, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s a right-wing cesspool.” I noted.
“There’s good things’ happening there, Haven. My kids are going to attend their private
school,” Still smiling.
“You’re not afraid they’ll get indoctrinated? Learn how to sell out, become poster children
for right-wing multi-culturalism?”
“Give me some credit, man. I don’t raise no wimps.” He raised one eye-brow, “You don’t
have to give up on reality when you become God fearin’”
“Some of the gangbangers who got saved there have become total right-wingers. It really
bothers me when I see men of color act that way.”
“Me too, brother. But I think you’re overstating the case. A few confused young men
shouldn’t speak for all the folks there. I know what Pastor Don’s about that doesn’t mean he can
control everything. You give that man too much credit. He doesn’t own the Gospel.”
“You know about his views?”
30

“Oh, yeah. He tries to avoid me when he preaches that Reagan shit from the pulpit.” He
laughed loudly.
“So why are you there? I just can’t get beyond his conservatism.”
“You’re a grown man now, Haven. You decide what you want to conserve and what you
want to radicalize. That’s how we do it, that’s how we’ve been doing it. White men don’t own the
Gospel. I like how there are so many different people there from all walks of life. And they actually
help people in trouble, getting jobs, going to court. That’s the Azusa Street Revival. That’s the
Gospel. And we’re doing it.”
“It sounds a little too kumbaya,” I cynically remarked.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.” Willie told me stories of White workers picketing the docks
when he started working there, screaming the most vicious things. Being in Wilmington, attending a
multi-racial church and, “living with people from all over the world means they lost. You know
Pastor Don is like Brother Parham, and wouldn’t that make Brother Seymour proud? Every time,
Brother Parham looks at those colored faces in the congregation, he has to admit, ‘Brother Seymour
you were right.’ You know, I remember segregationist preachers in Louisiana coming to our little
country churches, reminding us to mind our place and appreciate that ‘White men brought the
Gospel to the colored.’ And when they left, I thought we received the Gospel in spite of you and
sometimes to spite you.”
It was as touching as it sounds, but I never returned to Harbor Christian Center and I
eventually burned out on political activism. Belief in the divine seemed meaningless and changing
the world seemed futile. In 1990, I lost my best friend to gun violence; a close cousin slammed his
car into a wall while on PCP. That same year, an intimate friend died of AIDS-HIV. I dropped out
of community college and quit the gas station; instead I dove into the underground club and rave
scenes of Los Angeles. I burned out on that, as well. I bounced between jobs—I worked as a taxi
31

driver, salesman at a head shop, unloaded trucks for a department store liquidator, and managed a
halfway house for ex-convicts and recovering drug addicts. Ultimately, in 1997, I decided to go back
to college and pursue a degree in philosophy.
I enrolled in El Camino College, living and breathing philosophy. While completing my
prerequisites, I joined any club or organization which discussed philosophy. One summer I studied
postmodernism with other philosophy enthusiasts and discovered I no longer had a strong faith in
the Enlightenment, rational individualism, and free will. Ironically enough, Foucault and Derrida
opened me to the possibility of the divine and as such, I wanted to attend church. A friend of mine
was a deacon at a Calvinist congregation, however I still had leftist leanings and Calvinism seemed
too radically arcane and entwined with the spirit of Capitalism. Calvinists value religious doctrine
and are known for their God-centered, versus people- or community-centered beliefs. In addition,
my Pentecostal background, with its theological grounding in individual free choice and the born-
again experience, made Calvinists the anti-Christian Christians. For some reason, Willie McGee’s
comment, “You decide what you want to conserve and what you want to radicalize,” and “we
received the Gospel in spite of you. And sometimes to spite you,” motivated me to just check out a
Calvinist church.

Becoming a Calvinist, Remaining a Radical
I had become a member of an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation. It was Calvinist and
conservative in its theological orientation and it was primarily white in terms of racial make-up. I
would never hear from the pulpit that one’s political decisions would place a believer’s soul in
jeopardy because “by faith alone” meant just that, the political health of the nation did not depend,
according to the Calvinist tradition, with public displays of religiosity. If anything, congregants were
suspicious of believers who wore their religiosity on their sleeves. The flag of the United States was
32

not present in the sanctuary. And the notion of a “Christian nation” was suspect, since most of the
early founders were believed to be culturally secular Protestant Christians who had no patience with
the supernatural claims of Scripture. In essence they resembled liberal Protestants. Although these
notions did not dominate, they were held by a majority and intrigued me. Many of the members
were political conservatives, but would not derive policy from Scripture. As a leftist, I could not
derive my political views from Scripture, nor did I want to. Instead, my fellow Calvinists and I
would debate and discuss the responsibility of the nation-state and the role of government in society
by drawing on other sources. Universal Christianity was not assumed and Protestant particularism
was emphasized. I was home.
I always thought I resisted attending church because I had no patience for political
conservatives or vacuous therapeutic pop-psychology emphasizing “positive thinking.” Instead, I
discovered I was a bit of a curmudgeon when it came to the type of theology I thought should come
from the pulpit.
During a bible study we discussed the term Evangelical. I heard white politically
conservative members’ pronouncing the term “eee-vangelicals.” Another member commented
“There is the traditional ‘evan-gelical’ Gospel and then there are ‘eee-vangelicals.’” The “eee-
vangelicals” were Protestants who claimed Evangelical as their religious identity. They emphasized
trans-denominationalism or pan-denominationalism. My fellow Calvinists dismissed this group
because they also attempted to engage with popular culture through ministries such as “Skaters for
Jesus” and “Surfers for Jesus.” Terms like “generic,” “shallow” and “lowest-common denominator”
were used to describe the theology of the “eee-vangelicals.” Another Calvinist colleague discussed
the roots of the modern “eee-vangelicals.” He said they were grounded in the “born again”
Protestantism of the Neo-Evangelical movement of the 1950s, and as “More Billy Graham than
Martin Luther.” He went on to explain how he was disgusted by the way the Republican Party
33

activists had misused and appropriated the term evangelical since the 1970s. What was even more
surprising to me was that he was a Republican.
The Elder leading the group went on to explain that the term evangelical was derived from
Martin Luther’s “evangelisch”, and embraced by the Medieval Reformers, to separate their formulation
of the Gospel from Roman Catholicism. “Evangelicalism is Protestantism” he commented. The
consensus of the group was that evangelicalism was the act of spreading the Gospel, and the Gospel
consisted of the Five Solas. We discussed how Pentecostals and Presbyterians were sometimes
understood to be practically binaries within Protestantism, but on the Solas, they could agree.
This Bible study astonished me. It revealed to me that not all white conservative Protestants
were the same. Like me, they had two separate understandings of the term Evangelical. One
understanding I shared with them was strictly theological, concerning the Gospel and the Five Solas.
In this Calvinist church, this perspective was sometimes referred to as the “traditional,” “real,”
“Biblical” or “authentic” evangelicalism. Their other understanding was the present conception of
evangelicalism, with its roots in the Neo-Evangelical Movement of the 1950s. This movement,
dismissed by my fellow congregants, sought to refashion conservative Protestantism to make it
relevant for the culture-at-large. In the process of appealing to popular culture the proponents of
this type of evangelicalism would engage in “silly and gauche” designed for mass-appeal. For those
at my Calvinist church, Neo-Evangelicals were “dumbing down” Protestant theology.
The members of this Orthodox Presbyterian congregation were conscious of the Neo-
Evangelical’s image of Evangelicalism and how it dominated American understanding, so they were
very careful about how they would identify themselves. Yes, technically they were “Evangelicals,”
but since they did not want to be confused with what they thought was the dominant conception in
the culture-at-large, they referred to themselves as “Calvinist,” or “Presbyterian” or “Protestant.”
Although, my second understanding of evangelicalism included a racial component—whiteness-- we
34

both agreed about its “unhealthy” relationship to the Republican Party. But what was even newer to
me were the dates that my Calvinist colleagues linked to evangelicalism -- the 1950s with the Neo-
Evangelicals and the 1970s with the Year of the Evangelicals and the rise of the Religious Right. As
I progressed through college and my research about Evangelicalism, those dates would keep
popping up.
The Bible study also impressed upon me how my own racial identity informed the ways in
which I grappled with the term evangelical. I didn’t discuss it with the group, but I still viewed
whiteness as an essential component of the second understanding. Because Republican activists who
identified as evangelical were primarily white, I felt certain that their work to realign conservative
Protestants with the Republican Party had more to do with conservative racial attitudes than with
their commitment to the 5 Solas. To avoid confrontation, at least in Bible study, I was forced to
quiet my racial understanding.

When and Where I Enter as a Scholar
When the terrorist attacks on 9-11 took place, I was an undergraduate at Loyola-Marymount
University, a Roman Catholic university, and war was in the air. Anger, anxiety and fear swirled in
the atmosphere and questions concerning religious identity mingled in the confusion. The religion of
the terrorists and George W. Bush were under scrutiny. This was the first time I attempted to
answer the question “What is an Evangelical?” outside of my religious community. I was part of a
philosophical discussion group and defining religious identities had become a popular topic. At the
beginning of every meeting we would “define our terms” and President Bush’s religious identity was
the subject.
“So, what is an Evangelical?” a student asked, “Aren’t they waiting for Armageddon?”
“Are they fundamentalists?” asked another, “Like a Southern Protestant, or something?”
35

Most of the students were Roman Catholic, but even the Protestant students struggled to
give a clear answer. “It is the act of spreading the Gospel” a Methodist provided.
Another student would ask, “Why aren’t Roman Catholics considered Evangelical? Don’t
they ‘spread the Gospel’?”
“Well, that’s evangelism; I guess you could say evangelicalism is Protestant evangelism. And
the Protestant understand the Gospel as the Five Solas.” I answered, repeating what I learned in my
Sunday school and Bible studies.
“I think there may be a socio-political component to its definition,” our professor observed,
“But I’m not sure.”
I finally offered, “Well, sometimes I think it has to do more with race and politics, than just a
theological definition.” I went on to explain that, while growing up, I understood the theological
meaning and its relationship to the Reformation, but there was another meaning which was tied to
white Protestants and the Religious Right. Most, if not all, of the Black and Latino Protestants I
knew never referred to themselves as “Evangelical,” but I thought that had something to do with
the term’s relationship with the Religious Right. I also described the conversation at the Orthodox
Presbyterian Church ending with, “Sorry, this is all personal and subjective stuff; I don’t have any
hard academic research on this, yet.” I was being socialized into the world of academia, where
subjective personal experiences could never replace objective scholarly research.
And in fact, the goal of this dissertation is not to identify the most accurate definition for the
term evangelical or to describe the traits of an evangelical Christian. Rather, the objective of this
dissertation is to suggest that to explore the term and to help explain its shifting and malleable
nature by focusing on my own personal and intellectual experience, particular my experience with
religious identity and formal research on the topic.
36

In 2004, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I discovered the world of blogs and on-line
bulletin boards. I consumed hours and hours of time, lurking at pro-war sites and posting at anti-war
sites, eventually settling at a news site community called The Agonist. It provided a forum to discuss
and explore the latest news and cultural events, and the war in the Middle East dominated
discussions. A member, also called a “diarist,” would post links to an article, papers or book review,
and other members would comment or discuss the post. What was so valuable about this
community was its ability to turn into group research projects. If there were inconsistencies within a
news article, or misstatements by government official, members of the community would fact check
and counter with links to other articles and papers. It wasn’t enough to just state a disagreement; one
would have to provide a link to an outside source for support. We scoured the internet for multiple
articles and papers searching for inconsistencies, and then settled on answers. However, because
there was a war and subsequent American military occupation that most of us did not support, our
research seemed to take on a certain urgency.
In 2004 I posted transcripts of the PBS/Frontline documentary “The Jesus Factor,”
broadcast earlier that year, on The Agonist bulletin boards. The documentary examined “George
W. Bush's personal religious journey, its impact on his political career and his presidency and the
growing influence of America’s evangelical Christians.” It was extraordinarily informative, but it did
not define the term evangelical. Instead it provided multiple definitions which often times
contradicted each other. The underlining themes, which was never mentioned explicitly, were race
and political identity. Many of the evangelical leaders and historians mentioned the voting patterns
of evangelicals, but it was assumed Blacks and Latinos were not part this voting bloc. This was best
demonstrated by Doug Wead, an Evangelical leader, Bush family friend, and a campaign adviser to
George H.W. Bush in his 1988 presidential election remarks,
“Then in 1988, when we won with the Bush senior campaign and carried the highest
total of evangelical votes ever in American history, we lost as we always do--the
37

Republicans--we lost the Jewish vote and the Hispanic vote and all those votes…We
were the first modern presidency to win an election and it was a landslide and not
with the Catholic vote.…How did we do it? We carried 82% or 83% of the
evangelical vote…but I remember when it was all over, there was great shock from
me and others saying, ‘Whoa, this is unhealthy.’ We immediately began going after
the Catholic vote. While at the same time, we were frightened by the fact that we lost
all these votes and still won the White House. The message did come home. My
God, you can win the White House with nothing but evangelicals if you can get
enough of them, if you get them all, and they’re a huge number.”
47

That number, “82% or 83% of the evangelical vote,” in 1988 struck me. Earlier that year I had read
Christian Smith’s monograph, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, He described
evangelicals as 7% of the population. I searched for the definition he used to construct his research,
Smith’s study defined evangelicals as those who described themselves as Protestant, regular
churchgoers, and who chose “evangelical” from a list of Protestant identities.
48

I sent an e-mail to a fellow Agonist poster, Laura B., and explained how confused I was, since I
assumed all Protestants were in essence--evangelical. Seven percent was pretty low for a Protestant
nation.
Laura observed, “You never refer to yourself as an Evangelical.”
I responded, “No, but that has to do with race and culture. Most of the time, when the term
evangelical is used, it’s in relationship to Republican politics and white people. I prefer Protestant
anyway. ”
Laura B wrote back, “Apparently you’re not the only one.”

As the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan continued, I realized I had limited my understanding of
Evangelical identity to one’s approach to theology. It seemed there was a powerful socio-political
component to the definition. I was; in essence, demanding the “authentic and traditional” definition
I had been raised with, while forgetting that “authenticity and tradition” is a very subjective

47
Doug Wead, (Doug Wead is a motivational speaker, a Bush family friend, and was a campaign adviser to George H.W.
Bush in the 1988 presidential election.), interview by Frontline, “Interview,” The Jesus Factor, April 29, 2004, July 1, 2013,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/interviews/wead.html.
48
Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1.
38

experience. But even more surprising, I even used a socio-political conception of the term in my
private life, that is when I hear Evangelical being used outside of my religious community, I interpret
it to mean white, conservative, Protestant and Republican and yet, did not share that aspect of
myself to the Agonist community or my philosophical discussion groups. I had diminished my own
experience with term Evangelical, thinking it was inappropriate, since it was “personal” and
“subjective” while assuming the theological definition was “objective” and closer to “the truth.”
Ironically enough, my attempt at objectivity limited my access to how it was being used by the
culture at large and to myself.
In 2004, I discovered another odd quirk in defining Evangelicals; evangelicals who were
labeled nonevangelical. In an article written in 1989, by Martin E. Marty, a historian of Protestantism
in the United States and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, described how he
is usually invited to evangelical gatherings, think tanks and schools, where he is introduced as the
participant-observer, “non-evangelical.”
I like then to point to a linguistic irony: I am often the only person in the room
whose very denomination has “evangelical” in the title and whose confessional
tradition was “evangelical” in dictionary senses (gospel-centered, German-Lutheran
or Reformed, mainstream Protestant) before the Newsweek version was patented in
America.
49

Why was an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, referred to as a nonevangelical?
Lutherans in general do not emphasize the “born-again” experience in their tradition, could that be
why he was labeled nonevangelical? Was it because they are liberal in their theology and many
members tend to be liberal in their political orientation? Was liberalism of some sort the defining
characteristic of what was being used labeled Evangelical? And it was the first time I noticed an
argument about how the term Evangelical had begun to take on new meaning after 1976. Marty’s
comment about “the Newsweek version” was in reference to Newsweek’s cover which announced

49
Martin Marty, “The Years of the Evangelicals,” The Christian Century (February 15, 1989): 171.
39

1976 as “The Year of the Evangelical.” It was the first time, in popular culture, the term Evangelical
was used as an identity, instead of its traditional use as a Protestant
Later, Marty would observe that these Evangelicals were grounded in the Neo-Evangelical
movement of the 1950s, who were, in turn, a product of the Modernist-Fundamentalist debates at
the beginning of the 20
th
Century. Marty’s narrative resembled the narrative shared at my church’s
Bible study. The consensus among my on-line community was that political Evangelicals referred to
Marty as non-evangelical because he was a political liberal. The conservatives and traditionalists at
my church were not interested in playing the liberal vs. conservative game, even though they were
offended by liberal Protestantism.
At some point, I became very sympathetic to Muslim believers who had witnessed their term
for spiritual struggle—jihad --morph into a label for any Muslim seeking to violently confront
challenges to the faith.
I began to see the correlations between religion, race and ethnicity while in graduate school.
I was able to connect the history of U.S. Protestantism with U.S. racial and ethnic history and
formation in the United States. Weaving the two strands together, instead of studying them
separately,
50
confirmed what I had suspected, that religion did not float above human action. I also
had to be honest with myself. I approached this project with an agenda. The term evangelical had a
special and specific meaning for me. It was a specific interpretation of the Gospel as it was
understood during the break with Rome. I was committed to a definition that explicitly
acknowledged the Five Solas as I was taught as a child. As a Protestant of color, I felt the term was

50
Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States (London:
Harvard University Press, 2004), Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998),
Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and
Political Movements (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1998) and Daryl G. Hart (2004) are researchers I have quoted directly for
this dissertation. Pages 47 and 48 of the dissertation I provide Eric Kaufmann’s list of the academic research of Anglo-
Protestants in the United States. In addition, Sandra S. Frankiel, California’s Spiritual Frontiers: Religious Alternatives in Anglo-
Protestantism: 1850-1910 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), Rohrer, S. Scott. Wandering Souls Protestant
Migrations in America, 1630-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
40

being used for something other than the Gospel, and that it had mutated into a relationship with
political whiteness. As such, I was careful about how I used it.
However, I also learned that whiteness qua whiteness was not sufficient to understand the
evolution of the term evangelicalism. To understand the relationship between evangelical identity
and whiteness, it is necessary to become deeply familiar with the history of Anglo-Protestantism.
White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) were not only the gorgeous models depicted in a Ralph
Lauren ad surrounded by New England wealth. Instead, they were the Klan members who looked
the other way when innocent Black men were lynched, then taught the Reverend William J. Seymour
how to speak with the Holy Ghost. They were poor racists who told my father to go to the “nigger
church,” while they made sure his brother was in the union for dishwashers, for better pay. WASPs
stripped my grandfather of his tiny piece of hillside Puerto Rico, while a different group of WASPs
paid for his son’s seminary education. WASPs taught me that all kingdoms on earth were not worth
betraying the kingdom in Heaven, and then smacked my hand with a ruler when I refused to give
my allegiance to a nation’s flag. WASPs taught me to “Call no man your father on earth, for you
have one Father, who is in heaven” and then placed me in the “dunce corner” when I refused to
respect their nation’s “Founding Fathers.” The relationship between Protestants of color and Anglo-
Protestants is rife with blessings and curses. My own family members were welcomed to places but
then expected “to know our place.” This research project isn’t an attempt to “reclaim” the word
evangelical; instead it is an attempt to understand its multiple meanings and how those meanings
evolved alongside the U.S. racial system.

41

Chapter 2:
Literature Review: Problems with defining the term Evangelical
The term Evangelical, is derived from the Greek euangelium (“good news”, i.e. the
“good news” of the gospel) and came into widespread usage in the German Reformation. The
German equivalent, “evangelisch” used both as noun and adjective became quickly the self-
designation for the supporters of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and the other reformers.
The usage of the term thus preceded the introduction of the terms “Lutheran,” “Calvinist,”
or “Mennonite”, which came into usage from the middle of the sixteenth century onward
when ecclesiastical boundaries needed to be defined more sharply. “Evangelisch” was, from
the beginning, an umbrella term, denoting all those who were partisans of the Reformation.
In that sense, the Calvinist churches could be labeled “evangelisch” (Evangelical).
51

While attending an Evangelical Pentecostal private school, I remember being taught that the
Five Solas were the essential aspects of Evangelical belief, which separated Protestants from Roman
Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. To me, it is incredible that I have been part of two
separate Protestant traditions, teaching their congregants the foundations of the Reformation
through the Five Solas. One tradition, the Calvinist, is considered High Church and reformed and
the other tradition, Pentecostal, is considered Low Church and Anabaptist. Yet both rely on similar
foundational teachings and, in some circles, might be called evangelical.
However, another definition associated with the term evangelical has become popular
outside of the Protestant communities I was involved with. This definition was put forth by the
British historian David Bebbington. His approach to evangelicalism notes four specific hallmarks of
evangelical religion: conversionism, the belief that lives need to be changed; activism, the expression

51
Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Encyclopedia of Protestantism Vol. 2, Vol. 2. The Encyclopedia of Protestantism (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 310.
42

of the gospel in effort; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible; and “crucicentrism,” a stress on
the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Bebbington’s definition has become standard for most
scholars.
52
This definition is considered too broad by many. Using these criteria, Roman Catholics,
Eastern Orthodox and Mormons would qualify as evangelical. Another attempt at defining the term
evangelical was developed by the American historian George M. Marsden. Marsden suggested a fifth
characteristic—trans-denominationalism—which takes into account evangelicals’ pragmatic
penchant for cooperation in support of shared projects and evangelistic efforts.
53
Similar to
Bebbington’s efforts, Marsden has been criticized for creating a category which would practically
eliminate Protestant distinctiveness, and include other Christian traditions which would not define
themselves as Evangelical.
These popularized definitions of evangelical Christianity puzzled me. The fact that they are
so broad and inclusive struck me because the conservatives in my Protestant communities (both
Calvinist and Pentecostal) would frequently call Roman Catholics and Mormons cults and “really not
Christian.” Authentic “Bible believing Christians” would reject Rome and Salt Lake City, or so the
commentary went.
Race, ethnicity and political affiliation are not emphasized in these definitions. And yet, by
1976, the term evangelical began to signify something other than a theological persuasion, and to
develop into something more socio-political. Evangelical became another way to categorize a
particular group of Anglo-Protestants.
For the last quarter of a century, evangelicals and their political identity have most frequently
been associated with a conservative Republican agenda. Developing in the mid-1970s and
congealing in 1980, an anti-tax and socially conservative voting block emerged. At the same time,

52
David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman,
1989).
53
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
43

evangelicals, most of whom shared the same anti-tax and socially conservative agenda, became a
solid constituency of the Republican Party, contributing to a conservative rise to power. Evangelicals
became an essential asset to the GOP, and this facilitated a religiously based, conservative social
agenda. This coalition resulted in 20 years of Republican presidencies, coupled with a GOP
dominated congress for a significant portion of time. While there have been some disputes over this
relationship, there is no doubt that evangelical leaders and followers have been active on the political
right and that a majority have been voting for Republicans for many decades. While Republicans
have lost the presidency and congress, they have never lost the Evangelical vote, or to be more
specific, the Anglo-Protestant vote.
Ironically, it was the election of a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, and subsequently
Time and Newsweek both declaring 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical,” which brought renewed
attention to the Protestant term. This prompted social scientists to lament the lack of empirical
research on modern American Evangelicalism.
54
Since then, a torrent of research has been produced,
examining the many facets and nuances of what has been understood as a religious and political
movement. These studies usually identify evangelicals, using varied approaches to measure belief,
behavior, and belonging, even within the same research tradition. Consequently, observations
concerning the demographic and religious characteristics of American Evangelicals are usually
inconsistent and contradictory.
55
Studies have estimated the adult Evangelical population in the
United States to be as small as 7%
56
to as large as 47%.
57
Historians and social scientists conscious of
these conflicting images have critiqued the way studies “somewhat arbitrarily identify [respondents]

54
James D. Hunter, “Operationalizing Evangelicalism: A Review, Critique and Proposal,” Sociological Analysis 42.4 (1981):
363–72; R. Stephan Warner, “Theoretical Barriers to the Understanding of Evangelical Christianity,” Sociological Analysis,
40.1 (1979): 1–9.
55
Congrad Hackett and Michael Lindsay, “Measuring Evangelicalism: Consequences of Different Operationalization
Strategies.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47.3 (2008): 499-514.
56
Barna Group, Ltd.,“Survey Explores Who Qualifies As an Evangelical” January 28, 2009.
57
George. Gallup and D. Michael Lindsay, Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in U.S. Beliefs. (Harrisburg, PA:
Morehouse Publishing, 1999).
44

as Evangelicals.”
58
For many, the term Evangelical has morphed into a blanket term for conservative
White Protestant, sometimes differentiated from fundamentalists or Pentecostals, and sometimes
synonymous with fundamentalists or Pentecostals. The term “Evangelical” as a functional approach
to measure an aspect of American Protestantism continues to come under criticism and many within
the larger umbrella Protestant category have an aversion to the term because of its theological and
analytical fuzziness.
59
Others find its fusion with right-wing politics objectionable.
60

Lack of precision becomes even more apparent when race is part of the analysis. For the last
two decades, social scientists have used Evangelicalism as a place holder for conservative
Protestants. However, Black Protestants, who are overwhelmingly conservative and evangelical in
their theological approaches and share many of the theological views with white social conservatives,
are usually not included under the evangelical umbrella, especially when politics are concerned.
61

Instead, Black Protestants, who have multiple traditions resembling those within White
Protestantism, are lumped together, unlike their White Protestant counterparts. What is even more
surprising is that while theologically conservative White Protestants overwhelmingly vote for
conservative politicians, theologically conservative Black Protestants overwhelmingly support liberal
politicians. In addition, the more theologically conservative Black Protestants are radically situated to

58
Daryl G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 2005): 176.
59
Donald Dayton and Robert Johnston, The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 1991); Mark A. Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001); Robert D. Woodberry and Christian S. Smith. 1998. “Fundamentalism et al.: Conservative Protestants
in America,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24 (1998): 25-56.
60
Daryl G. Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011).
61
Allison Calhoun-Brown, “The Politics of Black Evangelicals: What Hinders Diversity in the Christian Right?” American
Politics Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 81-109; Carin Larson, “Divided Under the Divine? Black Evangelicals’ Relationship with the
Christian Right” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton Chicago
and the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, September 2, 2004).

45

the left of their White co-religionists. This phenomenon is also seen among Latino Protestants, but
by a lesser degree than Black Protestants, but not by much.
62

Other researchers on evangelical engagement in politics define evangelicals as “individuals
affiliated with historically white denominations and congregations in the Evangelical Protestant
tradition”
63
; this definition claims 26 percent of the adult population. It uses a denominational
approach, counting the sixty denominations affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals
(NAE), including schools, parachurch organizations, ministries, mission organizations, commissions,
individuals, and so on. However, this classification excludes the majority of nonwhite Protestants
who consider themselves evangelical,
This leads to the vexing problem, relevant not only to Green’s work, that it is not
clear whether nonwhite evangelicals are meant when researchers or media people
talk about the voting behavior of “evangelicals.” Green himself deals with this in his
research by often breaking out separate categories for nonwhite evangelicals, partly
because their voting patterns tend to be significantly different from white
evangelicals.
64

This “vexing problem” permeates research and commentary about evangelicals, because it is not
always clear if nonwhites are assumed to be part of the analysis. If it is a religious descriptor, why is
race so important in the defining and categorizing who is an Evangelical? It is apparent that race and
political priorities play as an important a part in evangelical identity as the theological beliefs one
holds.
Race, political affiliations and political commitments have had as much influence on how
Evangelicalism as perceived theology. Consider that anti-Roman Catholic sentiments were a strong

62
Eric L. McDaniel and Christopher G. Ellison. “God’s Party?: Race, Religion, and Partisanship over Time,” Political
Research Quarterly, 61.2 (2008): 180-191.
63
John C. Green, The American Religious Landscape and Political Attitudes: A Baseline for 2004 (Washington, DC: Pew Forum
on Religion and Public Life, 2004).
64
David P. Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center (Waco, TX: Baylor
University Press, 2008).
46

element of conservative Protestantism,
65
how is it then, that Roman Catholic adherents have been
welcomed into the political Evangelical world, while Black Protestants are still viewed as outsiders?
Given historical racial divides, it is not surprising that while Black Protestants overwhelmingly agree
with the theological definitions social scientists produced to describe evangelicals, “less than 7% of
Blacks identified themselves as Evangelicals.”
66
This goes beyond traditional theological uses of the
term evangelical, but demonstrates how race and political demographic shifts in the Republican
Party have colored, in a very literal and figurative sense, recent understandings of this term.
Literature Review: Dominant Ethnicity
The term Evangelical is not just a religious descriptor, but also an ethno-racial religious
identity. It functions as another way to describe American (White) Anglo-Protestants. The
transformation of the term evangelical did not start during the 1970s; it was the result of an inner
ethnic conflict among Anglo-Protestants which originated during the Fundamentalist–Modernist
Controversy from 1910 to the 1930s. The development of a white ethnic religious identity
continued with the work of the Neo-Evangelicals of the 1950s.
In this dissertation, I use Eric Kaufmann’s concept of a ‘dominant ethnie’ originally
conceived in response to the ‘hidden’ ethnic and racial identity of the dominant group in the United
States.
67
Kaufman’s concept seems well-suited to evangelical identity in the United States. Sometimes
understood as Dominant Ethnic Theory, Kaufmann ultimately sees this concept as a corrective to
“whiteness studies.”
Kaufmann develops the notion of dominant ethnicity using Anthony Smith’s theories of
nationalism, emphasizing that nations are built around ‘ethnic cores’ or ‘dominant ethnies.’ Smith

65
Thomas C. Berg, “‘Proclaiming Together’: Convergence and Divergence in Mainline and Evangelical Evangelism,
1945-1967.” Religion and American Culture 5 (1995): 49-76.
66
Calhoun-Brown, 1998: 85.
67
Kaufmann, 2004.
47

understands ethnie or ethnicity as “the set of sentiments and actions related to a sense of
identification with an ethnic group, or ethnie—a community that believes itself to be of shared
ancestry.”
68
The mytho-symbolic cores of ethnic groups are typically created through a break with
the parent stock (fission) or through the melting together of the myths of several groups (fusion).
Once in place, ethnic groups usually maintain these cores, policing symbolic boundaries while
admitting new members. New entrants assimilate into the core, transmuting into co-ethnics over
time.
69

Though most latter-day nations are, in fact, polyethnic, many have been formed in
the first place around a dominant ethnie, which attracted other ethnies or ethnic
fragments into the state to which it gave a name and cultural charter…since ethnies
are by definition associated with a given territory…the presumed boundaries of the
nation are largely determined by the myths and memories of the dominant ethnie,
which include the foundation charter, the myth of the golden age and the associated
territorial claims, or ethnic title-deeds.
70

Kaufmann, goes on to observe that the ethnocentricity of most ethnic relations literature, especially
in the United States, has meant that little attention has been paid to majority ethnic groups.
71

For instance, Donald Young’s 1932 work, described as the first comparative volume
in the field, was aptly titled American Minority Peoples. Later volumes in the United
States either reinforced the idea of ethnicity as innately ‘foreign’ or tended to ignore
the ‘majority’ question entirely. (Warner & Srole 1945: 28; Bloom 1948; Rose 1953:
v) John Higham’s Strangers in the Land (1955) did attempt to focus on majority
attitudes, but failed to link American Anglo-Saxonism to any comparative model of
dominant ethnicity. This was also a failing of Thomas Gossett, whose thesis (1953)
and book (1963) on American Anglo-Saxonism reduced dominant ethnicity to ‘race’.
The publication of the late Digby Baltzell’s Protestant Establishment (1963) proved
another important landmark, but again, little attention was paid to the ‘ethnic’ quality
of the ‘WASP’ dominant group. (Baltzell 1963: 321-3) Generally speaking, this
situation has persisted, even though the existence of a majority group began to be

68
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1991).
69
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991);
Kaufmann, 2004; Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); Anthony D.
Smith, Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London: Routledge, 2009).
70
Anthony D. Smith, 1991: 39.
71
To highlight Kaufmann’s point, I found it difficult to find recent research on the ethnic identity of Anglo-American
Protestants for this dissertation, unless I focused on the work of white nationalists.
48

discussed in the American literature by the 1970’s (Schermerhorn 1970; Burkey 1978:
170, Feagin 1978: 50-76).
72

Within the American context, the dominant ethnic group was not its focus, since the principal focus
of study concentrated on the ‘other.’ Kaufmann, pointing to Ashley Doane notes, “There was too
exclusive a focus on the ‘superordinate’ status or political dominance of the majority group, which,
though important, is but one side of the dominant ethnicity coin.”
73
In other words, ethnic identities
were what “foreign others” created and not traditional Americans. Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnic
identity receded into the construction of a White American ethnie, while maintaining the structural
and the cultural power. It was “taken for granted” that White Anglo-Protestant culture as the
normative cultural status and thus whiteness was equated with the “mainstream.”
74
The fusion of
white cultural dominance with the “mainstream” creates a situation in which whiteness can, in turn
be “taken for granted.”
75
On the other hand, nonwhite cultures are perceived as deviating from the
normative cultural status and inferior to whites.
76

Kaufmann, while agreeing, “[T]here was an ethnic/racial component to the American nation
based on white Anglo-Protestant superiority and the need to assimilate immigrants along Anglo-
conformist lines. However, …this process is more accurately described as ethnic rather than
racial.”
77

72
Eric Kaufmann, “Dominant Ethnie,” definition in Encyclopedia of Nationalism, ed. Athena S. Leoussi (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001): 51-52.
73
Ashley W. Doane Jr., “Dominant Group Identity in the United States: The Role of Hidden Ethnicity in Intergroup
Relations.” Sociological Quarterly 38 (1997): 375.
74
Doane, 1997; Henry A. Giroux, “Post-Colonial Ruptures and Democratic Possibilities: Multiculturalism as Anti-Racist
Pedagogy. Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 5-39; George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized social
democracy and the ‘white’ Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 38 (1995): 369–87; Peter McLaren,
Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
75
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
76
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Colorblind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil
Rights Era.” In Birth of a Nation’hood, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997).
77
Kaufmann, 2006: 234.
49

I will be adding another component to Kaufmann’s notion of dominant ethnicity, and that is
sociologist Steve Bruce’s theories to the relationship of religion and ethnicity, sometimes referred to
as ethnic religion. In Conservative Protestant Politics, Bruce notes that since the ayatollahs deposed the
Shah of Iran in 1979, the social sciences have dragged most religiously inspired political movements
from their contexts and mislabeled their traditions. Conservative Protestant Politics uses a comparative
analysis of Protestant nationalist and moral politics in the English-speaking world (i.e., Ulster and
South Africa to Scotland, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Bruce
demonstrates the tension between Protestantism and dominant-group ethno-nationalism,
concluding that Protestantism is inherently separatist due to its individualistic nature, and as such
poorly suited to function as a border symbol for dominant-group ethno-nationalism. Although this
may be the case, he documents the attempts made by conservative Protestants in the English-
speaking world and how they are undermined by cultural pluralism and its own theological
tradition.
78
The theological tradition being, it was born from a schismatic break from the Roman
Catholic Church during the Reformation and continued to be schismatic thereafter. Let me remind
the reader that the term evangelical was first used as way to mark this break in Western Christianity.
Bruce distinguishes “between religion as an element of ethnic identity and religion as a
voluntary-association activity of individuals united primarily by that religion.”
79
As the nation-state
becomes more stable and claims a commitment to democratic institutions and cultural pluralism, the
need for a shared religion to articulate its moral foundations become less important and is
marginalized. In times of cultural trauma and social transformations, Protestantism or religion in
general, is revived and put to work, but inevitably it is also used to undermine that work.
Religion as ethnicity was once common in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots
societies and it produced a form of conservative Protestant politics in which
reformed religion played a similar role to that of Judaism and Zionism, Catholicism

78
Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
79
Ibid., 23.
50

in Polish, Irish, and Croat national movements, or Islam in a variety of modern Arab
national struggles…. The conditions required to sustain that sort of religiously
inspired politics are rare in modern societies.
80

Conservative religion in a culturally pluralistic society is, on the one hand, attempting to
conserve the traditions, customs and values of the origins of the nation-state, its ethnie, while,
on the other hand, claiming to speak of a virtue and morality which is “independent of any
historical connections with a particular ethnic group.”
81

In the United States, this has led to mixed results. For the modern-day white
Evangelical, especially in the environs I had been raised, the United States is an exceptional
‘universal’ nation built on eternal truths; its founding documents were inspired by the
everlasting truths of the Bible. An appeal to its Founding Fathers is an appeal to The Father,
who has no race or ethnic identity. And there are Roman Catholic Whites and
Neoconservatives historians and intellectuals, who support the idea that the United States
was, unlike European nations, and exceptional universal nation that had never had an ethnic
core.
82

However, there are a growing number of white conservative Protestants who are
attempting to revive their own ethnic identity, some for nationalist reasons and others in
spite of white nationalism and popular Evangelicalism. That is, a growing number of
Orthodox Protestants believe modern-day Evangelicals have sacrificed Protestant
particularism for solidarity within the Republican Party, while white nationalists have
despised Neoconservative attempts to make the United States’ lose its ethno-racial identity
for a utopian ideal of universalism.

80
Ibid., 24.
81
Ibid., 24.
82
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative (London: Heinemann, 1968).
51

But what is even more important are the conservative Protestants of color, who may
not be fully aware of the history and nuances of the United States’ ethnic core, are very
familiar with its racial core. A racial core that is tied to specific spatiality and temporality. The
birth of the modern Evangelical has co-opted Protestant Christianity in such a way, as to
make the historical memory and the religious practices and political priorities of Protestants
of color unimportant.

Literature Review: Racial Identity and Whiteness
As I began to focus on the ethnic identity of Anglo-Protestants and the re-birth of the term
Evangelical, I came upon a debate between Eric Kaufmann, a political sociologist and Kevin
MacDonald an evolutionary psychologist. Both are astute scholars of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
ethnic identity in the United States and their debate underscores the importance of learning and
understanding multiple ethno-historical narratives. Their debate highlights the historical process by
which religion (conservative Protestantism) and race (Whiteness) became conflated in the United
States.
Kaufmann, a self-described cosmopolitan liberal, had just written The Rise and Fall of Anglo-
America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States, attempting to explain how white
Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent, who had established themselves as the dominant
American ethnic group, recede from positions of power. He notes that the United States much like
other European nations maintained an ethnic “core.”
83
The unraveling of the Anglo-Saxon
Protestant identity, for Kaufmann, begins in the late 1890s into the 1930s, wherein liberal and
cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a
powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. MacDonald, a committed scientific racist, authored The

83
Anthony D. Smith, 1996.
52

Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political
Movements, and had written a book review titled “Suicide--Or Murder? Kaufmann’s Rise and Fall of
Anglo-America” for the white nationalist site VDARE.com, where he disagrees with what he calls
Kaufmann’s theory. MacDonald writes,
White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their
attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans
simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion, with
the result that immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world,
84

multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and Whites willingly allowed themselves
to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media,
politics, and the academic world.
85

MacDonald disagrees with Kaufmann’s inner ethnic conflict idea, emphasizing his own
theory of external forces in the dismantling of Anglo-America, “that the rise of Jews to elite
status in the United States and particular Jewish intellectual and political movements (e.g.,
the movement to open immigration to all the peoples of the world) were critically necessary
(not sufficient) conditions for the collapse of a self-consciously identified White Protestant
America. My view is that the outcome was the result of ethnic conflict over the construction
of culture. Indeed, the fall of Anglo-Saxon America is a textbook case of “how deadly the
conflict over the construction of culture can be.”
86

Note MacDonald begins with identifying “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” and in a
sleight of hand ends his summary of Kaufmann’s theory with “Whites.” In summarizing his
own theory, MacDonald conflates “the collapse of White America” with “the fall of Anglo-
Saxon America.” This is not a simple mistake, since MacDonald is an intellectual heir to
scientific racists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Both of whom believed the

84
Kevin Macdonald, “Suicide--Or Murder? Kaufmann’s Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,” VDARE.com. (July 29, 2009),
http://www.vdare.com/articles/suicide-or-murder-kaufmanns-rise-and-fall-of-anglo-america. (Accessed June 24, 2013).
85
Ibid., 1.
86
Ibid., 1.
53

Northern European ethnic groups needed to be preserved by way of eugenics, not only from
the ‘colored’ races, but Southern Europeans, as well. And yet, MacDonald, who is active
among white nationalist political organizations, seems to replace his scientific certainty with
political convenience.
Kaufmann’s response notes that eventually race theorists betrayed WASP America
because they began to be more inclusive to Southern and Eastern European Roman
Catholics, viewing anti-Catholicism as antithetical to rational eugenics. Eugenicists’ influence
could only go so far, in light of the
Mass anti-Catholicism of the Klan, Masons, American Protective Association
and preachers like Billy Sunday, who had an audience of millions. Elites of
colonial stock who were proud of their WASP ancestry—Teddy Roosevelt,
Henry Cabot Lodge and the D.A.R.—would have had to prevail over
German, Irish and Scandinavian lobbies and Anglo business interests.
Scientific racists and Social Darwinists who preached a more inclusive
message of Nordic unity actually undermined the idea of a Protestant nation
descended from Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers and pioneers.
87

Ironically, scientific racism also played a role in dismantling Anglo-Saxon Protestants from power.
But Kaufmann stresses in his book that he is strictly focusing on dominant ethnic group, which is
the Anglo-Protestant Americans and not the dominant race, which is White. He is also analyzing the
ideological shifts the dominant ethnic group embraced, from the era of Anglo-Conformity to the era
of the Melting-Pot Thesis to Cultural Pluralism and presently, Multiculturalism.
While they both agree that the United States had an Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, they
disagree about why the dominant ethnic group lost power. Kaufmann argues that liberal Anglo-
Protestant elites, in conjunction with pro-immigration business interests, and race theorists who de-
emphasized religion in favor of a broader understanding of whiteness undermined Anglo hegemony.
MacDonald argues that Jewish intellectuals, by way of Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist

87
Eric Kaufmann, “Verdict: Suicide—Eric Kaufmann Replies to Kevin Macdonald,” VDARE.com, (August 12, 2009),
Http://www. Vdare. Com/articles/verdict-suicide-eric-kaufmann-replies-to-kevin-macdonald. (Accessed June 24, 2013).
54

political ideology and behavior, and the cultural Marxism of Frankfurt School, began to pathologize
Western gentiles’ racial identity and dismantle America’s Anglo-Saxon ethno-racial identity.
Kaufmann agrees that the ideological trends MacDonald points to were influential; however Jewish
intellectuals did not have the power and influence to force anything on anybody. “So in writing the
autopsy report for WASP America,” Kaufmann writes “I would pronounce the case one of
suicide,”
88
while MacDonald cries murder.
But they both agree that the United States at its origins had an ethnic core it sought to
preserve, “characterized by non-conformist Protestantism and pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon
genealogy.” They both agree that the popular notion of America as the first “civic nation,” first
developed by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, is mistaken. In their view, the U.S. has always been
a fundamentally religious nation. They also agree to the role liberal Protestants played in changing
Anglo-American ethnic identity by embracing the new intellectual trends at the beginning of the 20
th

Century to today. The Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy is an aspect of the inner ethnic
conflict among Anglo-Protestants that led to the demise of a coherent religious and racial national
identity, and the modern “evangelical movement” grew out of this conflict.
The debate between Kaufmann and MacDonald also echoes themes I had heard at white
Evangelical Churches, Christian radio, and TV, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The ideological
trends and shifts Kaufmann and MacDonald point to; Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist
political ideology and behavior, and the cultural Marxism of Frankfurt School were decried by
conservative evangelicals.
89
I heard, “Cultural relativism leads to moral relativism,” a very common

88
Ibid., 1.
89
This narrative is reflected in the work of popular Evangelical thinker Francis A. Schaffer, The God Who Is There:
Speaking Historic Christianity into the 20
th
Century (Westmount, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968), How Should We Then Live?: The
Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1976), A Christian Manifesto (Wheaton, IL:
Crossway, 1981) and The Great Evangelical Disaster: 1934-1984 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1984). For his influence
among the politicized Evangelicals see Lane T. Dennis, ed., Francis A. Schaeffer: Portraits of the Man (Westchester, IL:
Crossway Books, 1986), Ronald Ruegsegger, ed., Reflections on Francis Schaeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986) and
55

statement, in evangelical media. Cultural relativism is the foundation of Boasian anthropology. In
the view of many white evangelical leaders, Leftist political ideology sought to strip Christianity from
the world to make it safe for Soviet communism. Secularism, liberalism, “the Gay Agenda,”
feminism and “fake Christians” were all aspects of Cultural Marxism. It is striking that all of the
ideologies MacDonald points to as essential to the conditions necessary to unseat Anglo-Americans
from positions of power resembled the check list white Evangelicals used to explain how
Christianity was being dismantled in America, but where MacDonald sees Jewish ideologies,
conservative Anglo-Protestants see liberal ideologies.
What is not on MacDonald’s list that is part of every white evangelical’s list of social and
political threats is Darwinism. Darwinism is another ideology that sought to threaten Christian
America, according to many white evangelical conceptions. Later, I would read similar check lists in
the works of popular evangelical thinkers and celebrities like Francis Schaffer, James Dobson and
Pat Robertson, all of whom still see the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy as the beginning of
the end of Christian America. White Evangelicals believe the United States is a universal nation with
no ethnic core and that their faith is not grounded in historical trends of ethnic identity, yet they
decry the same threats to Christian America that McDonald and Kaufman identify as threats to an
explicit White Protestant American identity.
I certainly do not agree with MacDonald’s thesis that Jewish intellectuals seduced WASP
elites into dragging the Anglo-Protestants masses into multiculturalism, thereby loosening their grip
on power. I also oppose MacDonald’s understanding that whiteness is primarily a biological
phenomenon shaping the social construction of race. As a matter of fact, I entirely disagree with
MacDonald’s whole “biology is destiny” intellectual foundation. And, I do not fully subscribe to

D.G. Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011).
56

Kaufmann’s theory that the receding influence of Anglo-American influence in the structures of
power was solely an affair of the elites. Nor do I concur with his faith in the foundations of liberal
Enlightenment and its ability to help us evolve. I especially disagree with how Kaufmann avoids
most discussions concerning whiteness discourse. However, his notion of dominant ethnicity is
useful because it provides a sharper understanding of the nuances of whiteness and white
supremacy.
But why is this debate so important to my research? It was one of the few places where I
found an intellectual discussion of an inner-ethnic conflict understanding of the era of the
Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy. Both understand Protestantism as an essential component
of Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity in the United States. Most research treats American Protestantism as
simply “religious” sometimes tied to whiteness, but always non-ethnic, except when it is tied to non-
Anglos.
What concerns me about Kaufmann’s work is his understanding of whiteness. In 2006,
Kaufmann wrote an article called, “The Dominant Ethnic Moment: Towards the Abolition of
Whiteness,” in the journal Ethnicities. He suggests that “while the study of whites and white racial
systems is important, the White Studies approach possesses little heuristic value for scholars
attempting to explain majority responses to multicultural politics.” He argues that
‘Whiteness’ is a colloquial term used by local actors to describe the lived reality of
dominant ethnicity as it appears from the ‘inside’ of American society. Scholars
should be more critical, comparative and discerning than their subjects: ‘white’ is the
particular racial boundary marker that distinguishes dominant ethnic groups from
subaltern ones in a small proportion of the world’s nations. Whiteness informs, but
does not constitute, dominant ethnicity and we should not mistake the content of
group boundary markers for the essentials. Particular cultural markers are neither
necessary nor sufficient conditions for ethnicity.
90

90
Eric P. Kaufmann, “The Dominant Ethnic Moment: Toward the Abolition of ‘Whiteness’?” Ethnicities, 6.231 (2006):
231.
57

In the article, he contends that “White Studies defies white people and within the full scope of
human history, the political-economic performance of ‘light-skinned people’ has been brief,
beginning around 1600. Once whites lose their dominant political-economic global position, they
will lose their ‘reverential treatment’ in the Third World as well as their privileged status in western
society. The future of the urban American elite will become more racially hybrid than the traditional
homogeneity. Though there will be a hybridized elite, there will still be a ‘light skin/dark skin’ binary,
however power and wealth will be separated from ‘narratives’ of white superiority and privilege”
91

Just as the Ku Klux Klan began to include groups they once derided, such as southern and eastern
Europeans, future white nationalist movements will expand their conceptions of whiteness to
“include lighter-skinned Hispanics and Asians.”
92

David Roediger, a prominent scholar of whiteness, concedes many of Kaufmann’s points,
agreeing that the critical study of whiteness should not generalize about race and ethnicity from
models based solely on the United States. He then reminds Kaufmann of authors who have made
many of these points already, such as Steven J. Gold and Alistair Bonnet. He concedes that fifteen
years ago, there was the simple narrative of European immigrants “becoming white” in the US, of
which he was a part, however a new generation of scholarship has a much more nuanced story
acknowledging that Europeans brought to the United States a complex mixture of thinking
regarding both race and nationality that were applied on easily to the local realities encountered.
“It is worth observing that the critique of what opponents insist on calling ‘whiteness
studies,’ but is better called the critical study of whiteness, has matured rather before the area of
inquiry itself.”
93
Reminding Kaufmann that there is not, “even in the U.S. not a single book series,
journal, scholarly organization, advertised job or regular conference devoted to the study of

91
Ibid., 240.
92
Ibid., 240.
93
David R. Roediger, “A Reply to Eric Kaufmann,” Ethnicities 6:2 (2006): 255.
58

whiteness—a tribute perhaps partially to the fact that such work is most organically situated within
ethnic studies and not as a separate enterprise, but also an index of the brevity of its life inside
universities.”
94
The volume and magnitude of critiques leveled at the critical study of whiteness do
not corresponds to its power and influence.
Roediger is troubled by Kaufmann’s willingness to see whiteness as ‘secondary’ because it is
has been unable to “stir the imagination as strongly as ethnicity.” The history of mob violence and
racial separation, in the United States, was not mostly mobilized in the name of Anglo-Saxon
Protestant pride. Whiteness was hardly a “colloquialism” in the process of constructing identities, it
was the basis of a political alliance that could “defend slavery, of much of slave law, of naturalization
law, of trade union exclusionary practices, of early immigration restriction, of Jim Crow education,
of denial of voting rights, and of the state-subsidized growth of apartheid in housing.”
95

The categories of analysis that the critical study of whiteness brings to the table can only
compliment, not hinder theories of dominant ethnicity. However, Kaufmann is a critical realist,
focusing on “mutually understood concepts for the advancement of human knowledge. This
approach rejects use of subjects’ constructions as the basis for scholarly categories unless those
constructions afford us a useful way of understanding social reality.”
96
Social reality is, according to
Kaufmann, constructed by the way human perceive the world through sense-impressions and it
would be careless “to move from this accurate observation to the post-structuralist conceit that
concepts are simply power-driven paradigms without empirical referent.”
97

Kaufmann, as I wrote earlier, calls himself a cosmopolitan who believes in the logics of
liberal egalitarianism. He cannot embrace right-wing American assimilation and desires to rescue

94
Roediger, 2006: 255.
95
Roediger, 2006: 257.
96
Kaufmann, 2006: 232.
97
Kaufmann, 2006.
59

multiculturalism from “the radical left, with its anti-WASP (or antiwhite) moral center”
98
and sees
the future as communities of “life-styles” wherein individuals choose which ethnic communities to
be part of. This would produce some liberal ethnicities, with relaxed barriers to enter multiple other
ethnicities. Kaufmann provides us with his own autobiographical reasons for his view,
This curious stance is not based on some mischievous desire to be provocative.
Instead, it probably stems from my atypical biography. I am a Canadian who does
not reside in the United States, and my ethnic background is entirely secular and
“new” immigrant in origin: part postwar Jewish, part Chinese, part Hispanic. To
make matters worse, I was born in Hong Kong, spent eight early years in Tokyo,
studied-and live-in England, and was raised by parents who collectively speak ten
languages. But appearances are seldom so simple. Though I experienced a sense of
minority consciousness in the WASP suburb in which I grew up, I am - in most
social situations - a white, native-born, native-English speaking North American
“Anglo.” This dual sense of minority and majority consciousness has helped to
stimulate my research in this area and germinate a different sense of ethnic reality.
99

Although white nationalists like Kevin MacDonald call this rootless cosmopolitanism, I
think it is an example of the fluidity and privilege of capital. I appreciate Kaufmann’s
postmodernist lifestyle and his autoethnographical approach to social reality. I wonder to
what extent it may have informed the “accurate observations” of his critical realist theory.
The critical point to take from Kaufmann’s observation is that at one point in U.S. history,
Whiteness and Protestantism were deeply intertwined and recognized explicitly. The point
to take away from Roediger and other critical whiteness studies scholars is that White
identity became both dominant and invisible in the United States. When we speak of
evangelicals, then, we refer to white evangelical, but do not name the racial category.

98
Kaufmann, 2004.
99
Kaufmann, 2004: 283.
60

Chapter 3: Ango-Protestantism & the Rebirth of the Evangelical
“What the hell is an Evangelical, then?” someone had posted this question at a popular conservative
blog, when he was told he wasn’t an evangelical because he was Episcopalian. The definition of
Evangelical most of the conservatives were using at the site, stated a belief in one God, the centrality
and Lordship of God's son Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, the authority of the scriptures,
the saving death of the crucified Christ and his bodily resurrection—not as a metaphor but a
historical event and a “born-again” experience. The conservative Episcopalian stated that a born-
again experience was not necessary in his Protestant tradition, but he agreed to the other points in
the definition. Other Protestants posted how they found it offensive that theological terms were
used, but political affiliation seemed to be the deciding factor in determining evangelical status. A
Roman Catholic posted that he found it offensive that the posters to the board claimed evangelicals
were “authentic” Christians. Nonetheless the consensus at the site was that since Episcopalians
tended to be liberals anyway, the Episcopalian couldn’t be an Evangelical. The debate over who was
“really” an Evangelical, and who was an “authentic” Christian raged in virtual space; whether
liberalism in theology meant liberalism in politics, whether conservatism in theology meant
conservatism in politics, or was a born-again experience essential. But what made this debate so
desperate and important was it took place a year after 9-11 and the United States was gearing for
another war.
The Bush Administration was preparing the United States for another invasion in Iraq, after
invading Afghanistan, in its response to the 9-11 terrorist attack. Republican George W Bush’s
religion had become the subject of thousands of articles, and the term Evangelical had become the
dominant way to understand his faith. The 2003 March issue of Newsweek had a praying President
Bush on its cover, with the bolded title, “Bush and God” and in smaller type, “How Faith Changed
61

His Life and Shapes His Presidency.”
100
Two separate stories reported that he was raised an
Episcopalian and was currently a member of the liberal United Methodist Church, which was
unequivocal in their opposition with his Iraq invasion. However for the most part, he was known
by his other Protestant identity—Evangelical. And it was in his capacity as an Evangelical most of
the stories grounded their understanding of George W. Bush’s faith and the faith of the Protestants
who supported him or, more specifically, the white Protestants who supported him and the
Republican Party. It should not be surprising that I myself thinking, “Hey, you guys are using the
term wrong! This is not authentic evangelicalism! What the hell does this have to do with the
Gospel?” I soon realized that the line between the scholarly researcher and religious adherent were
not as clear.
I had always been intrigued and confused by the term Evangelical, but as mentioned in the
Introduction, 9-11 and the buildup to war turned my intrigue into an obsession. The term
Evangelical had become a major player in the justification of mass death. It carried a certain amount
of power and influence, which seemed to have more to do with race and politics, than theology.
Although Evangelicalism was the essence of my faith as a Protestant Christian, I was still puzzled by
other Protestants who referred to it as a personal religious identity. And since most of those who
were using it as an identity were white Republican Protestants, it was associated with many meanings
and functions in popular and political culture that did not capture my own attitudes or experiences. I
have explored the extent to which whiteness and evangelicalism emerged in the U.S. together, but
grew apart, at least in terms of self-conscious identity categories over time, but how did

100
Howard Fineman, “Politics: Bush and God.” Newsweek-International Edition (2003): 14-21; Randall Balmer, “Bush and
God.” Nation, 276 (2003): 7; Carl M. Cannon, “Bush and God.” National Journal, 36 (2004): 12-19; Julie Kosterlitz, “Born
Again, and Again.” National Journal. 33 (18) (2001): 1296; Joel Schalit, “God is His Copilot: The Bush Regime and the
Triumph of the Religious Right.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 35.21 (2001): 21-27; Kenneth T. Walsh, 2003. “George
Bush's Push for War: Building on His Instinct for Action and Using the Language of Evangelical Christianity, the
President Believes he is on a Sacred Mission to Remove the Iraqi Despot.” U.S. News & World Report, 134.17 (2003): 14.

62

evangelicalism evolve into a political category? How did the term evangelical, which I had always
believed was a theological descriptor become so omnipresent in American political life?

Creating an Evangelical Identity
This chapter will explain why an exploration of the term evangelical and its relationship to the
politics of race and ethnicity is essential for understanding how it is used today. I argue that the
modern usage of the term Evangelical developed from the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,
which took place 1902-1928. I also argue that this was not just a religious split, but an Kauffman
might suggest, an ethnic struggle over Anglo-Protestant identity. In 1948, Fundamentalists renamed
themselves “Neo-Evangelicals” and began employing the term evangelical, hoping to rebuild a
conservative Anglo-Protestant identity. It was during the 1970s, with the rise of the Religious Right
and the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, that work of the Neo-Evangelicals paid off, and a new
socio-political identity was created. It is during this time that race becomes a primary factor in the
definition of who is an evangelical.

Anglo-Protestant Ethnic Identity
The United States is usually understood to be the quintessential civic nation, defined by its
commitment to eighteenth century liberal ideology. However, recently academics have taken issue
with the civic nation thesis, and instead assert that the United States “for nearly its entire existence,
is shown to be an ethnic nation characterized by non-conformist Protestantism and pre-Norman,
Anglo-Saxon genealogy.”
101
English colonization of Northern America began with the

101
Developments in the 'West' have since ushered in the era of liberal civic nationhood in which the U.S. has
participated. In this manner, America's shift from ethnic to civic nationalism is not exceptional, but instead reflects a
broader value shift in Western culture. Eric P. Kaufmann, “Ethnic or Civic Nation?: Theorizing the American Case,”
Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 27 (2000): 133.
63

presupposition that their colonies would represent for other societies the values of Anglo-Saxon
Protestant culture and would be the foundation from which to spread those values to other peoples.
“As American settlements advanced outward, the Puritans not only saw God’s kingdom moving to
the West, but thought of America as the place from which the renovation of the world would
begin.”
102

The United States, from its birth has been an Anglo-Protestant nation, and this ethno-racial
religious identity furnished the ‘core’ myths, symbols, and memories that give birth and animate the
America identity. After the Civil War and at the start of the Spanish-American War the United
States ended the ninetieth century, understanding its ethno-racial religious identity as a “ethnic
nationalism of whiteness, underpinned by Protestantism, had penetrated and had come to dominate
the American psyche… whiteness, Protestantism, American nationalism, and imperialism were
bound tightly together in the moral conception of whites by the turn of the century.”
103

From the 1830’s to the 1920s, the United States practiced a form of ethnic defense in both
its Anglo-conformist and immigration restrictionist forms. Having institutionalized the ethnic
defense of Anglo-Protestant identity, between the early 1920’s until the mid-1960, the dominant
ethnic group had stabilized “its ability to mold the white United States into a truly ‘American’ ethnic
nation.”
104
The Liberal Cosmopolitan vision of the United States as a civic nation of immigrants
existed primarily on the margins of American intellectual communities during the 1930’s and did not
gain popularity until the late 1960’s.
105

102
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (London: Harvard University
Press, 1981).
103
Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge,
Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 244.
104
Eric P. Kaufmann, “Ethnic or Civic Nation?: Theorizing the American Case,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism,
27 (2000): 154.
105
Since many 'Western' nations have recently reinterpreted their past and opened their borders to become civic 'nations
of immigrants', the American experience should not be viewed exceptionally, but should be seen to be reflective of a
broader trend.
64

In The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: the Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States, political
sociologist Eric Kaufmann asks: Why did the American Anglo-Protestants recede from their
position as dominant ethnicity during the period from the seventeenth century to today?
106
How did
such a stunning transformation take place between the 1920s and the 1960s? He demonstrates that
the conflicts between nativist and the liberal-left Anglo-Protestants in the early twentieth century
reconstructed the notion of a united WASP ethnic actor. Emphasizing the role Protestantism played
on both sides of this conflict over ethnic, racial and national identity, he describes it as “the
internecine schism within the Anglo-Protestant soul.”
107

An indicator of the “schism,” during the early twentieth century was the Fundamentalist-
Modernist Controversy, splitting churches and whole denominations. Although the Fundamentalist-
Modernist Controversy is traditionally seen in strictly religious terms, I argue that it was a
manifestation of the conflict over Anglo-Protestant ethnic, racial and national identity. It was over
who gets to claim and define ‘core’ myths, symbols and memories or what today’s conservative
Protestants call---“core values.” I also argue that the meaning of the term Evangelical begins to
change during the “internecine schism” in the Anglo-Protestant “soul,” eventually becoming, in the
1970s, a new ethno-racial religious identity for many conservative Anglo-Protestants.

The Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy (1910-1930)
The victory of the Spanish-American War, amplified White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
solidarity which was at its zenith and occurring during an era of massive migration from Europe,
consisting primarily of Roman Catholics and Jews. It was a “massive influx of highly undesirable but
nonetheless ‘white’ persons from” Europe. These new white people revealed the insufficient

106
Although I do not fully agree with his conclusion that, the Characteristic ideas of the ethnic group—expressive
individualism and egalitarianism—were ultimately incompatible with a position of dominance,
107
Kaufmann, 2004: 2.
65

interpretations of race and ethnicity within the United States, and between 1840s and the 1920s, the
unstable drawing of racial lines would force a new hermeneutics of race. “The period of mass
European immigrations, from the 1840s to the restrictive legislation of 1924, witnessed a fracturing
of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races.”
108

There were new sciences and new theologies at hand to interpret these cultural shifts,
emanating from universities, which no longer focused on religion and the education of clergy
Influential seminaries adopted a liberal or ‘Broad Church’ approach that interpreted the Bible
metaphorically rather than literally. Liberal Protestantism was nurtured in this environment, fusing
new scientific discoveries with new hermeneutical approaches to sacred texts, as well as embracing a
social activism within the communities of the recent Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrant
communities.
Anglo-Protestants had been interacting with non-Anglo immigrants in numerous
ways since the founding of the Republic. The difference now lay in the new left-
liberal’ preconceptions. Instead of approaching the foreigner with fear and loathing,
the left-liberal Anglo-Saxon reformer exhibited humanitarianism—albeit from a
position of superiority. This differing preconception was the result of an ideological
shift which cannot be explained by social interaction.
109

Many of the home missionary and Settler movements, originating from theological seminaries and
religious institutions, staffed by liberal Protestants, who failed to convert the Roman Catholic and
Jewish immigrants. “The only explanation of this…is that Protestant leaders were beginning to
sacrifice traditional evangelism at the altar of humanitarian ethics.”
110
Most Protestant churches
involved with the assimilation of European immigrants, emphasized educational, recreational, and
philanthropic functions while asking little if nothing of recipients in the way of religious

108
Mathew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (London: Harvard
University Press, 1998): 7.
109
Kaufmann, 2004: 113.
110
Kaufmann, 2004: 114.
66

commitments.”
111
This would be one of the furious contentions between liberals and conservatives,
in Anglo-Protestant communities. And there were clergy on the overseas mission projects who
began to complain of “superficial…often imperialistic, Anglo-Saxon” missionaries. Another
missionary criticized his faith’s tendency to take on “some of the characteristics of the white races
[while] missionaries, inheriting these characteristics, have more or less unconsciously identified them
with the essentials” of faith. Many of the liberal Protestants viewed their ability to educate and assist
the foreign other as an expression of their Evangelicalism, while conservatives believed only
conversion could be the true standard by which Evangelicalism, is expressed.
The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy started to develop, within this soil between
1910-1915 with the publication of a series of booklets entitled The Fundamentals,
112
they were written
by a collection of conservative theologians in response to the New Theology (later labeled Neo-
Orthodoxy) a hermeneutic technique which combined the earlier traditions of Transcendentalism,
Unitarianism, with the newer techniques of German Higher Criticism and keeping in mind the latest
scientific discoveries concerning evolutionary thought. The popularity of the “New Theology”
worried conservatives since it called into question the traditional understanding of the Bible, and
therefore Christianity, as the ultimate Truth on which the whole of existence rested. It was a struggle
over meaning and symbols, over who had access to Truth, who understood what Truth meant, and
who could be depended on to tell the Truth. Who could be trusted to tell the truth of America? And
if the New Theology (perpetuated by Modernists) dominated, what would that mean for the history
of a people who justified empire, domination and genocide on the Word of God?

111
Kaufmann, 2004: 114.
112
Published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, they were designed to affirm orthodox Protestant beliefs and defend
against ideas deemed inimical to them. They are widely considered to be the foundation of the modern Fundamentalist
movement. The essays were originally financed by Lyman and Milton Stewert, two wealthy Christian oil magnates, in
1909 to set out what they believed to be the fundamentals of Christian faith. These were to be sent free

to ministers,
missionaries, Sunday school superintendents and others active in Protestant ministry. The volumes defended orthodox
Protestant beliefs and attacked higher criticism, liberal theology, Catholicism (also called by them Romanism), socialism,
modern philosophy, atheism, Christian Science, Mormonism, Spiritualism, and evolutionism.
67

As liberal theologies, German higher criticism, Darwinism, existentialism and Socialism
began to permeate American society and seep into Protestantism, many conservative Protestant
academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary fought back by developing a
quintessentially U.S. American phenomenon in religion called Fundamentalism.
113
This was a trans-
denominational movement, which means it became influential with conservatives within the
Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, Apostolic, Holiness, Pentecostals and other new
denominations developing in the United States. However, Fundamentalism and The Fundamentals
would provide tensions and contradictions it could not maintain:
They never agreed on exactly what made up the fundamentals, differing in their
acceptance of five or nine or fourteen of them, depending on who was counting—
and often not bothering to count. The sacraments basic to Catholic-Anglican-
Orthodox-Lutheran Christianity were dismissed from the doctrinal tests imposed by
the fundamentalists. They wanted to test people on issues like the physical
resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the Second Coming of Christ, all literal terms. Since
the modern views of the physical universe and of time did not make acceptance of
these versions of Christian teaching easy.
114

Then there were the premillennialist Evangelicals, represented by the students of Dwight L. Moody
and John Nelson Darby, a new and growing belief in the apocalyptic end of time which would bring
Christ to rapture his flock, while He fought Satan.
115
Then there was the new denomination of
Pentecostals, which embraced Moody’s eschatological view, however they emphasized charismatic
and ecstatic worship, while preaching an anti-doctrinal mysticism.
116
They were alien to the hostile
stoic, elitist and rational Platonism embraced by the citadel of intellectual mainline Protestantism,
the Princeton Theological Seminary. These same academic Protestants, who had obviously fused

113
Martin Marty, Protestantism in the United State: Righteous Empire, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: Scribner Book Company,
1986); Marsden, 1980, 2001; Smith, 1998.
114
Marty, 1986: 212.
115
As an ironic aside, this eschatological view was violently crushed during the canonization of the Christian Bible and
the formation of the Roman Catholic Church under Emperor Constantine; it had been a traditional heresy which,
ironically, came back in full force, in the United States, demanding a seat at the fundamentalist table.
116
How they managed to embrace fundamentalism while being anti-doctrinal became a joke in some theological circles.
68

Hubert Spencer’s Social Darwinism with John Calvin’s “elect” and “providence”, were in conflict
with the followers of the Social Gospel, who had seen capitalism as a system which rewarded
nihilism and greed.
117
It became apparent that fundamentalism was in the eye of the beholder and
had many interpreters. Yet, this did not stop the publication and dissemination of The Fundamentals:
A Testimony To The Truth, a set of four volumes, which attacked higher criticism, liberal theology,
Catholicism (also called by them Romanism), socialism, modern philosophy, atheism, Christian
Science, Mormonism, Spiritualism, and evolutionism.
118

The groups above constituted a coalition of disparate people who agreed on some all-
purpose test-doctrine while disagreeing on other “fundamentals,” folks from a variety of theological
positions and personal dispositions would always suffer from internal divisions and meandering
goals. However, “they did best when united by a common despised object”
119
and this righteous
anger would focus on Liberal Protestants. In essence, they couldn’t agree on what kept them
together, but they all agreed that Liberal Protestantism and liberalism in general, was dangerous. This
trans-denominational coalition of Anglo-Protestant conservatives would be replicated in the 1950s
with the rise of the Neo-Evangelicals and again in the 1970s, with the rise of the Religious Right and
its relationship with the Republican Party. However, in the 1970s, Roman Catholics would be seen
as equal partners in the defense of traditional Christian America.
The aftermath of World War I fanned the flames of the Fundamentalist/Modernist
Controversy. The overwhelming carnage and mass death the war had created, left a generation
stunned and new philosophies were being produced to account for this mayhem. Existentialism and
Marxism began to take on more relevance while further research, concerning the authors of the

117
Mathew Bowman, “Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel, 1885–1917.”
Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 17(1) (2007);
118
Christians who embraced evolution, explored with great detail by Leslie A. Muray, Liberal Protestantism and Science
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008).
119
Marty, 1998: 213.
69

Bible, would find a receptive audience among the newly labeled Neo-Orthodox Protestants
120
. What
had been a controversy restricted to theologians and clergy, began to involve the Protestant church
structure as a whole. The traditional view of the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy, is that it
had been primarily a theological matter regulated to the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists
churches, and did not have immediate political implications for the era.
121
Yet, it is important to note
the political events shadowing this theological storm, in addition to the repercussions of World War
I,
In the 1920s, the United States consolidated its Anglo-Protestant ethnic character in
a series of legislative actions: the Volstead Act of 1920 prohibited the consumption
of alcohol; the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 shaped immigration flows around a quota
system designed to preserve WASP dominance; and Al Smith, a Roman Catholic of
part-Irish extraction, was defeated in his bid for the presidency in 1928. Nativist
commentators glowed with praise for a U.S. Congress whose ethnic composition
matched that of the Continental Congress of 1787. In communities large and small,
powerful Protestant voluntary associations like the Ku Klux Klan, Daughters of the
American Revolution (DAR), Masons, and American Protective Association (APA)
nurtured the bonds of white Protestant ethnicity and enforced Anglo-American
hegemony.
122

While American nativism enjoyed numerous policy victories, the divinity schools and seminaries,
which manned the churches most Anglo-Protestants attended were being staffed by “cosmopolitan
clerics”
123
who began to call into question the metaphysical and epistemological foundations on
which WASP identity rested. The united WASP ethnic hegemony began to crack. It is this
“internecine schism within the Anglo-Protestant soul”
124
do we find the origins of the modern-day
Evangelical; it would be the Fundamentalists who survived this break in the Protestant church who
would eventually co-opt the term, as I will show in the following section. However, as the

120
The New Theology came to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy.
121
There were Fundamentalists on the progressive side of American political culture, best represented by William
Jennings Bryan and the Social Gospellers, and there were Liberal/Modernists within the conservative side best
represented by Herbert Hoover and much of the Republican establishment.
122
Kaufmann, 2004: 2.
123
Kaufmann, 2004.
124
Kaufmann, 2004: 2.
70

Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy began to crescendo into shattered denominations and
ripped churches, the term Evangelical had not been associated with the conservative side of the
battle … yet,
In the 1930s “Evangelicalism” was not a term much used in American religious life. The
white Protestant world was still dominated by the mainline denominations, and these were
divided by wars between “fundamentalists” and their sympathizers and “modernists” and
their sympathizers. Both sides had claimed the appellation “Evangelical,” so that it was no
longer of much use to either.
125

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a struggle over meaning and who would control
the symbols and narratives which informed and justified how Anglo-Protestants saw themselves and
the world in which they were to save. If the hermeneutic approaches of the Modernists were
applied, then the social distinctions within which they viewed their nation would be comparable to
other imperial societies, which could mean that American exceptionalism was Roman paganism in
Protestant drag. The history of the United States rested on stories and symbols, buttressed by
Fundamentalist religious and racial ideology, like Manifest Destiny and the “White Man’s Burden”
which emphasized the uniqueness and exceptional character of white America.
Between 1910-1930, the intense battles within most of the prominent Protestant
denominations over the hermeneutics of Scripture would force them to split into many pieces.
These conflicts were over who controlled the interpretations of the Bible. The battle lines were
drawn with liberals and modernists on one side and fundamentalists and orthodox on the other. The
fundamentalists/orthodox camps were adamant about the Bible being the literal words of God put
on paper for His people, while the liberal/modernist camp believed the Bible to be inspired by God
and should be interpreted in light of the latest scientific and hermeneutic methods.
Liberals/Modernists also believed in the universality of scriptural ideals, that is one did not have to

125
George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co, 1991), 66.
71

believe in the divinity of Christ and scripture to understand the universal truths inherent within. The
camp that successfully dominated this debate would set the parameters within which the seminaries
educate the clergy and the methods of engagement the proselytizing missions would practice. The
fundamentalists/orthodox camps sought total control and the excommunication of the apostates
and heretics on the liberal/modernist side. This war was heated further, when the liberal/modernists
had to give up their pluralists’ stance and seek disciplinary action against the
fundamentalists/orthodox.
The Scopes Monkey Trial seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of the Fundamentalists
and their attempt to dominate American Anglo-Protestantism. By the time of the Depression, the
liberals/modernists dominated Anglo-Protestantism
126
and most of the fundamentalists/orthodox
became separatists, starting their own independent church organizations, denominations and
seminaries.
Yet, many U.S. religious historians believe the years between the 1920s through the 1970s
became the most productive time for Fundamentalists, growing in the rich soil of racism and anti-
feminist sentiment in the South and the Sun Belt, eventually growing in areas of the Midwest,
127

Many historians have concluded that after 1925 and the humiliation that
fundamentalists received at the Scopes Trial, they withdrew from public life, formed
their own ghetto-like culture held together by a variety of religious organizations, and
abandoned hopes for constructing a Christian America. Nevertheless, the America in
which fundamentalists lived was not overly threatening to conservative Protestant
ways of life. To be sure, they did not worship alongside mainline Protestants. But
fundamentalists did benefit from the Christian culture that the Protestant
establishment labored to keep patched together, no matter how generically Christian
it was.
128

126
Here, I mean the dominant churches to be Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptists and Methodists. The
Pentecostals, Holiness, 7
th
Day Adventists, and “other” Protestant faiths, were still considered the margins of Protestant
society.
127
Joel A. Carpenter, “Fundamentalist Institutions and the Rise of Evangelical Protestantism, 1929-1942,” Church History
49(1) (1980): 62-75; Marsden, 1980.
128
Daryl G. Hart, “Mainstream Protestantism, ‘Conservative’ Religion and Civil Society,” Journal of Policy History, 13.1
(2004): 24.
72

To be more specific, the Anglo-Protestant establishment labored to keep its ethno-racial religious
identity protected. They may have had disagreements over theology, but they all saw themselves as
part of the Anglo-Protestant ethnie. And in the following decade, came together for a short time to
defend their Anglo-Protestant ethnic identity against the rising influence and visibility of Roman
Catholics. During this era of U.S. Protestant church history, the term “Evangelical” was not
associated with liberal or conservative, nor was it used as a religious identity. No one would have
ever thought to ask, “Are you an Evangelical?” with the assumption that one was conservative or
fundamentalist.
129
Further, the association between Whiteness and Christianity was unquestioned
and assumed, Protestants of color were tolerated, as long as “they knew their place.”

Billy Graham and the Neo-Evangelicals (1942 –1970)
The Neo-Evangelicals, led by Billy Graham and Christianity Today, developed their social
movement at the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the of the Cold War, while
Anglo-Protestants were searching for a new identity as an imagined community.
130
The decade began
with a coalition of Liberal Protestants and Neo-Evangelicals hoping to stop the tide of
“Communism and Romanism.” The decade ended with Neo-Evangelicals demanding traditional
conversion-centered evangelism as essential to their Evangelicalism, while liberal Protestants
emphasized social action as an expression of their Evangelicalism.
131
A critical distinction between
the two groups was also that the Neo-Evangelicals took the religious and racial anxieties of many

129
It also should be said, that the Protestant churches were not bastions of liberal politics, most of the laity within these
churches were moderate to progressive, or moderately conservative, however the clergy was indeed much more radical
than the average Protestant. What this does demonstrate is the willingness of the laity to embrace a type of Protestant
pluralism, since they were intent on keeping their clergy, radical or not. I also suspect that many of these parishioners did
not need religion to justify white privilege, since the physical sciences and the social sciences were executing that job just
as efficiently.
130
Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Robert
Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
131
This split resembles the battles during the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy and the purpose of the modern
missionary.
73

Anglo-Protestants seriously. They recognized that their ethno-religious identity was threatened by
the rising political fortunes of White Roman Catholics and their whiteness was threatened by the
rising Civil Rights movement.
In 1942, a group of Fundamentalists met for the “National Conference for United Action
among Evangelicals” in the hope of refashioning the Fundamentalist image of Protestantism.
During this conference the term Evangelical begins its metamorphosis. These Fundamentalists were
not giving up the literalism and anti-liberal/modernists stances of fundamentalism; however they
were willing to give up the isolationism. They were unparalleled in their organizational prowess and
their profound ability to raise money forming the National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Fuller
Theological Seminary (1947), National Religious Broadcasters (1944), the Evangelical Foreign
Missionary Association (1945), the Evangelical Theological Society, World Evangelical Fellowship
(1951) and many other trans-denominational, para-church organizations and agencies constructed
with the expressed purpose to facilitate solidarity among the eclectic faith traditions that made up
conservative Protestantism.
The leading lights of the new Evangelical movement were L. Nelson Bell, Carl F. H. Henry,
Harold Ockenga, and the charismatic and telegenic revivalist, Billy Graham. Within this community
there was a concerted effort to rebrand themselves as Evangelicals, yet this would be no easy task,
since they were claiming to be something “new” as opposed to the “old” Fundamentalists, and at
the same time they were claiming to be the inheritors of traditional Protestantism—“That Old-Time
Religion.”
These new Evangelicals were, deridingly called Neo-Evangelicals by Fundamentalists and
liberal Protestants alike, yet the nickname stuck. “One of the interesting features of this
organizational growth was the use of the term Evangelical to describe these agencies and efforts.
74

Almost by sheer tenacity neo-Evangelicals had created a new religious identity, and Evangelical was its
designation.”
132

They began to produce new narratives concerning the “Evangelical” tradition within U.S.
religious history. Where Evangelical used to mean the content of the Gospel used for evangelism, or
a term applied to revivalist forms of Protestantism; it would become the traditional systematic
understanding of conservative Protestantism. Historians and theologians within the Neo-Evangelical
Movement would grab all the different strands of American Protestantism, including revivalist
movements, and all three of the Great Awakenings, “born-again” Protestantism, popular Protestant
political movements--like abolition and women suffrage, and thread together a coherent Evangelical
braid. This revision of American Protestant history was not embraced by the Anglo-Protestant
culture at-large; however the followers of the new movement embraced it whole heartedly. Everyone
from Jonathan Edwards to Aimee Semple McPherson was baptized within the Evangelical movement.
During the early 1950’s, Liberal Protestants and the Neo-Evangelicals found common cause
in defending their Anglo-Protestant identity, against Roman Catholicism and Communism. Roman
Catholicism had increased in cultural influence and visibility. Catholics were no longer restricted to
urban ethnic enclaves, thus migrating to the suburbs, enrolling in college, and attaining positions of
power in society. The “fear of ‘Rome’” created a new “minority consciousness” among Anglo-
Protestants that was hardly justified in statistical terms but, nevertheless, became “the most powerful
cement of Protestant community.”
133

If the churches failed to vigorously, John McKay warned in 1950, “the secular order
will be organized by Communism and the religious order by Romanism.” “[U]nless
new life comes to Protestantism in the next twenty years,” another wrote, “America
may well have become predominantly Roman Catholic, or more frankly pagan.” In a
series of articles in The Christian Century, the leading ecumenical magazine, publisher

132
Daryl G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 2004), 24.
133
Thomas C. Berg, “‘Proclaiming Together’: Convergence and Divergence in Mainline and Evangelical Evangelism,
1945-1967.” Religion and American Culture 5 (1995): 56.
75

Charles Clayton Morrison eyed the “formidable rivals” of Catholicism and
secularism and asked, in a doubting tone, “Can Protestantism Win America?”
134

Nonetheless, this alliance to protect the United States’ Anglo-Protestant identity did not last. The
tensions that fueled the fundamentalist modernist controversy reappeared. Conservatives maintained
that Evangelicalism meant conversion and disdained social action, while modernist held that social
action was an expression of Evangelicalism. In addition, Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most
celebrated modernist Protestant theologians of the 1950s, feared that the neo-Evangelical’s biblical
liberalism could not present the gospel honestly nor could it appeal to the “modern cultured man.”
The theological issues that surrounded the fundamentalist modernist controversy were still there.
Niebuhr also feared that the neo-Evangelicals, especially represented by Billy Graham, constructed a
very shallow and simple minded form of Protestant Christianity. Mass conversions, according to
Niebuhr, were contingent on naïve and shallow interpretation of the Gospel.
During this era, the term Evangelical is still used by neo-Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants
alike. Evangelical was not assumed, during the 1950’s, as a form of conservative Protestantism. The
Neo-Evangelicals constructed a generic conservative Protestant narrative washing away
denominational boundaries, and Liberal Protestantism, by the end of the 1950s, had become the
enemy.
The Neo-Evangelical movement’s attempts at refashioning the term Evangelical as the
conservative alternative to mainstream Protestantism would benefit from an outstanding infusion of
cash from oil magnate J. Howard Pew. Pew believed that the mainstream Protestant churches, as
represented by the National Council of Churches, had become “the most powerful subversive force
in the United States,”
135
and they needed to be counterbalanced by the new Evangelicals. Pew and

134
Ibid.
135
Allen J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2008), 194.
76

Graham had formed an alliance with profound impact on American political history. “God has
given me the ear of millions,” Graham wrote to Pew. “He has given you large sums of money. It
seems to me that if we can put these two gifts of God together, we could reach the world with the
message of Christ.”
136
Pew would finance the creation of the popular magazine Christianity Today, in
1956, which would facilitate the message of the neo-Evangelicals, which was the synergy between
conservative theology and right-wing theories concerning economics and sociology. In a January
1959 meeting Ockenga assured board members that the editors were “always keeping in mind the
close inter-relation between socio-economic issues and theological beliefs…Liberalism in theology
almost inevitably leads to liberal socio-economic philosophies.”
137
Pew, Graham and the editors
agreed they would be nothing like the National Council of Churches, and Christianity Today, would
not be “making political pronouncements in the name of the church,”
138
but instead, in the name of
the Bible. In spite of this obvious push to politicize the movement the Neo-Evangelicals were
constructing, Graham played down the political implications of his connections.
139

Their desire to construct a conservative Protestant identity, separate from the mainline
Protestant Church History, required that they construct ambiguous and creative theological
boundaries so that they could find common cause with “Low-Church” sects and denominations:
Pentecostals, Anabaptists, Holiness, and many other groups existing on the fringes of the Protestant
world.
140
And their willingness to “compromise” on denominational/church foundations set them in
conflict with the Fundamentalists from which they were born; however it created a larger base from
which this new religious identity bounded to conservative political commitments would grow. Some

136
Lichtman, 2008: 215.
137
Lichtman, 2008: 194.
138
Lichtman, 2008: 217.
139
George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co, 1991), 73.
140
Daryl G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2002); George M. Marsden,
Religion and American Culture, 2nd Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2001).
77

of the Neo-Evangelicals called it engaged orthodoxy, while others persisted in calling it
Evangelicalism. A generic conservative Protestant narrative washed away denominational
boundaries, and Liberal Protestantism had become the political enemy.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Fundamentalists, like Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones, Sr.
continued to practice a strict separatism, believing Billy Graham and the Neo-Evangelicals were
embracing a new type of “liberal” theology, compromising truth for popular pluralism. In 1957 Bob
Jones, Sr. refused to permit a campus Prayer Day asking blessings on Dr. Graham’s Madison Square
Garden crusade, saying he wanted no part in “the great compromise.”
141
(King, 1966: 56). Bob
Jones, Sr., the founder of Bob Jones University critiqued Billy Graham, a student of his university in
1936, and the Neo-Evangelicals in an interview with Harper’s in 1966,
At Bob Jones University they think Dr. Graham has “trimmed Jesus
down….President Jones has listed Satan’s three forces in his war against God as
“Modernism, Neo-Orthodoxy, and the New Evangelicalism. Of these three, the last
group is the most dangerous. You know where that puts Dr. Graham, don’t you?”
142

It is important to note this split between Neo-Evangelicals and Fundamentalists; it forced many
liberal Protestants to start viewing the new Evangelicals as “moderate” Fundamentalists. Graham’s
insistence on an “engaged orthodoxy” found support among many liberal Protestants, Graham’s
deft hand at appearing apolitical in his sermons, only stressing that there can be no change without
being born-again through Christ, also found favor with many moderate Protestants. This becomes
Graham’s mantra, which is he consistently reminds his audiences that there are no solutions without
Christ, which suggested that inherent structural problems within the United States would not be
solved until everyone became “born-again.” However Graham, Christianity Today and other Neo-
Evangelical outlets were consistently right-wing in the political analysis of the day’s events, although
they insisted that racism and poverty could not be changed without a renewed heart in Christ, their

141
Larry L. King, “Bob Jones University: The Buckle on the Bible Belt,” Harper’s Magazine, June (1966): 56.
142
Ibid, 56.
78

political priorities sought to maintain the status quo. In contrast, the mainstream Protestant
churches dropped much of the American exceptionalism and Christian nationalism their forefathers
embraced wholeheartedly, even during the anti-communism of the Cold War, they still refused to
use the apocalyptic language of the Neo-Evangelicals and other Christian nationalists.
During this era, there still was no evangelical identity to speak of, in academia and the news
media, when studying American religious life, were using the categories created by social scientist
like Will Herberg, in Protestant, Catholic, Jew in 1955, in which he lumped Billy Graham as a revivalist,
with fundamentalist and Pentecostals. In 1968, Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock published
American Piety, where the dominant mode of analysis was still denominational and the National
Association of Evangelicals were lumped with “sects,” and liberal, moderate and conservative,
among the denominations were the categories of analysis. And in 1972, Andrew M. Greeley’s
Denominational Society, wherein Billy Graham and the neo-evangelicals were labeled “revivalist
fundamentalist” not a distinct Protestant identity for analysis, but an extension of a folk religiosity.
143

Although the Neo-Evangelicals were growing and building separate institutions, during the
1960s, they were still regulated to the fringes of mainstream Anglo-Protestant churches, considered
fundamentalists and revivalists by most of the Anglo-Protestant world. Most academic work
devoted to the trends and functions of faith in America, divided the religions by Protestant, Roman
Catholic and Jew. And within the Protestant category, it was the denominational church structure
which informed the social sciences and newspapers. The Sixties ended with much of this convention
intact, the Evangelical and Evangelicalism was not seen as a separate religious identity. But by the 1970s,
this will all have been changed.

143
Daryl G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids: Baker Book
House, 2004).
79

The Evangelical and the Rise of the Religious Right (1970-1980)
1976 would become the perfect year for the neo-evangelicals and their use of the term
evangelical as an identity. All of the work they had done to revise American Protestant history in
their image began to bear fruit. Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist who spoke openly about being
“born-again” and his faith, also referred to himself as an “evangelical.” This caused a flood of
interest in the term and anyone who claimed it.
In October of that year Time magazine published a short story called Counting Souls, wherein
George Gallup Jr., president of the American Institute of Public Opinion and an active member of
the American Episcopalian Church, announced that this is the “Year of the Evangelical.” Gallup,
who had a born-again experience while in divinity school, would use new measuring techniques for
understanding American religiosity. Instead of focusing on traditional church boundaries, he would
use questions designed to measure feelings about particular religious positions, “Many Episcopalians
and members of other denominations may think that ‘religious enthusiasm does not go hand in hand
with intellectual seriousness and emotional balance,” says Pollster Gallup. But, he wonders, “Isn’t it
time for us to bring our religious feelings out of the closet?”
144
Newsweek announces that it is the
“Year of the Evangelical” on the cover of the magazine. By the end of that year, Evangelicalism, a
theological term usually meant to describe Protestant proselytizing had become a separate religious
identity.
145

It cannot be stressed enough, how radical it was for Gallup to structure his polls on emotive
standards as opposed to church allegiances, this would assist the Neo-Evangelical cause since some
Americans were attending non-denominational churches and embracing emotive types of
spirituality, instead of the traditional systematic theologies dominant within the church structures. In

144
Counting Souls. 1976. Time. Oct. 4, 1976. Retrieved at
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918414,00.html.
145
(Hart, 2004).
80

1967, evangelical wasn’t a category for analysis, they were using the traditional denominational lines
for study
146
but by 1976:
Gallup’s new and innovative interview instrument discovered:
1) “A startling 34% of all Americans —about one-half of the country's Protestants—
say they have had a “born-again” experience, a turning point when they committed
themselves to Jesus Christ. That projects to nearly 50 million Americans over age 18.
2) Four out of ten Americans—nearly half of the Protestants—believe that the Bible
"is to be taken literally, word for word. 3) Just under half of the population —58%
of the Protestants—say they have done personal witnessing, meaning that they have
encouraged other people to believe in Christ or to accept him as Savior (Time,
1976).
147

In 1979, a partnership between George Gallup Jr. and Christianity Today, the journal of neo-
evangelicals, had created even newer categories of analysis, and with each new interview instrument,
a more liberal use of categories began to allow more and more Protestants into evangelical label.
That is to say, goal posts were in constant flux.
After 1976, with neo-evangelical determination and the innovative polling of Gallup, both
would persistently redefine the categories of analysis pertaining to Evangelicalism, creating a whole
new category for study. Evangelicalism was no longer about Protestant evangelism or a “folk
religion,” but it had become a fully-fledged Protestant identity, with a long tradition in the United
States. The Neo-Evangelicals dropped the “neo” and claimed to be the traditional faith of traditional
America. It was old and new, speaking for conservative Protestantism. During the 1950s, liberal and
modernist Protestants were still using the term evangelical, to describe their expression of faith and
evangelism. The evangelical is conservative/mainline is liberal dichotomy was constructed by the
neo-evangelicals, and by the 1970’s, their understanding of the split in modern Protestantism, has

146
Hart, 2004.
147
“Counting Souls.” Time, October 4, 1976. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918414,00.html
(accessed July 1, 2013).
81

come to dominate today's definition. This formulation has also facilitated the association of
Evangelicalism with conservatism and right-wing politics, as we shall see.
After 1976, and more profusely after the Reagan Revolution, religious historians were not
defining evangelicalism as the older generation had, as a revivalistic form of Protestantism or the
mode in which Protestantism replicated itself, but as the preservation of orthodox and/or
conservative Protestantism. A complete and separate religious identity had been established, a trans-
denominational identity was forged, which could embrace and speak for all Protestants, without the
complicated denominational differences and a President to reaffirm this new faith.
148
The changing
definition of Evangelicalism coincided during the time Fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Bob
Jones began to explore political power, since their organizations were being investigated by the
government.
149

Randall Balmer,
150
a professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, a
prominant historian of Evangelical history and contributing editor to Christianity Today, has written
about the Religious Right’s constructed narrative about today’s anti-abortion movement,
Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us
believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's
1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally
outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to
mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so
reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and

148
Hart, 2004.
149
Bruce, 1998; Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2006).
150
He has written A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies, won several awards,
and his second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, was made into a
three-part documentary for PBS. Professor Balmer was nominated for an Emmy for his script-writing and for hosting
that series. His second documentary, Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham, was aired on PBS and also appeared in A&E's
Biography series. "In the Beginning": The Creationist Controversy, a two-part documentary on the creation-evolution debate, was
first broadcast over PBS in May 1995 and then recut and broadcast in fall 2001. Professor Balmer has co-written a
history of American Presbyterians, a book on mainline Protestantism, and another book, Protestantism in America, with
Lauren F. Winner. Other books include Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, published by Baylor University Press, and Religion in
Twentieth Century America, part of the Religion in American Life series, published by Oxford University Press. A spiritual
memoir, Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith, published by Brazos Press in 2001, was named “book of the
year” (spirituality) by Christianity Today. Professor Balmer recently completed a history of religion and the presidency
entitled God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. It will be released by
HarperOne (formerly Harper San Francisco) in January 2008.
82

the contempt of liberals and ‘secular humanists,’ who were trying their best to ruin
America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the
opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order
to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's
misguided Roe decision.

It’ a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.
151

The abortion issue was usually associated with Roman Catholic organizations, however most
Protestant groups were “agnostic” about the decision. According to Balmer, Christianity Today treated
abortion like a necessary evil, in which the good, of its legalization, outweighed the bad. Most of the
Protestant academic journals of that time echo this assessment. The Pastoral Psychology, in 1971,
reported that, “the Protestant churches seem significantly silent in their concern, views, and
positions.”
152
The Reverend James H. Newton, Chaplain Supervisor, Nebraska Methodist Hospital in
Omaha goes on to write,
The problem of legally protecting the rights of the “defenseless” is not answered by
singly protecting the rights of the fetus. Legal protection must also protect the rights
of the pregnant woman. The moral and legal question must finally decide whose rights
and freedoms are of more value; i.e., would it be more loving, creative, and
constructive to protect the rights of the pregnant woman or her fetus? The question
answers itself. The fetus is “hers;” it is her possession, and, thus, her rights are to be
protected.
153

Newton then goes on to stress the traditional Protestant notion of self-determination and believes
Roman Catholics should make their anti-abortion stance a pre-requisite for their church membership
and not to force Protestants to suffer under their belief system. Balmer gives a list of various Protestant
clergy and organizations that expressed satisfaction with the court decision, at that time. W.A. Criswell,
a fundamentalist and former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist

151
Balmer, 2006: 11-12.
152
James H. Newton, “Abortion: A Protestant Position” in Pastoral Psychology, (1971): 56; Leslie J. Reagan detailed and
traced the pro-abortion movement among Protestants in When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United
States, 1867-1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
153
Ibid., 58-59.
83

Church in Dallas, Texas: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life
separate from its mother that it became an individual person and it has always, therefore, seemed to
me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
154

During the early 1970s, the majority of Protestants were content with Roe v. Wade. Balmer
reports that it was a conference by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Religious Right organization,
where he learned about the marginalized story. The conference was attended by a virtual who’s-who
of the American Right; “Ralph Reed, then head of the Christian Coalition; Carl F. H. Henry, an
evangelical theologian; Tom Minnery of Focus on the Family; Donald Wildmon, head of the American
Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; and Edward G. Dobson,
pastor of an evangelical church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and formerly one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes
at Moral Majority. Paul M. Weyrich, a longtime conservative activist, head of what is now called the
Free Congress Foundation, and one of the architects of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, was also
there.”
155
Paul Weyrich, an anti-Vatican II Catholic, during one of the conference meetings he
reminded the attendees what event initially drew them together to create a political movement, the
Civil Rights Movement and the IRS. The Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-
exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. This decision would force Bob Jones
University and many other white only Christian schools and universities to integrate, however, in 1975,
it still forbade interracial dating. Consequently, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-
exempt status of Bob Jones University. The university would file a suit to keep its tax-exempt status,
and when it finally reached the Supreme Court, in 1983, it would be the Reagan administration arguing
in favor of Bob Jones University.
156

154
Balmer, 2006: 11-12.
155
Balmer, 2006: 15.
156
Balmer, 2006; Lichtman 2008; Phillips 2006
84

Weyrich saw an opportunity to be exploited, a cause to broaden the Southern Strategy
implemented by Kevin Phillips for Richard Nixon’s campaign. It was manipulatively brilliant, because
the Green decision of 1972 and the IRS action against Bob Jones University in 1975 were set in motion
before Jimmy Carter’s presidency; Weyrich was successful in making Carter look responsible for the
efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools. He approached Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell to begin building a coalition of religious leaders and organizations to defend their
right to self-determination against the tyranny of the government.
157

Many of the fundamentalist leaders were having problems with the federal government,
concerning their business ventures. Jerry Falwell started Lynchburg Baptist College by selling bonds
to a small group of private investors. However, in 1972, the Securities and Exchange Commission
investigated the bonds alleging Falwell’s church committed “fraud and deceit” in the issuance of
$6.5 million in unsecured church bonds. The church won a 1973 federal court case prosecuted at
the behest of the SEC, in which the Court completely exonerated the church and ruled that there
had been no intentional wrong-doing. Falwell was furious, complaining, “In some states it’s easier to
open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”
158
These confrontations with government
agencies would begin to color the views of ex-Dixiecrats, who would come to embrace anti-state
rhetoric.
Weyrich had been a Republican activist since the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, and he
had been working on the Southern Strategy for years, attempting to stir up the
evangelical/fundamentalist voters over the school prayer decisions, abortion and the proposed
Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. “I was trying to get those people interested in those
issues and I utterly failed,” he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. ‘What changed their mind

157
Balmer, 2006; Lichtman, 2008; Phillips, 2006.
158
Balmer, 2006: 14.
85

was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status
on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
159
Balmer goes on to report, Weyrich’s
characterization of the hesitant and politically agnostic Fundamentalists, even a decade after Roe v.
Wade,
“What caused the movement to surface,” Weyrich reiterated, “was the federal
government’s moves against Christian schools.” The IRS threat against segregated
schools, he said, “enraged the Christian community.” That, not abortion, according
to Weyrich, was what galvanized politically conservative evangelicals into the
Religious Right and goaded them into action. “It was not the other things,” he
said.
160

Balmer corroborated Weyrich’s account with Ed Dobson, Falwell’s longtime associate, who said,
“The Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion,’ Dobson said. ‘I sat in
the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion
ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.’”
161
Abortion was an afterthought,
strategically added to begin an alliance with Roman Catholic activists. There is a strong traditional
“anti-papist” streak that runs through the American Right.
162
It was one of the fundamentals agreed
upon at the formation of The Fundamentals, which claimed that Papists needed to repent for the
devotion to Rome. The abortion issue, along with anti-Civil Rights sentiment, helped facilitate a
voting shift among white Roman Catholics.
During this era, Fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones, Sr., who were at one time
hostile to Billy Graham and the Neo-Evangelical movement, started calling themselves evangelical,
as well. Marsden captures this episode in Neo-Evangelical history,
In the aftermath of the resulting schism within the coalition, “fundamentalism” came
to be a term used almost solely by those who demanded ecclesiastical separatism.
They called their former allies “neo-Evangelical” picking up on the term “new
Evangelicalism” coined earlier by Ockenga. Others in the reforming group called

159
Balmer, 2006: 15.
160
Balmer, 2006: 16.
161
Balmer, 2006: 16.
162
Berg, 1995; Balmer, 2006.
86

themselves simply “Evangelical,” the term that eventually became common usage
both for them and the wider movement.
163

During the 1970s, as the Religious Right is organizing, they realized they could no longer rely strictly
on the conservative Anglo-Protestant vote to preserve their cultural and economic hegemony.
Anglo-Protestant conservatives had to widen their appeal to all Whites, without explicitly claiming to
be employing racist demands, thus they became defenders of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Politically conservative Anglo-Protestants needed a way to talk and organize around their ethno-
racial religious identity, without the political and cultural baggage the term Anglo-Protestant carried.
The term Anglo leaves out the other white ethnic groups, while Protestant emphasizes the social
hierarchy, in which all the disparate denominations were placed in American religious history,
especially isolating Roman Catholics.
The term evangelical became a powerful tool for white racial consolidation and yet it
ostensibly more to do with racial defense than with religious commitments. The Religious Right,
during the 1970s, needed a different approach, “[a]lthough there are residual elements of the ethnic
conflict in the Christian Right (for example the anti-Semitism, racism, and traces of ‘White Anglo-
Saxon Protestant’ antipathy to Irish and southern European Catholics), the culture which
conservative protestants in the USA seek to defend is one which they have chosen and which that
advertise as virtuous, independent of any historical connections with a particular ethnic group.”
164

The traditional language of the ‘nativist’ defense of culture of native-born Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, limited their appeal. They wished to reimagine or ignore the relationship between
religion as an element of ethnic identity and stress religion as a voluntary-association activity of
individuals united primarily by that religion. The Religious Right and the Republican Party could no

163
George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co,
1991), 73.
164
Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
87

longer be the defenders of the traditional values of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, but defenders
of the traditional values of Judeo-Christian culture. The term Evangelical, and Christian were to be
understood as non-ethnic and non-racial, especially since there were so many Christians of color
using the same terms to describe themselves, they would assume to speak for all of American
Christendom. But the new alliances were all primarily White Jews and Roman Catholics, assuming
the nature of their whiteness as normative.

Evangelicals and Political Power (1980-2000)
It wasn’t just pollsters and activists that helped refashion the term Evangelical, academia also
contributed. In 1980, George Marsden is credited with constructing the contemporary synthesis in
his ground breaking Fundamentalism and American Culture. It is the canonical work upon which most
contemporary evangelical history is shaped, and essential for any understanding of religion in the
United States. Marsden articulated a definition of evangelicalism and fundamentalism, which set the
stage for the torrent of research that would be constructed in the last three decades. It’s backing by
the Oxford University Press, placed it firmly in respectable academic scholarship, and eventually into
academic consciousness.
165
Marsden had written Fundamentalism and American Culture, as a response to
Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism. Sandeen reinterpreted fundamentalism as a simple
reaction against modernity and an attempt to preserve a dying way of life. Marsden realized that
Sandeen had only written about a small sliver of fundamentalism, while Marsden described a more
multifaceted movement which also included; 19
th
Century Evangelicalism, Scottish Common Sense
Realism, revivalism, Holiness impulses, Pietism, Reformed confessional ism, Baptist traditionalism,

165
Barry Hankins, “‘We’re All Evangelicals Now’: The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth-Century
Evangelicalism,” in American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future (Tuscalooga, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 2008).
88

dispensational premillennialism, and Baconian science.
166
Together this incredible matrix of disparate
Protestant ideologies, impulses and traditions coalesced together as a militant defense of Protestant
Orthodoxy, against the intellectual and cultural changes, within U.S. society, which liberal and
modernist Protestantism endorsed.
167

Marsden was so masterful in his ability to point out the different strands of this complex
quilt, woven prior to the 1920s, before it became a militant armory, his other discovery or better yet,
his new and innovative definition of “evangelicalism” went unquestioned. That is, Evangelicalism
was the dominant form of Protestantism, prior to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,
although it was not used as an identity it was a term shared among all Protestants. This begs the
question, “Which Protestants are not evangelical?” If all Protestants share the term evangelical, why
not use the term Protestant, instead of evangelical? And if researchers aim to understand
conservative Protestantism, why not use the label conservative Protestantism?
While academics were discovering and refashioning the term Evangelical, with no intention
for assisting the Religious Right, Republican activists witnessed the fruits of their labor during the
Reagan Revolution, but it would be the election of George H.W. Bush wherein all the various
conservative Protestant groups solidified. Doug Wead, an Evangelical leader, Bush family friend,
and a campaign adviser to George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election remarks,
“Then in 1988, when we won with the Bush senior campaign and carried the highest
total of evangelical votes ever in American history, we lost as we always do--the
Republicans--we lost the Jewish vote and the Hispanic vote and all those votes…We
were the first modern presidency to win an election and it was a landslide and not
win the Catholic vote.…How did we do it? We carried 82% or 83% of the
evangelical vote…but I remember when it was all over, there was great shock from
me and others saying, ‘Whoa, this is unhealthy.’ We immediately began going after
the Catholic vote. While at the same time, we were frightened by the fact that we lost
all these votes and still won the White House. The message did come home. My

166
Hankins, 2008.
167
Ibid, 2008.
89

God, you can win the White House with nothing but evangelicals if you can get
enough of them, if you get them all, and they’re a huge number.”
168

Evangelicals Today (2000-2012)
On September 11, 2001, a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks from the
Islamist militant group al-Qaeda hit the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C.
This violent shock unleashed a flood of reactions and questions concerning religion; the religion of
the men who organized and executed the attack, and the religion of President George W. Bush who
would respond to it with two wars.
In early 2003, public support for war with Iraq was tepid as Bush delivered his State of the
Union address to congress. In his speech he accused the Iraqi government of purchasing uranium
from Africa and claimed that Saddam Hussein had aided and protected members of Al Qaeda, (both
claims proven false) he then ended his speech with a metaphysical justification for nationalism and
mass death,
America is a strong nation and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise
power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers. Americans are
a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of
every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to
humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do
not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our
confidence in the loving god behind all of life and all of history. May he guide us
now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.
169

David Domke and Kevin Coe observe in The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in
America, “It was a bold linkage of administration goals with divine wishes, but Bush had the benefit
of a platform built by more than two decades of religious politics.”
170
They note that since 1981

168
Doug Wead, Interview with Frontline: The Jesus Factor. PBS. (2004). Accessed April 28, 2013,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/interviews/wead.html.
169
David Domke and Kevin Coe, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 8.
170
Ibid., 8.
90

there has been a striking change in the way Republican presidents and party platforms used “God
talk,” speaking on God’s behalf and issuing proclamations about God’s will in politics, more so than
any era in U.S. history. This shift in the use of “God talk” by national politicians coincides with the
new Evangelical identity and the rise of the Religious Right.
171

Although 75% of U.S. adults approved of Bush’s speech and 63% liked the way Bush spoke
openly about his religious belief, the main target was white Evangelicals. There was a proliferation of
books and films documenting the Evangelical President: the documentary George W. Bush: Faith in the
White House, and biographies emphasized his “born-again” experience with Billy Graham, the
architect of the new Evangelical identity.
The Republican Party had benefitted from the consolidation of the Religious-Right and
innovative polling; so much so, Evangelicals have become synonymous with most right-wing causes.
White Evangelicals, in the 2004 election,
“were the largest single demographic group among Bush voters, constituting fully
35% of his total”. The real influence of white Evangelicals is not in their numbers
but in “their increasing cohesiveness as a key element of the Republican Party.
Today, Republicans outnumber Democrats among white evangelicals by more than
two-to-one (51%-22%), and hold a 63%-29% lead when partisan “leaners” are
included. Although Republican Party identification among both evangelicals and
non-evangelicals increased slightly following the September 11 attacks, it has since
retreated to pre-9/11 levels for non-evangelicals. Among evangelicals, it has
continued to rise. Today, white evangelicals make up 22% of the population, and
constitute nearly four out of every ten (39%) Republicans.
172

These numbers present the impression that Evangelicals are solidly white right-winging political
actors, that is to say the label Evangelical has morphed into a socio-political identity. The association
the Evangelical label has with the Republican Party had become so strong, that in 2005, Time
Magazine, 29 years after both they and Newsweek declared 1976 the year of the Evangelical published,

171
Ibid., 8.
172
Scott Keeter, “Will White Evangelicals Desert the GOP?” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2006).
Retrieved at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/22/will-white--evangelicals--desert-the-gop.
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“The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” Their list consisted overwhelmingly of
Republican supporters along with two Roman Catholics, Richard John Neuhaus and Rick Santorum.
The term Evangelical had come a long way, from its original use as the Protestant interpretation of
the Gospel distinct from Roman Catholic interpretations, to white politically conservative
Republican.

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Chapter 4: Language and Meaning in Two Churches
During the mid-1980s, in Wednesday and Sunday Bible classes, it became a common assumption
that I would confront the adult in authority, over racism, abortion, same-sex relationships, anti-
communism, Ronald Reagan and scriptural authority. Some of my class cohorts began to resent me
for distracting from the purpose of the classes, which was to learn scripture. I would answer their
complaints, “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.”
173
Other
cohorts would goad me into confrontations with the teacher, hoping to turn an otherwise boring
two hours of Bible study, into heated drama.
But my experience adds further complexity to the story of race and Evangelical identity.
When I started attending demonstrations protesting the United States involvement in Latin America,
the views and attitudes of my fellow congregants were especially disturbing to me. I was no longer
confronting the usual suspects, older White males predictably right-wing in political orientation, but
young men of color who seemed to internalize arguments and narratives that did not belong to
them. At the time, it didn’t surprise me that they could not find it within themselves to agree with
my questions concerning abortion and same-sex relationships, but I became livid over the way they
embraced, what I considered, a racist and depraved history.
It was even more disturbing to me that many of the young congregants of color would
engage racial boundary-keeping, accusing individuals of “thinking they were white” if someone was
challenged common community norms. Surfing, listening to Heavy Metal, or flirting with white girls
would yield strong accusations along the lines of ““you think you are white.” For me, it was my
penchant for Depeche Mode, The Cure, “dressing preppy,” my “light skin,” and my utter lack of
Spanish-language skills that would quickly produce the accusation. And yet, in my experience, it was

173
“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” Proverbs 27: 17 (King James Bible
“Authorized Version” Pure Cambridge Edition)

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recognizing this particular historical narrative and critique of the evangelical tradition that would not
only prompt the “white” label, but also accusations of being brainwashed. And since history did not
seem to matter to most of my fellow congregants of color, it became another reason for me to
understand religion as a colonizing force, keeping “the ignorant” ignorant. This was also another
reason for me to leave the business of faith behind.
I had always assumed, like the culture-at-large, that conservative religion leads to right-wing
politics. At that time, I never made the observation that there were many folks within my
community who held conservative theological views and leftist political priorities. My maternal
grandfather was a conservative Pentecostal preacher who believed in socialist forms of government.
My elderly aunts and uncles were children of the depression who could never bring themselves to
admire the Reagan Revolution. My father, a pious old school Pentecostal, would speak glowingly of
the Cuban Revolution, describing it as a revolt against racist and greedy Cubans. However, they
never used terms like “liberal,” “leftist” or “radical” to describe their political views. I would go
further and say, they used “traditional” ways of understanding to come to their political conclusions.
Terms like “liberal,” “leftist” or “radical” were the concerns of “those other people.”
This would haunt my thinking, and eventually this research; how do we develop our
narratives, our historical narratives, to inform our political and theological decisions? Why and how
did some people embrace the theology transmitted to us by Whites, or more specifically Anglo-
Protestants, while rejecting their politics? While others internalized both the theology and political
ideologies of right-wing Anglo-Protestants, it became apparent to me that the historical narrative
someone has of the United States was based on much more than theological beliefs. One’s story of
America, I thought, would inform one’s political views more than one’s theological beliefs. I decided
to return to the congregations of my youth in is an attempt to validate whether and how this
assumption played out in those pews.
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Protestantism and Nationalism
In Conservative Protestant Politics, Steve Bruce, analyzing Protestants in Northern Ireland, notes the
problem with questionnaires attempting to seek correlations between evangelical attitudes in
religion, Ulster unionism, and terrorism. The questionnaires end up identifying evangelicalism as a
discrete entity which is distributed throughout the community, “so that, like body fat, everyone has
very little, more, even more, and so on.”
174
While most surveys fail to find a correlation, he argues
evangelicalism influences unionist thinking indirectly and sometimes unconsciously by (1)
demonstrating it is the religious tradition historically defining Ulster unionist; (2) providing better
legitimation for ethnic honor than the alternatives, and (3) by being the furthest from the defining
characteristics of the enemy. Although these three causal connections are not explicitly revealed in
the reflexive consciousness of those influenced by them, this does not make the connections any
less real. One would be forced to employ long and sensitive interviews to discover these influences.
Although an atheist, Bruce was raised in a Scottish Presbyterian household, positioning him to
notice the nuances of signs and symbolism of religions uses in the political discourse of Northern
Ireland.
So what does Northern Ireland have to do with Southern California? Like Steven Bruce, I
am interested in in the way evangelicalism is understood and defined by the society-at-large. In
addition, like him, I recognize the limitations of quantifiable attempts to gage forms of religiosity
and then attempt to make correlations to social and political action. I found his three causal
connections useful in my effort to understand how evangelicalism is used politically, by conservative
Anglo-Protestants. I am applying these notions developed by Bruce to my local church
communities in Los Angeles and I am adding a strong consideration of the U.S. conception of race.

174
Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 72.
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Among certain conservative White Protestants, and a few Latino Protestants as the following
interviews will show, (1) evangelicalism is believed to be the traditional Christian religion defining
American identity; (2) evangelicalism provides legitimization for the dominant ethnicities’ honor,
especially if Anglo-conformity is still operative; (3) by claiming the mantles of “conservative” and
“traditional,” it is assumed to be the furthest from the defining characteristics of the enemy, which is
liberalism. These causal connections are rejected or ignored by Black Protestants and many Latino
Protestants who believe religion has been misused by politically conservative White Protestants.
These interviews will also suggest that terms like “radical”, “liberal”, “conservative” and
“traditional” become useless to understand how the term evangelical is used among those who are
technically a part of the broader evangelical communities, especially when taking into account race
and ethnicity.
In the following interviews, I focus on two questions, “What does evangelical or
evangelicalism mean to you?” and “What does Christian nation mean to you? It is in how these two
questions are answered by the interviewees that I will demonstrate the socio-political dynamics of
race and ethnicity in understanding how the term evangelical is used and understood. The question
about “Christian nation” will give the interviewee an opportunity to provide their historical narrative
of America, also demonstrating how much historical narrative and racial identity are bound together.

Methodology
In this chapter, I will use an ethnographic and multisite account to demonstrate how
Protestants of color, along with Anglo-Protestant use language to create and embody ethnic, racial,
political, and class identities, all ingredients in the alchemy that creates a religious identity. I used 7
interviews from the 35, I conducted in partnership with the Center for religion and Civic Culture
between 2008-2011 and field notes, from two evangelical churches, both autonomous members of
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the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, both have membership in the National
Evangelical Association. I attended Harbor Christian Center (HCC), as a child and young adult
between 1978-1988 and have family members who attend Mission-Ebenezer Family Church
(MEFC).
Because I have such an intimate relationship with both congregations, this will have some
advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were immediate access to most areas and members of
both churches, since I was introduced as an old member at HCC and I knew many of the
interviewees from my youth. In addition, I remember conversations from my youth, with particular
members, so I was able to trace how opinions changed over time. At MEFC I was introduced as the
grandson of a prominent Pentecostal preacher and the nephew and cousin of a prominent family of
the church.
The disadvantage was my comfort level. That is, since I had become so comfortable in
certain environments, I let my guard down and spoke openly about my Calvinism. For some
Pentecostals, especially those I had met for the first time, Calvinism can be a point of challenge.
Since Calvinism leaves little room for “free will” because of its doctrine of predestination, it tends to
disturb those who place a heavy emphasis on “choice”. In some conversations outside of this
Pentecostal congregation, I’ve been called “fatalistic elitist” and “Christian nihilist.” At HCC, a male
member, 35 years old, screamed at me, “You make God look like an evil God! Where is the love?”
One young woman, 25 years old, asked, “Is that even Biblical?” Another member accused me of
being a secular humanist. I would have kept my theological views to myself if I had not become so
comfortable in the environment. However, I found it interesting that “secular humanist” was used
as a catch-all phrase for “foreign” or unfamiliar ideas and ideologies. Although I don’t think it was a
problem, an older member who remembered me from my more youthful rambunctious days
remarked, “I remember when you were a Godless atheist!”
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Another reason I chose these two churches was because they are both considered multiracial
congregations. I rely on Michael O Emerson’s definition of a multiracial congregation as described
in United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race, wherein no one racial
group accounts for 80% or more of the membership.
175
By this definition, multiracial churches make
up about .5% of all churches
176
; uni-racial churches being the norm. Although the two churches I
include in this analysis are a rare phenomenon, I believe these congregations prove to be interesting
sites to observe how the construction of identity through language can clash within the same
congregation. That is to say, a congregants’ race and ethnic identity tend to determine how he or she
defines particular religious terms, like “evangelical” and understand the role of religion in Christian
America. Suggesting that familiarity does not mean understanding and essentially that people can
still be separated by the same religion and language, calling into question, Emerson’s multiracial
congregation as an answer to the problem of race.
Thus far, the research on how language is used by evangelicals has focused on white
Evangelicals,
177
and the work using ethnographic methods to study Protestants of colors’ use of
language minimal.
178
This multi-sited ethnographic chapter will emphasize language as the primary
source for creating and embodying ethnic, racial, political, class and religious identities. I will focus
on how Protestants of color utilize their faith and the language about their faith as intellectual

175
Michael O. Emerson, People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
176
Paul Curtiss DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey, Karen Chai Kim. United by Faith: The Multiracial
Congregation as an Answer to the Problem of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
177
Peter Stromberg, Language and Self Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); James S. Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York:
New York University Press, 2009); Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2002); Simon Coleman, “When Silence Isn’t Golden: Charismatic Speech and the Limits of
Literalism.” In The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006);
Heidi Campbell, Gordon Lynch and Pete Ward, “Can You Hear the Army?”: Exploring Evangelical Discourse in
Scottish Youth Prayer Meetings.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 24 (2009): 219-236.
178
Frances Kostarelos, Feeling the Spirit: Faith and Hope in an Evangelical Black Storefront Church (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1995); Erica A. Muse, The Evangelical Church in Boston's Chinatown: A Discourse of Language, Gender and
Identity (New York: Routledge, 2005).
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resource to construct the way they perceive themselves and engage with others. Understanding how
Protestants of color use and understand terms like “evangelical” and “Christian nation”, in relation
to their White congregants and the Evangelical culture at large. Consequently, this section provides a
first step towards studying how language is used to express and create ethnic, racial, religious,
political, and class identities, in casual conversations, sermons, attempts at proselytization, and
argumentation, in essence the congregation’s discursive life. I will show how situations and the
historical narratives they tell influence the role of religion and the language used to construct their
identities. Readers will come to a better understanding of how, when, and why religion matters in
Protestants of colors’ “day-to-day experiences and how it is they work out, either by themselves or
with others, when exactly ‘[religion is just religion]’ and when, alternatively, ‘[religion is not just
religion]’”
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Two Congregations
Mission-Ebenezer Family Church (MEFC) is a church which started, in the city of
Carson, as a Spanish speaking Mexican-American congregation, in the late 1950s, and expanded to
become a Pan-Latino church by the late 1960s. During the late 1970s-the late 1980s, it was active in
combating the growing crack epidemic and gang violence, by providing spaces for gang meetings, in
order to facilitate truces, between warring factions. It was during this time the congregation, began
to have English speaking services, to broaden its reach within its community.
Pastor Isaac Canales is known for playing down politics, especially from the pulpit.
However, the Arizona initiative motivated a sermon on prejudices, welcoming the stranger, and
outsider, and nationalist greed. There were other moments, where he had made side comments, in

179
Jacobs-Huey 2006, 4
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Men’s Bible study, I thought were revealing. He mentioned, that he thought President Obama was a
“traditional pragmatist.”
Another time he spoke about “old-fashion” affirmative action in white Bible colleges, where
the institutions had set aside a limited amount (2-4) of seats for “Negros, and Mexicans.” When he
which Pentecostal congregation I was a part of, I sheepishly answered I was attending a Presbyterian
church. I was for the first time in my adult life, embarrassed/shamed, because he and my
grandfather attended the same Bible College and my grandfather was celebrated for his passionate
“church planting” and his prominent position among Latino Pentecostals. He then added jokingly,
with a sly sarcastic smile, “So you went where the money’s at!” A reference to American
Presbyterianism’s reputation as the Protestantism of the United States’ elite, and I just blushed as I
smiled.
Harbor Christian Center (HCC) began in the 1930s, as a congregation of depression era
Anglo-Pentecostal migrants from Arkansas and Oklahoma. It was established in the working-class
community of Wilmington, the heart of the Los Angeles Harbor. The vast majority of the
congregation was wage laborers, and members of the growing labor unions, such as the
Longshoremen. The post-World War II/Cold War boom of Aero Space industries and military
bases brought another influx of workers to Los Angeles, and as a result, HCC broadened it’s out-
reach, outside of its working-class Arkansas and Oklahoma migrant exclusivity, to the wider
white/Anglo-Protestant community of the South Bay and Harbor Area of Los Angeles. By the mid-
1960s, it had welcomed its first Black family, from the San Pedro Naval Base. White flight, in the
1970s, changed Wilmington, from a white working-class town, to a Latino working class town. This
changed the composition of the congregation.
Pastor Don is known for saying, from the pulpit, that he questions the faith of any Christian
who would vote for Democratic politicians. He has verbalized this sentiment, for both the Bill
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Clinton and Barak Obama elections. He has remarked that liberalism and secular humanism have
stripped God from the schools and government institutions, and alluded to the Republican’s
struggles to bring back a “Biblically grounded” America. On Sundays, prior to holidays, he shows
short videos, recorded from FOX News, which speak of a “Godly, God fearing people taking back
America.” He has set some pretty distinctive boundaries, concerning faith/religion and political
priorities, and it has reverberations among the congregants.
In a brief conversation with Pastor Ezell, we discussed the Assemblies of God (AG)
denomination’s relationship with the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles, the event that gave birth
to modern-day Pentecostalism.
180
When I asked about the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and
the AG, he quickly reminded me it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with theology.
I never mentioned race, his quick answer spoke volumes.

The Interviews, Part 1: “When you hear “evangelical,” what do you think of?”
To help explain why Black Protestants avoid the label evangelical, I interviewed a number of
Black congregants and Latino congregants. I asked “Are you an Evangelical?” And would follow
up with the question, “What do you mean by ‘Evangelical?” Respondents often offered two separate
meanings, “Do you mean spreading the Gospel or Republican?” This chapter addresses these
questions drawing from insights with Black and Latino congregants of an Evangelical church who
identify – or more precisely qualify--their identities as Evangelicals. Are political commitments, more
so than theological ones, essential in defining who is an Evangelical? Has the definition of the term
Evangelical grown so much as to incorporate most conservative white Christians, while ignoring

180
From the Revival, Bishop Charles Mason went to Tennessee and started the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)
denomination, with white Pentecostals. Pentecostalism had a reputation for being a religion for “poor Blacks and white
trash” and social pressure from other white Protestant denominations, forced white Pentecostal members to break with
COGIC and start the AG (Newman, 2007).
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Protestants of color? If so, why not explicitly use “conservative white Christians” instead of the term
Evangelical?
Bunmi (MEFC), 30, is a first generation Nigerian-American and wife to the assistant pastor,
Joshua. She had been raised in charismatic churches her whole life and sees herself as a “traditional
wife,”

Haven: When you hear “evangelical,” what do you think of?
Bunmi: I think of primarily Southern pastors, Bible belt pastors who talk all about Jesus,
preaching about God and Jesus and not afraid to share the gospel, feel [?] from the
pulpit or from wherever.
Haven: So evangelical Southern pastors, more assertive, more conservative?
Bunmi: I use “Southern” loosely, but yeah.
Haven: There’s a reason why that was the first word that popped up into your head.
Bunmi: Isn’t it derived from there, from the Bible belt? I’m not sure…
Haven: That’s why I’m asking the question, because there is a lot of debate over that term.
I’m trying to figure out how people see that term, because people see it in different
ways.
Bunmi: Like Billy Graham!

Her husband, Joshua (MEFC) 29, Mexican-American and assistant pastor, in a separate interview,
made it clear he thought there are two understandings; “The media usually portrays Evangelicals as
conservative Republicans.” His second understanding was, “Someone who spreads the Word—the
Gospel, the Gospel being the Five Solas, and the promise of the Cross, through Jesus Christ.”
William McGee III (HCC), 28, African-American and a pastor who frequently goes on
evangelist crusades.
Haven: When you hear the term “evangelical,” what do you think of?
William: I think of white America, very conservative, very mainstream Christian kind of a
fish, pretty much Jesus people.
Haven: You wouldn’t consider yourself part of that?
William: No.

Later, after the recorded interview, he wished to remind me that he still believed in evangelicalism,
but is worried that most people associate the term with a type a political affiliation—conservative
Republican, which is why he very careful how he uses the term. He then explained that it was,
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“Really about spreading the Word, that you can have a new life in Christ.” William had asked me if I
wanted an unvarnished interview, and if so, we could meet in the parking lot of the church.
Apparently, he believed his views were “way too outside-the-box” for his fellow congregants. I will
go into more details about this later in this chapter.
Stephan (HCC), 29, the older brother of William and a student at Fuller Seminary, gave a
similar answer to Joshua, “There is the political definition, White conservative Republican…and
then there is the traditional definition, spreading the Gospel…the Word.” He then proceeded to
repeat the Five Solas.
Dan Hudson (MEFC), 49, the manager of spiritual care at a Roman Catholic hospital,
identified his ethnic and racial background as growing up “in a middle-class white household in a
white neighborhood,” however his biological father, who was absent his whole life, was Mexican-
American.
Haven: When you hear the term “evangelical,” how are you using it...what do you think of?
Dan: Depends on where I am. In a setting like this, in a secular setting, I think it depends on
the way it’s—you can hear someone say “evangelical” and it comes with negative
connotations, like exclusive, we’re the right way.
Haven: Almost like fundamentalist?
Dan Hudson: Yeah. Wacko. Not very intelligent.
Haven: In what way do you understand it?
Dan: I understand it as having the understanding that someone who has experienced a point
in their life where they realize they’re incapable or lacking at the core and that an
experience of the love of God is what’s needed to heal or transform that which is
lacking or broken at the core.

Bunmi, Joshua, William, Stephan and Dan all prefaced their answers to “What does
Evangelical mean?” with a description as to how they believed it is understood by the culture-at-
large, which is a term ripe with racial and political meaning. William and Dan used what is known as
born-again Protestantism, to define the contents of the Gospel, while Joshua and Stephan gave the
Five Solas. Both Joshua and Stephan attended Fuller Seminary, which I believe explains their
answer, because both were also familiar with the roots of the term evangelical. The two seminarians
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were committed to born-again Protestantism, but also had conversations with me about the
historical changes within Protestantism, understanding that the notion of a born-again experience
prior to salvation is a theological understanding developed much later, after the Reformation, in the
United States.
Paul (HCC), 59, Irish-American and Longshoreman, had been raised Roman Catholic his
whole life and had started attending HCC recently with his wife.
Haven: I’m gonna switch over the questions a little bit. When you hear the term
“evangelical,” what does that mean?
Paul: It means evangelizing. It should be.
Haven: How is evangelical different than evangelizing?
Paul: I think that it’s a connotation that you have that basic thing, how you’re behaving. ___
an evangelist, but his teaching would be about getting out and spreading the good
news to his congregation. So he’s the pastor of a church, but his teachings are
evangelical in the sense that he’s asking people to understand that our purpose is for
somebody to reach Jesus, reach somebody else for Christ. Even though he’s the
pastor of a church, he’s not out standing on a street corner or going to different
parts of the world. That’s how I see it.
Haven: Can a Catholic priest be an evangelical?
Paul: Yes.
Haven: So you’re at Harbor Christian Center, and Don has impressed you. You’re slowly
becoming a Protestant, in essence?” [I laughed.]
Paul: “Well…” [Shifting in his chair, Paul appeared very uncomfortable.]

Paul, was not like other ex-Roman Catholics at both churches. He had a hard time identifying with
the term Protestant, preferring evangelical, instead. It seemed, to him, that the term evangelical was
much more ecumenical, more inclusive. He still had a profound respect and reverence for Roman
Catholicism, “Their sense of justice on things, their issue on abortion, their sense about war,
justification for war and things, some stuff is really enlightening.” He believes he would be in the
“far left of the Democratic Party” if they weren’t so “pro-abortion.” He went on to explain, that
Protestants were not sufficiently anti-abortion and hoped to change that.
Ralph Giordano (HCC), 38, identifying himself as Italian-American, and youth pastor of
HCC.
Haven: When you hear the term “evangelical,” what do you think?
Ralph: It’s loosely applied to Christians. It’s basically those that believe in the…
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Haven: So are Roman Catholics are evangelical as well?
Ralph: Evangelical basically is a loose term referring to Christians that believe in the Bible
message of salvation. When I’m about to tell you right now, most people are not
gonna tell you this. But if you ask me, “Is Catholic Christian?” I would say no. The
reason why is because Biblical salvation is not taught in the Catholic church, meaning
salvation is not by works, it’s by faith and faith alone.
Haven: We’ll get to salvation, but I’m trying to get at what you think evangelical means.
Ralph: Basically, it’s a general term that refers to Christians that believe the Bible message of
salvation.
Haven: When you hear on the news or usually in political news, they’ll say, “Evangelicals
today—” how do you think they’re using it?
Ralph: They lump everybody together. You can be a Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness, and
traditional Christian, and they lump it all together as evangelical.

During the interview, Ralph kept reminding me to make sure I give “those liberals and secularists” at
the University, the answers to my questions. This was important, since “they are spreading lies about
Christianity, trying to destroy it!” Ralph, who identifies himself as a Republican, because “They
represent Biblical principles,” also believes “the media” clumsily lumps all Christians under the
Evangelical label, but stresses that there are “false Christians” and “Biblical Christians.” He was
raised Roman Catholic, like Paul D. attending Roman Catholic private schools and becoming
confirmed in the faith. He had “left Roman Catholicism for Christianity.” I pressed him on this later
in the interview.
Ralph: That was the whole thing I noticed when I went to my grandma’s church, which was
a Christian church.
Haven: What do you mean by Christian?
Ralph: According to the Bible. It was a church that was followed after the Bible.
Haven: Protestant?
Ralph: You could say that, yes, you can. I say Christian. But Protestant meaning, like, OK,
do I believe that salvation is by faith and faith alone? Yes, and so does Paul in the
New Testament. But Catholicism doesn’t teach that, it teach it’s by faith and works
that saves you, which is not scripture. That’s why Catholicism errs, because if you
have to tell me is Catholic Christian, and this is gonna—people will get mad at you
for quoting, but you can quote me, even people at my own church disagree with me,
but on the authority of God’s word and as an ordained minister and as a person who
has studied the Biblical texts, salvation is not by works, it’s only by faith in Christ and
Christ alone. […] A lot of times in Christian or religious circles, religious circles, we
say the same words but the meaning is much different.

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While Paul desired an ecumenically Christian definition of evangelical, Ralph sought one that was
exclusive to Protestantism, although, he was awkward with the term “Protestant” preferring
“Biblical Christianity.”
Bob Beechly (HCC), 74, white, computer programmer, grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran
denomination, the liberal wing of American Lutheranism, responded to the question,
Haven: The term “evangelical.” What does that mean to you?
Bob: That sounds to me like; the Nazarene is typical of evangelical. They’re fundamentalists;
they believe everything that’s in the Bible except about the baptism of the Holy
Spirit. They’re just not Pentecostal, is my feeling about evangelicals.
Haven: Do you think evangelicals are separate from Pentecostals?
Bob: Yeah. They’re the next thing to it as far as denominations go, but they’re still separate.
Haven: So you wouldn’t consider yourself an evangelical?
Bob: No, I’m Pentecostal.

I was a bit puzzled by his answer, but realized the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy, had at
first primarily been taken up by Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist denominations. The
liberal/conservative split among American Lutherans transpired differently. In addition to that,
Evangelical Lutherans were some of the first Protestants to quickly notice how Fundamentalists had
been appropriating the term for themselves, eventual creating a Mainline/Evangelical binary, which
had become a type of shorthand for a liberal/conservative distinction. Bob was sure to remind me
that he didn’t appreciate fundamentalism, but found a home in a charismatic church. That he
associated evangelical immediately to fundamentalism made me think he still carried Lutheran
assumptions.
Joan (HCC), 67, second generation German-American and church administrator had been
raised in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the more conservative branch of American
Lutheranism.
181
When asked, “When you hear “evangelical,” what do you think of?” answered,
Joan: Evangelical, in my understanding it would refer to an individual or a church that
basically believes the Gospel message of scripture, the good news of Jesus Christ,
salvation. Evangelical kind of has a connotation of the mainstream of Christianity,

181
Although more conservative than the Evangelical Lutherans
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mainstream Protestant grouping. Theologically that may not be an accurate
definition, but off the top of my head—

Joan associates the term Evangelical with mainstream Protestantism. Later in the interview, I asked
her to compare and contrast her Lutheran upbringing with her Pentecostal adulthood.
Joan: The one thing that was missing, I felt the Lutheran denomination was weak on
eschatology and also weak on their teaching about the Holy Spirit. But as a child
growing up, you don’t give a great deal of thought to those things.
Haven: It was a solid, stoic, Protestant type of—?
Joan: Very solid, salvation by grace through faith was the cornerstone. By faith alone, grace
alone, scripture alone. That was in big letters in Latin as you walked into the college
door. Sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide. I’m probably pronouncing it wrong.
Haven: Oh, no, you’ve got it!
Joan: Those are the main points. Later, when I came into the Pentecostal experience, I had a
very solid foundation in Bible doctrine as well as just knowledge of scriptural New
Testament.
Haven: So Protestant theology?
Joan: Yeah, basically, mm-hmm. Like I say, when I got to a certain point in my life, I
realized there were things we had not been taught regarding the baptism of the Holy
Spirit and also there was a lot we hadn’t been taught in the area of eschatology also,
the end times. But as far as the salvation message, inerrancy of scripture, deity of
Jesus Christ, and all that, I felt I had a very solid background.

Joan was my first Sunday school teacher, at Harbor Christian Center, and I remember her classes
focusing on the Gospel, the Five Solas and Evangelicalism.
In most of the recorded interviews and casual meetings, congregants associated the term
Evangelical with “evangelizing”, “spreading the Gospel”, “sharing the Word”. In a number of casual
conversations, it was suggested that Roman Catholics “believed in the Gospel” so they could be
Evangelical “unless, of course, if they were liberal Catholics.” Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses
didn’t have the Trinity, so they should not consider themselves Christians. However, all Black and
half of the Latino congregants made sure I understood that there were two understandings, (1)
conservative White Republican and (2) spreading the Gospel. Congregants with extensive
theological training always added the Five Solas.

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The Interviews, Part 2: Christian Nation and Historical Narrative

Dan was surprised to learn that I was a member at a Reformed/Calvinist church, since I had
been raised in the Pentecostal church. He thought it was funny, since he was raised in a Reformed
Church and was now active in a Pentecostal Church. Later in the interview I asked,

Haven: When you hear the term “Christian nation,” What does that mean? Do you believe
it’s a Christian nation?
Dan: I don’t believe it’s a Christian nation. I have come to realize that we need to be a more
pluralistic nation. There’s probably a nicety, a dream that it would be a Christian
nation, just because it’s easier, it’s homogeneous. It takes some of the messiness out
of it when you have to deal with the fact that there are other faith traditions here. I
believe that we have to learn—I want my kids to grow up being able to have
relationships, friendships, working relationships with the Buddhists that are in their
communities, the Muslims. I don’t need that term. I do long for the—I love the
Christian heritage that our country has. There’s a part of me that I wish we could be
more Christian-identified as a country. But I’ve worked so long in a pluralistic
setting; it doesn’t have as much weight for me anymore.

Dan’s comment, “I don’t need that term,” was an explicit attempt to separate his understanding of
traditional faith from a nationalist narrative. Later in the interview Dan spoke of having a racist step-
father, whom he loved dearly. He made sure I understood that his step-father was incredibly loving
and caring; however he held racist views, casually using “nigger” and “wetback”, although never
referring to him with those labels. He was raised with a very racist understanding of American
history and felt conflicted about having a step-father who “freely gave himself to me” but had views
that made him uncomfortable. He believed attending MEFC would get him closer to his Mexican
roots, while maintaining his faith.
William’s (HCC) father played an active role in forming his historical narrative. Instead of
using terms like “radical”, “liberal” or “leftist”, he assumed the historical narrative was just
“research”,
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Haven: When you hear someone talk about “Christian nation,” what does that evoke?
William: America’s a Christian nation that we believe that our roots were in Christianity. I
understand where they come from, the Pilgrims coming over here were looking for
religious freedom from the Church of England, they wanted to establish their own
religion, and it was rooted in Christianity, the laws of this nation were to reflect
Christian morals and Christian principles. The Bible was taught in school. Not so
much as a spiritual tool, but as a knowledge tool to understand the framework of
morality.
Haven: So when someone says—when you normally hear the term, how is it usually used?
What’s the context?
William: Pretty much on the TV, election time, when it’s time to vote for a candidate,
“Remember, this is a Christian nation.” We need to make sure that we remember
that in the candidate that reflects Christian morals the best, that’s who we need to
vote for.
Haven: So usually Christian nation is closely related to politics?
William: Yeah.

William went on to explain that the “Christian nation” phrase was a naïve and romantic notion,
mostly used for political ends. He went out of his way to be very diplomatic,
Haven: So do you agree or disagree with that statement?
William: When they say it, I understand what they’re saying.
Haven: Are you saying that—there seems to be a little tension in your thinking about it, or
maybe I’m reading too much into it?
William: No, you’re not. It’s good, because I’ve heard it my whole life, and I don’t
necessarily agree with it, that this was a Christian nation. I believe that there were
Christians here that were greatly used and that the plan of God has unfolded in
America. I believe that God has used men and women here tremendously.
Haven: But to call it a Christian nation would be going too far? Why?
William: Because I believe that the society in which we live, the nation—the nation was
founded and when it grew, when the Constitution was written, they weren’t trying to
please God.
Haven: What would motivate you to think this?
William: History, research.
Haven: Give me examples.
William: Reading books, documentaries on the founding fathers, on the Declaration of
Independence, slavery.
Haven: Is it safe to say I can see your father’s hand in guiding your—?
William: Oh, yeah.
Haven: So expand on this.
William: My father was someone who always challenged us to—“Don’t just take something
for face value. Study it out for yourself.”
Haven: You think that the fact that it may have had a lot of Christian in it, but these were
Christians who were involved with taking land, with slavery, you’re not so quick to
say, then—
William: Yeah, that this was a Christian nation, that this was God land. No.
Haven: And you learned that how?
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William: From my father opening my eyes to say, “Get out and read for yourself. Go to the
library. Go to the bookstore. Search. Do research for yourself and match it together.
Don’t just take what you see during the Fourth of July.” And I love—I appreciate
living in—well, I love LA, number one. I love where I live, and LA’s in the United
States of America, so I love America, too. And I believe that God has a plan for this
nation. I believe the hand of God has been on America in a tremendous way. The
grace of God, the blessing of God is here.
Haven: Would you go so far as to say that God had manifested himself through the writing
of the Constitution?
William: Yeah. It was good. It was a good—it’s a democracy, its capitalism. That’s not the
kingdom of God.
Haven: Obviously, wouldn’t it be safe to say also that because of your racial background
that that would inform the way you hear that term differently
William: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Haven: And you would hear certain terms differently?
William: Oh, yeah. When it comes to election time, I understand how a lot of—it all
depends how you grew up and your view and perspective of how things were. And
just because of how my dad—it was, like, from tragedy to triumph in his life. He
remembered growing up poor and black in the ’20s. He said, “No one wanted to
give me anything. No one was gonna help you. You couldn’t even help yourself. You
were just gonna stay black and die.” Because that’s the way it was in this nation. So
for him, growin’ up and transitioning from Louisiana to her and traveling, traveling
all over. During World War II, he didn’t go overseas, he was about troop transport,
so he was responsible for making sure that when the soldiers were traveling in the
U.S., going from destination to destination, state to state, that they got on the train at
the right time and they were on the right train goin’ to the right destination and they
got there, and takin’ these troops to this destination. So he was ridin’ trains all durin’
World War II. So he—I love it. He went to all—the only state he didn’t go to, he
never went to Alaska or Hawaii. But all other 48 states on the mainland, he went to.
And he would tell stories about Florida, the South. Florida was one of the worst
states, dealing with racism.
Haven: So the South is in northern Florida?
William: Exactly. So he saw it all. When people said, “This is a Christian nation,” he was
like, “You mean to tell me these are Christians? The ones that tell me I can’t get a
hamburger because of the color of my skin? This is God?” He saw it a different way.

William’s father
182
was one of the first Black Longshoremen to join International Longshoremen and
Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), when the Los Angeles port was run by L.B. Thomas, a man bent

182
For some black shipyard workers who were determined to find permanent employment in the West, longshore work
offered a sensible avenue for work opportunities. In the move from the shipyards into work on the waterfront, Gulf
Coast family networks and familiarity with the industry certainly facilitated the transition. Willie McGee, who migrated
from New Orleans to Los Angles in 1941 to work in the shipyards, used his knowledge of longshore work from his
years in New Orleans to gain a permanent job and eventual membership in ILWU Local 26 in San Pedro. After working
for a Los Angeles shipyard as a rivet heater, McGee picked up part-time work on the docks. From his part-time job,
McGee jumped at the chance to join Local 26 after a year. As he recalled, “I had the opportunity to [join] and I had
110

on, as he explicitly put it, “keeping the union lily white.”
183
William knew I used to hang out with his
father, but did not know his father would have an impact on how I understood faith and race, in
which I go into more detail in chapter 4.
William recalled reading and watching education materials produced by Francis Schaffer, at
HCC’s private school. He remembers its emphasis on the Modernist/Fundamentalist Controversy,
and the subsequent cultural shifts in the 1960’s. William respected his critiques of modernism and
secularism, but was suspicious of its claim of Christian America and his emphasis on the 1960s,
since that was the era of Civil Rights.
William had asked me to go to the church parking lot, since he felt uncomfortable talking so
bluntly about race and politics inside around people he believed to be unsympathetic. The pastor
was vocal about his support of Republican politicians and would frequently state he was
uncomfortable with Christians supporting Democratic politicians. William thought his views
concerning American history and his support for President Obama kept him from advancing in the
pastoral positions. When I asked him why he stayed, he explained that HCC was “the most
interracial, multicultural congregation in town.” This was a very important part of his ministry.
Joan (HCC), 67, always the educator, spoke in careful and thoughtful tones,

Haven: The term “Christian nation.”
Joan: [laughs] Oh, boy! I don’t know. I think what it meant 100 years ago is a lot different
than what it means today. I think in our past, I would say maybe up until 50, 60 years
ago, Christian nation meant that we as a people and a nation shared certain values
that were based primarily on the Bible, ideas about public and private morality, ideas
about right and wrong which were based mainly on the Ten Commandments, that
there was a shared concept of what was right, what was wrong, what was moral, what
was immoral, what one’s value and goals should be. Authority, parents, elders in the
church were to be respected. Monogamy and heterosexuality were acceptable,
promiscuity and homosexuality were not. Things like alcoholism and drug addiction

sense enough to know that organized labor was the worker’s friend.” Charles D. Chamberlain, Victory at Home: Manpower
and Race in the American South during World War II (Athens, GA, USA: University of Georgia Press, 2003): 116.
183
Josh Sides, “Rethinking Black Migration: A Perspective from the West,” Moving Stories: Migration and the American West
1850-2000, ed. Scott E. Casper, (Reno, NV: Nevada Humanities Committee, 2001), 197-198.
111

were viewed as bad. The goal was that a man would be the provider for his
household. “Traditional values” is another catchphrase for that.
I think the fact that those values were held in common for generations was
true up through probably the mid-1900s. From about then on, it seems to have been
a downhill slope. I think the ’60s were a turning point. In the ’60s, you had
Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury and the hippie movement. Sexual behaviors and
values changed. There just seemed to be an opening of the gates to less self-control,
less moral behavior. Things were becoming acceptable publicly which had not been
acceptable in generations past.
Haven: So a breakdown in public culture?
Joan: Yeah. And some of that, if you’re looking at it from a historical perspective, it
probably goes back quite a bit before that. I think World War II was a significant
point, because women were working outside the home in large numbers for the first
time in World War II. A great many of the men were off fighting in the war. Women
learned that they could be the providers for their households. They were working in
the factories, doing jobs that men previously had done.
Haven: Especially here in Los Angeles.
Joan: Yeah, any of the industrialized areas of our country. And I think that was mainly at
least the starting point to the breakdown of family values, because prior to World
War II, divorce was extremely uncommon, the male leadership in the home was a
recognized value, the man was the breadwinner, the woman was the wife and
mother. Gender roles were clearly defined up until that point. A little girl grew up
knowing she was gonna be a wife and a mother. A little boy grew up thinking he
would be the husband, the father, the provider. After World War II, that began to
shift, and of course this was a thing that shifted over 10, 20, 30 years. A girl growing
up in the ’60s, number one, she probably was growing up with different values. She
realized that maybe she was gonna be divorced, if she even bothered to get married,
and that she’d better learn to be self-supporting. It was just a whole different
mindset. And now we’re at a point where homosexuality is widely accepted in the
media. We’ve got middle school kids who are involved in behaviors that would have
shocked a college student 20 years ago.
Haven: Any particular behaviors?
Joan: Sexual behaviors in particular. And things like drug usage, which is so very, very
common today. There have always been alcoholics, and there have probably always
been drug addicts, but now it seems like it’s extremely widespread and reaching
lower and lower in the age brackets. We’ve had the rise of street gangs, the rise of
crime families. Just morally, things are in a very different place than they were.
And again, the evils of mankind have always been present. You go back to
the Old Testament, there were people doing all the things of essentially human
nature. Today I think the difference is that some things are social more acceptable.
For years and years, the pro-life abortion issue, that’s another place where there’s
been a big change. Abortion was considered very shameful and very private back
before Roe v. Wade in 1973. Now it’s put forth as a woman’s right, which is baloney.
It’s still murder. It still is wrong to think otherwise. But because it’s legally
permissible, and because feminist groups and others have been pushing their own
agenda, portions of society see it as an acceptable alternative now. So I think there’s
just a lot of areas of moral decay that have increased.
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Haven: And these are some of the images that are brought up when the term “This used to
be a Christian nation” comes up?
Joan: Yeah. And then, too, going back to the Christian nation concept, back into the early
1900s and prior to that, Christianity was widely accepted and practiced. I know there
were probably their share of hypocrites and all the rest back then, there have always
been.

Joan response would be familiar to most modern-day evangelicals and this was the narrative I heard
from conservative white Protestants in my youth. Although she does not mention the
Modernist/Fundamentalist Controversy, her dates match perfectly. Later in the interview and in
some casual meetings, she mentions secular humanism, the “Gay Agenda” and feminism. Her
historical narrative resembles Francis Schaffer and I remember Joan and my mother attending a
conference sponsored by Schaffer in the early 1980s. Joan was in charge of education at the church
private school, which would explain Williams’s familiarity with Schaffer’s work.
Ralph was eager to discuss the religious roots of the United States,
Haven: “Christian nation,” when you hear that, what do you think?
Ralph: You mean, the U.S. is a Christian nation? It was founded upon Christianity. Our
founding fathers believed in God and looked to the Bible and the Ten
Commandments as their authority, and the foundation for our U.S. judicial system is
the Bible and the Ten Commandments. Some historians disagree with me, but I just
say, “Look at the evidence in our country. Etched in stone in the Supreme Court
building is the Ten Commandments in the wall.” Why? Because American
jurisprudence is the Ten Commandments and the Bible.
Haven: Couldn’t you be an atheist and still appreciate the Ten Commandments?
Ralph: I would think so, but really there’s no such thing as an atheist, because God has put
the knowledge of himself inside every single person. It’s like a computer that’s
already been preprogrammed, but mankind chooses not to acknowledge what God’s
already put in them.
Haven: Going back to the founding fathers, the argument for a lot of people is that they
were deists.
Ralph: That’s not true, though.
Haven: That they didn’t believe in the trinity.
Ralph: History does not say they were deists, if you want authority, primary texts—hello?—
because you want primary texts, go to Wallbuilders.com. There’s a lot of primary
documents that give you the true history of the U.S.
Haven: ___ Wallbuilders?
Ralph: I’m not interested in these liberals that want to teach the next generation that the
founding fathers were deists. Not true. And if they disagree with me, it’s on tape
right here, Ralph Giordano, Harbor Christian Center, let’s talk. Look at the evidence
of the history and don’t be close-minded, because you have deep hurts and issues
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and you want to ignore God and the truth of our history. You know why? Because
mankind loves his sin and doesn’t want to be accountable to God. They want to do
what they want because they’re in rebellion against their creator.
Haven: So you think Thomas Jefferson and George Washington believed in Christ?
Ralph: Absolutely. The historical evidence and primary documents speak for themselves.
But if people don’t want to listen to that—
Haven: This is a liberal versus conservative thing for you?
Ralph: If they don’t want to agree with that conclusion, they’re being close-minded to—
Haven: You immediately said it’s a liberal thing.
Ralph: Because liberals want to dismiss the truth of our history, and the historical record, so
that’s why I’m asking them to have an open mind, it’s really a heart issue, and look at
the evidence. That’s all I’m asking. Wallbuilders.com is primary documents that will
speak that the founding fathers were Christian. Not many people will tell you that.
Haven: A lot of people tell me that.
Ralph: Don’t get sucked into that liberal mindset, because it’s not true. They have an issue
with God.
Haven: Now that you’ve brought up liberal and conservative, why do so many people color,
Asian, black, Latino, conservative Christians, vote for liberal politicians?
Ralph: Well, conservative Christians don’t vote for liberal politicians. There’s a lot of
conservative Christians that don’t, because the conservative worldview is more
Biblical. The liberal worldview is not in agreement with the Bible. So let’s discuss
that for a moment. What is—

Ralph has completely internalized the popular historical narrative of conservative White
Evangelicals, so much so he believes he shares the same religion of the Revolutionary Americans.
He is an example of an Roman Catholic Italian-American who has gone through a modern form of
Anglo-conformity, evangelical style and believes his conservative political position and his claim of
Biblical, thus traditional Christianity positions “liberalism” as “the enemy.”
I also interviewed Charlie Horton (HCC), 38, whose father was White and mother was
Filipino. He drives a truck delivering electric supplies to contactors. I knew Charlie from the streets,
when he used to hang out with my brother and cousins, whose gangs were on good terms. I always
thought Charlie was Mexican. He had done time in prison with many folks I knew and I was
surprised to find out he was a faithful member at HCC. The interview was conducted while he was
taking care of the elementary school boys of the church. Our interview was lively and fun, we were
familiar and I could not help but speak in my more familiar “neighborhood” tone,
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Haven: When you hear the term “Christian nation,” this used to be or is a Christian nation,
what does that mean?
Charlie: When I heard that—when Obama of all people said this is no longer a Christian
nation, he can’t speak for me, ‘cause I still pray. I still pray to the Lord. I still believe
Jesus Christ is the ruler of this country. The thing is when people call it a Christian
nation, the reason why it was called a Christian nation is because we used to live by
the Biblical rules of the Bible, we used to go by what the Bible says. It says, “Don’t
be a drunkard, don’t be a homosexual, don’t rob, don’t kill, don’t do none of that
stuff.” We used to follow the word of God. Before we put somebody into office, we
would pray, “Lord,” and then we’ll ask him, “Are you a Christian? Do you believe
that?” This country no longer does that. Does that mean this is no longer a Christian
nation? No. I just believe Christians are not steppin’ up to do what they’re supposed
to do. We’re not challenging the world no more. We’re just sitting back and letting
these people just take over.
Haven: Who are these people?
Charlie: Liberals. People who feel that they can do—OK, it goes like this. In the ’60s,you
used to have the hippies. In the ’60s, you had the Christian nation. But when the
hippies came out, they came out with free love, sex, all that stuff, and what happened
was, those hippies, they didn’t like the way the country was being ran, by Christians.
So what happens? They start goin’ to school and gettin’ their degrees. So after they
start gettin’ in the Senate, Congress, next you know they’re trying to hand the seats
and stuff. And what do they do? They change it from the inside out.
Haven: So the ’60s is a key time for you in this nation. Where did you learn this history? In
school? OK. So in school you learned that prior to the ’60s, this was a more God-
fearing nation and then after the ’60s, hippies—
Charlie: I’d say during the ’60s is when the hippies took over. Before the ’60s, it was a God-
fearing country.
Haven: Let me push you a little bit more. You don’t think the devil had anything to do with
the taking of land, the enslaving of people?
Charlie: Oh, yes! Oh, yeah, he had all that.
Haven: But for you, it was the ’60s, and technically, let’s say Obama’s pastor, what was his
name?
Charlie: Oh, that dude was nuts, man!
Haven: He made the argument that the devil’s been active in history since the beginning.
Charlie: Since the beginning of time.
Haven: So free love is nothing compared to the genocide of a whole people. Matter of fact,
two whole peoples, Africans and Native Americans. And he sees Satan’s hand
behind all of that. So for him, this has never been a God-fearing nation.
Charlie: But see, for me, OK, I can’t say a certain group, I can’t put—I can’t just categorize
these people as saying, “They’re the main people why this country’s not God-
fearing.” No, no, they just had a hand in it. But it was spiritual. Everything in this
world that goes on in life. Everything in our life is a choice. I have a choice of
whether I want to drink coffee now or later. Is my choice to hate a black person or
not? It’s my choice to hate a Mexican, to hate Indians, to hate anybody I want. That’s
how it was, it’s always been.
Haven: How did you piece some of this stuff together? When you’re a kid, you pick up
things everywhere…. As we grow up, we piece together all this information and
form a way we interpret it.
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Charlie: And then I learned from people when I was working. I learned a lot from a lot of
guys that were in the Vietnam War.

Charlie goes on to tell me of the older white men who told him of the Black Panthers and “free love
hippies.” These are narratives he learned prior to becoming a member at HCC. At HCC he learned
about the Supreme Court’s decisions on school prayer, in the early 1960 and Roe v Wade in the early
1970s. All of these narratives place liberals as the enemy intent on destroying traditional America.
Joan’s, Ralph’s and Charlie’s views exemplify Steve Bruce’s causal connections. They believe
they share the same historic religion of the early Founding Fathers. To a certain extent, is true.
However the majority of the early Founders were deist and secular Protestants Christians who did
not believe in the miracles and divinity represented in the Bible, epistemologically resembling liberal
Protestants. For these interviewees, any discussion claiming that they the Founders were not
believers like they, the congregants, are believers (i.e., literalism, the Trinity, virgin birth, etc.) are lies
created by a conspiracy of liberals and secularists to undermine the moral foundations of the nation.
Ralph and Charlie have completely internalized the popular historical narrative of conservative
evangelicals, the ex-Roman Catholic Italian-American and the Protestant of color have gone through
a modern form of Anglo-conformity, evangelical style, They both wish to defend the honor of
dominant ethnicities’ myths and symbols. They also believe their conservative political position and
their claim of Biblical, thus traditional Christianity positions “liberalism” as “the enemy” to the
Bunmi, Joshua, William, Stephan and Dan all consider themselves “traditional” and
“conservative” in their theological beliefs; however they are not wedded to the United States as a
Christian nation needing defending. And they do not see “the liberal” or liberalism as a threat, or the
enemy to the spiritual health of society. As a matter of fact, they reject the historical narrative Joan,
Ralph and Charlie advocate.
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Evangelicalism, as a form of evangelism, seems to be the common thread, but that’s even
contested. Paul is wary of any narrative that places Roman Catholicism outside of Christian America
and is still suspicious of Protestant America, preferring to use evangelicalism as the bridge between
religious anti-abortion activism and more disparate theological commitments. And Bob is still using
narratives of evangelicalism he learned growing up Lutheran.
An important aspect of conservative religion is identifying the “foundations” of one’s
beliefs, being familiar with the doctrines and principles which separate one religion from others. At
HCC, most congregants I interviewed assumed since they disliked liberals and preferred Republican
candidates, they were theologically traditional or conservative. However, most could not explain the
basic tenants of Pentecostalism and its place within Protestant Christianity. What was ironic was
many of those who considered themselves traditionalists or conservative, held theological beliefs
resembling liberal Protestants, i.e., the Bible must be made culturally relevant by incorporating new
discoveries in science and cultural changes, except in the case of evolution, abortion and civil rights
for GLBT persons. Their political priorities stood in for their theological understanding. Ralph was
familiar with the foundations of Pentecostalism and Protestant Christianity, but refused to believe an
individual could call himself a traditionalist in the faith and vote Democratic, let alone have leftist
political inclinations. Today’s America was morally bankrupt, because there were no state sanctioned
prayers in schools, abortion, same-sex relationships and liberalism.
Some Latino and Black congregants, at HCC had a more nuanced view of the relationship
between theological understandings and political views and were well aware of their fellow
congregants’ opinions; nevertheless, they tended to believe a lack of education was at the root of this
tension. For them, an education did not mean specialized schooling, but a willingness to learn more
about theology and US history.
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At MEFC, there was a more nuanced view of traditional and conservative views of theology
and its relationship to political priorities. Since all members are required to enroll in theology classes
prior to becoming a member, they were more familiar with what was distinctively Pentecostal and its
place within Protestant Christianity. Political views and the “moral health” of the nation was not tied
to political parties, nor was there an urgency for them to see the rest of the nation to recognize the
role Christianity had in the United States’ origins.
Ultimately, the differences lay in the way the Senior Pastors have set cultural boundaries
from the pulpit, and the way they organize their church structures. Both Pastors are sons of pastors,
and both grew up in working-class neighborhoods. Both are committed to Pentecostalism and a
multi-racial vision.
Don Ezell had left for Orange County, and his brother Harold Ezell was active in the
growing religious right in the Republican Party, becoming a member in Ronald Reagan’s cabinet.
Don Ezell returned to HCC when his father died. Isaac Canales had remained in Carson, most of his
life, facilitating the shift from a Spanish speaking congregation into a bilingual congregation, and
become active in the community, during the crack epidemic in the 1980s. This led him to broker
gang truces at his home and church. He then left for Harvard.
Pastor Isaac Canales has an academic background, and MEFC resembles an academic
institution. The men’s group is run like a graduate seminar. Before someone becomes a member,
they must attend classes concerning Pentecostal history and a members’ responsibility to the church.
Officials of the church rise from the ranks but have to become educated members first, and most
church responsibilities are derived from within the congregation. He expects more from official
members than the casual attendee. Pastor Don Ezell has a background in business, and HCC is run
accordingly. Instead of rising in the ranks, Ezell handpicks and delegates responsibilities, sometimes
hiring outside professionals, and as a result, the church is well run, a smooth operation. Ezell has a
118

keen eye for successful leaders, expects professionalism, and is known for saying, “I sign the checks”
when his decisions are questioned.
Isaac Canales is aware and sensitive to the different experiences Protestants of color have
had in the United States from their white counterparts, recognizing that there is no one Christian
narrative. Don Ezell sees one continuing Christian thread, from Israel, into Europe and culminating
in the United States, and this has been ruptured by secular humanism.
Don Ezell’s, no nonsense, straight-from-the-hip, un-nuanced views concerning politics have
influenced the younger Latino members’ political identities, while hardening older Latinos and Black
congregants’ positions. This has also led other prospective members to become turned off by his
“Republican sermons” from the pulpit. Isaac Canales’ careful approach to political opinion and
extraordinarily nuanced understanding of US and Christian history, have created a multi-political
space. But he has turned off prospective members looking for a well-oiled church. These two
pastors do not determine how congregants’ think, but they set a tone.
Although conservative theological beliefs may predict the political priorities of the dominant
ethnicity and whiteness, it certainly does not predict the political priorities of minority ethnics and
Protestants of color. It’s imperative to compare and evaluate how certain terms, concepts and
narrative that circulate in academia are used in the communities being discussed and studied. If a
term, like evangelical, is used to describe conservative Protestants, but is used to mean something
else by a significant number of conservative Protestants, how useful is the term? If the meaning of
the term changes, contingent on the race and ethnicity of the conservative Protestant, then it would
seem the term may have a socio-political meaning unmoored from theological beliefs. This explains
why academics and researchers witness studies estimating the adult evangelical population in the
United States to be as small as 7 percent to as large as 47 percent.
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Protestants of color share a common faith with the dominant Anglo-Protestant community,
but have been separated and marginalized, by the racial hierarchies which structured American
society, and imposed by their co-religionists. Both Latino and Black Protestants have had to learn to
negotiate multileveled relationships, between Anglo-Protestants, White Christians, racist secular
society and the multifaceted way Whiteness works in the United States. And as a result, a type of
“double-consciousness” appears in the church life of these communities.
On the one hand the Protestant denominational hierarchy (Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
Baptists, Methodist, Pentecostal, etc) is mirrored in the Black and Latino denominational system.
184

On the other hand, the infamous Modernist/Fundamentalist debates and the following Neo-
Evangelical Movements have played out much differently, in these communities. That is to say, the
two-party system which divided Anglo-Protestants between liberals and conservatives
185
does not
have an equal among Protestants of color. Theologically conservative Protestants of color who
believe scripture is the literal word of God still worship with Protestants of color who believe it is the
inspired word of God, one of the defining debates in the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy.
Theological conservative Protestants of color have made political alliances with liberal Anglo-
Protestants and Leftists of color, while still consuming religious products published by conservative
Anglo-Protestants, in spite of white Christians’ questions concerning the faith of those who created
such coalitions. In addition, many of these religious products are packaged as “evangelical”
materials. But because of the way evangelical is used, they are both evangelical and not evangelical.
And the notion of “Christian nation” which is a very powerful phrase among conservative Anglo-

184
Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1990); David Maldonado, Jr. ed. Protestantes/Protestants: Hispanic Christianity within Mainline Traditions (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1999); Paul Barton, Hispanic, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists in Texas (Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press, 2006); Larry L. Hunt, “Hispanic Protestantism in the United States: Trends by Decade and Generation,”
Social Forces (1999): 1601-1624; Darren E. Sherkat and Christopher G. Ellison, “The Politics of Black Religious Change:
Disaffiliation from Black Mainline Denominations” Social Forces (1991): 431-454.
185
Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880-1930 (The University of Alabama Press, 1982).
120

Protestants more specifically, and white Christians in general, has an entirely different meaning
among Protestants of color. This seemingly labyrinth of ethnic, racial, religious, political, and class
identities and the way language is used to navigate understanding and meaning calls for intellectual
intervention. Understanding “culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors,
institutions, or processes can causally be attributed; it is a context, something within which a matrix
of interworking systems of definable signs can be intelligibly –thickly, described,” I will always be
attempting to uncover “the degree to which [an action’s] meaning varies according to the pattern of
life by which it is informed. Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without
reducing their particularity.”
186

In the Genealogies of Religion, Asad demonstrates that many of the analytical categories used by
anthropologists for comparative purposes, especially in the use of the term “religion,” have their
roots in the idiosyncrasies of Western discourse and as a result are not appropriate for cross-cultural
analysis.
187
I would go further, and observe that many religious terms in circulation among academics
are rooted in a particular white evangelical/Anglo-Protestantism and its idiosyncrasies can become
confusing when applying them to Protestants of color and other smaller Anglo-Protestant
communities. It was in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church coupled with my experiences within the
Pentecostal traditions, wherein I discovered a huge disconnect in the way certain religious terms, like
“evangelical”, were used in the media, popular culture and academia and the way they were used in
the religious communities I traveled in.
As an example, within the Orthodox Presbyterian community, the term Evangelical is used
by theologically conservative Calvinists who self-identify as evangelical, but employ “Evangelical” as
a negative signifier to suggest a type of Pop-Protestantism that is both shallow and simplistic. Within

186
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973): 14.
187
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993).
121

the more liberal Presbyterian USA, many see themselves as evangelical, as well, but use the term
evangelical to signify popular Protestantism. Used in this fashion, the term “evangelical” is less
negative but also denies its intellectual roots and its relationship to Billy Grahams’ Movement.
Protestants of color, whether they be Baptists, Methodists, Pentecostal or non-denomination, would
associate the term with white politically conservative Protestant—Republican. These intricacies in
the language could only be studied if one were to “hang out a-while” that is to say these nuances
really are not noticeable, unless one pays attention to how the language is used and in what context,
and in order to discern that, one must be willing to do more than formal interviews. Assuming
certain religious terms are only used in their theological contexts misses how theological terms are
used to describe nonreligious objects and subjects. One's racial and ethnic position, as well as one's
religious and political positions, may inform theological terms more than the traditional academic
definition.
In the end, I hope these interviews demonstrate that by not paying attention to how
language is used and how terms are interpreted, a researcher may end up taking sides in a religious
battle over meaning. Privileging one group’s use of a term over others may assist in a political
agenda and be forwarding political priorities, unwittingly. Once, while listening to NPR, I heard a
political analyst describe the political constituency of “Evangelicals” and “Christian”
interchangeably, thus conflating a specific Protestant subculture with the vast and global religion of
Christianity. It also ignored the vast difference in voting and political priorities of Protestants of
color. Another time, again on NPR, a reporter in Israel, conflated the subculture of millennialist
Protestants with Evangelical Christians, as a whole, and then reporting the popularity of this belief
among Christians in general, ignored the tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians living under
occupation. This inattention to how terms are used and the context they are used in privileges one
religious tradition over another. As our global community becomes more conscious of each other, it
122

is our responsibility to understand how terms, especially religious terms, can change and fluctuate
and meaning in different cultures.

123

Chapter 5: Conclusion
I did not write this dissertation to reclaim the term Evangelical, nor did I write it to redefine
the term. Instead, I wish to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the term Evangelical has been
used and is used today and the implications thereof. Throughout this dissertation, I have kept in
mind that in academia the way we organize knowledge, make sense of difference,s and draw
boundaries has consequences for the society we live in, especially in “the nature of the
investigators’ relationship to their subject matter”
188
. At the same time, we borrow and use the work
of earlier researchers, having faith that previous generations have reviewed and filtered out
mistakes and blind-spots, so that we may proceed to add our own analytical categories. Yet, in the
case of the analytical category of Evangelical, I have had to remove my faith and claim previous
researchers may have assumed too much. Using Lila Abu-Lughod’s notion of “writing against
culture” I have written this dissertation to share with other researchers that they should not assume
there is a uniform narrative of what and whom is an Evangelical. Presently, there is a way in which
the term Evangelical obscures complexities and may steer communication toward naturalizing the
“obvious character of those portrayed”
189
. These ubiquitous cover stories have such momentum
that they seem to be the reality. And in the case of the term Evangelical it has become another way
to categorize socio-politically conservative white Christians. Following Abu-Lughod’s idea of writing
against culture, it is important to understand the complexity of culture from below in relation to
dominant narratives.

188
Strathern, 1987: 284.
189
Abu-Lughod, 1991.
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It is through my multiple identities as a person of color raised within the Pentecostal
tradition and member of a Calvinist tradition with Leftist political positions that I am able to
reflexively understand my intersubjective experiences and attempt to demonstrate the nuances,
meanings and confusion concerning the term Evangelical. It had always struck me how the term
Evangelical was used in academic environments and news stories versus in the churches I attended.
While my religious environment used the term to describe Protestant understandings of the
Gospel, the academic work I read used the term to describe conservative religious impulses and
news reports used the term to describe politically conservative priorities.
I have spent my entire life within Protestant Christianity. I grew up within Pentecostalism,
always privileging Protestantism, so much so, it was synonymous with Christianity rarely referring to
myself as a Protestant. We believed that Roman Catholics stood utside of real and true
Christianity. As an adult, I became a member of a Calvinist tradition—Orthodox Presbyterian,
wherein Protestant distinctiveness is valued, while at the same time the multiplicity of Protestant
traditions are recognized. That is to say, although Pentecostalism and other Protestant traditions
are recognized as Protestant, I do not assume they are any more or less Christian than Roman
Catholics. While Pentecostals, Baptists, Methodists and other Protestant traditions share the term
Evangelicalism, I do not assume we share the same theological foundations and in many instances
I share Roman Catholic teachings concerning eschatology and the place of the Eucharist in
Christian life against fellow Protestants. In my religious life, I place a high premium on what
separates Protestants from Roman Catholics and I especially value what separates Presbyterians
from Pentecostals.
I also believe I am a bit of a conservative, when it comes to my relationship to other
Protestant traditions, so much so, I sometimes refer to other denominations such as Methodist,
125

Apostolic and Pentecostals as “non-traditional.” Within my conception, they are newer and /or
radical variations of “my tradition.” I would view a conservative Pentecostal as a radical departure
from the theologies established during the break with Rome. In this case, the term “conservative”
and “traditional” would have a different meaning for me because of my position as a Calvinist. For
me, I use “conservative” and “traditional” in relation to theology and religious practices, and
separate my politically radical priorities and beliefs from my religious conservatism. This is why I
have struggled with the way the term Evangelical has morphed from a theological term separating
Protestants from Roman Catholics into a socio-political term synonymous with conservative
politics. And I am not alone in this.
When I began attending Calvinist study groups, a common theme kept percolating in
discussions, and that was the way all the disparate Protestant traditions were lumped under the
Evangelical label. Speaking in tongues, the state of Israel’s “special” relationship to history, having a
born-again experience, the issue of abortion in political choices and a host of other subjects were
assumed to be aspects of conservative Christianity---that is Evangelicalism. Although most of the
Calvinists I associated with considered themselves to be both conservative politically and
theologically, they did not see what those issues had to do with them politically and religiously.
Technically, they viewed themselves as evangelicals, however because of the way the term was
being used by the culture-at-large, were careful to refer to themselves by their denomination (i.e,
Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist) or their theological tradition (i.e. Calvinist or
Reformed). It was in their desire to separate themselves from the common usage of the term
Evangelical that I had seen similarities with Protestants of color.
In my positionality as a Protestant of color, I had been familiar with the ways in which
other Protestants of color were quick to separate themselves from the term Evangelical. Although
126

many of us understood we were evangelical, we also understood how the term had become
another way to describe white conservative Christians. As the interviews in chapter 3 demonstrate,
Protestants of color are quick to ask how the term Evangelical is being understood and in what
social context before claiming the label. As one interview subject asked, “When you say
Evangelical, do you mean white Republican or spreading the Gospel?” It became apparent to me
that Black and Latino Pentecostals and White Calvinists shared a suspicion in the way the term
Evangelical was being deployed.
In addition to learning the complexities inherent within Protestantism, once I became
active in Calvinist circles, I also learned that the racial category of “White” did not sufficiently
describe the people in my new religious community. Yes, some may be categorized as racially
White, but they were also ethnically Anglo, and as such, viewed the history of Protestantism within
the United States much differently than I had been raised with. While I had been raised to
understand my faith as separate from my national identity as an American citizen and separate
from my ethno-racial identity as a Puerto Rican, most of my Anglo-Protestant co-religionists had
viewed their religious identity as intimately related to their ethnic and national identity. This
connection between religion and ethnicity led me to Eric Kaufmann and Kevin MacDonald’s
research about Anglo-American identity. Although I do not agree with Kaufmann’s liberal ethnic
identities or MacDonald’s evolutionary psychopathology, they both place Anglo-Protestant ethnic
identity as the core history of the United States. As a child in the 1970s, the Anglo-Protestants in
my new church taught the history of the United States and Protestantism as the history of
Christianity and progress triumphant, separated from racial identity or ethnic identity.
In spite of their differences, both Kaufmann and MacDonald observed a shift in
ideological trends at the beginning of the 20th Century that led to changes that began to displace
127

the Anglo-Protestant elite. For MacDonald the change can be traced to the psychobiological
evolutionary process of Jewish intellectuals pathologizing Anglo-Protestant behavior which
reconstructed power relations, while Kaufmann locates the change in an Anglo-Protestant
commitment to classical liberalism. Either way, both agree it was facilitated by the changes in
liberal Protestantism and its conflicts with the conservatives of every Anglo-Protestant tradition.
This notion, that liberal Protestantism “changed everything” was and is something I heard among
the Anglo-Protestants in my Calvinist study groups and congregations.
Recently more research has been produced demonstrating the vast cultural influence of
liberal Protestantism, through their embrace of religious pluralism and more universal mystical
religious experiences.
190
Christian Smith notes, “Liberal Protestantism’s organizational decline has
been accompanied by and is in part arguably the consequence of the fact that liberal Protestantism
has won a decisive, larger cultural victory.”
191
Although, a conservative populist Protestantism best
represented by modern day Evangelicals has demonstrated institutional strength and voting
prowess, it operates under the boundaries constructed by liberal Protestantism’s ecumenicalism
and multiculturalism. This is why I began to conceptualize many of the religious debates
surrounding the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy as an inner-ethnic conflict. The
Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy may have started as a religious debate, but as Chapter 2
demonstrates, it also had political repercussions in the way non Anglo-Protestants (i.e., Southern
European Jews, Roman Catholics and non-Whites) were to be understood and treated in the
United States.

190
Hollinger 2003; Schmidt 2005
191
Smith, 1990.
128

On the one hand, I find myself sympathetic to some of the concerns of Fundamentalists
against modernist influences in theology. On the other hand I also recognize that the controversy
was also political. Political pluralism and racial integration became aspects of Liberal Protestantism
and American modernism, and Protestant fundamentalists sought to defend the ethno-religious
core against those modernizing forces. Once the fundamentalist label became toxic in American
popular culture, the term Evangelical became another way to confront political pluralism and racial
integration. As Chapter 2 demonstrates, the term Evangelical became “born-again” to represent the
concerns of the new Religious Right, shedding the conceptual baggage of the term Fundamentalist.
In addition, the ethnic hostility between Anglo-Protestants and Southern European Roman
Catholics slowly receded, replaced by a Christianity dominated by Whiteness.
However, for the Anglo-Protestants within my community, the term Evangelical had come
to encompass too much, sacrificing Protestant distinctiveness for political ends. In 2005, thirty
years after both Newsweek and Time magazine announced the year of the Evangelical, Time
began to publish a list of the most influential evangelicals in America, and each year more Roman
Catholics began to appear on the list. For Anglo-Protestants with a Calvinist bent, the inclusion of
Catholics underscored an emphasis of the political over the religious, and the uselessness of its
meaning. This shift in meaning for the term Evangelical was noticed by the Protestants of color I
had grown-up with decades earlier.
Growing up a Protestant of color, I rarely heard terms like “liberal” or “radical” to describe
the political views of the adults in my community. It seemed as if it was always understood that we
were “traditional.” And yet, most folks I knew voted for liberal Democrats, were committed union
members, and distrusted “trickle-down” economics and Ronald Reagan. Our political priorities
marked us as liberals, while we referred to ourselves as traditionalists. Although I would hear some
129

of my elders refer to Roman Catholics as members of a “global cult,” there were always portraits of
John F. Kennedy or Caesar Chavez somewhere in their houses. And at the same time, we attended
multi-racial churches where we shared identical religious practices while admitting, at home, our
White brothers and sisters had racist political views. It was “normal” to believe someone with racist
political views could also have a multi-racial and multi-culture religious disposition. Just as it was
normal to believe that a member of a “global cult” could share our political priorities. Being a
Protestant of color meant living with strange bedfellows.
Again, following Abu-Lughod, researchers hoping to understand how religion functions in
society need to unsettle and interrogate our assumptions about how religious labels are used,
understanding that there are multiple traditions and practices which fall under certain labels. And
these labels do not always fall into our preconceived notions and narratives of “traditional”,
“conservative”, “liberal” and “radical.” When the term Evangelical began to circulate into
mainstream culture, it was assumed it represented a new way of understanding Protestant religiosity
and to certain extent that was true. However, for many Protestants of color, it became another way
of understanding Whiteness. For certain theologically conservative Anglo-Protestants it became
another way of understanding Republican politics and cynical marketing schemes. Either way, the
term Evangelical had become so ubiquitous, I find it futile to police and “correct” its modern
usage. At the same time, I hope when it is used by researchers and cultural theorists, its nuances
and multiple meanings are incorporated into any attempt at understanding.

130

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Asset Metadata

Creator Perez, Haven Abraham (author)

Core Title How Evangelicals are born-again and again: race, ethnicity, religion and politics in American culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 02/26/2014

Defense Date 03/29/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Anglo‐Protestants,ethno‐nationalism,Evangelicalism,Evangelicals,OAI-PMH Harvest,protestantism,Protestants,religious identity,WASP

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wong, Janelle (committee chair), Jacobs, Lanita (committee member), Miller, Donald Earl (committee member)

Creator Email havenperez@aol.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-365792

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Legacy Identifier etd-PerezHaven-2269.pdf

Dmrecord 365792

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Perez, Haven Abraham

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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