Define 'evangelical' – please

Ask Americans to rank the world's most influential evangelicals and the Rev. Billy Graham will lead the list.

So you might assume that the world's most famous evangelist has an easy answer for this tricky political question: "What does the word 'evangelical' mean?" If you assumed this, you would be wrong. In fact, Graham once bounced that question right back at me.

"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."

Wait a minute, I said. If Billy Graham doesn't know what "evangelical" means, then who does? Graham agreed that this is a problem for journalists and historians. One man's "evangelical" is another's "fundamentalist."

This was true in 1976 when a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter shocked the press by saying he was "born again." It's just as true today, as Beltway insiders dissect those Nov. 2 exit polls saying that 23 percent of the voters in the presidential election called themselves "evangelicals" or "born again Christians."

Establishment pundits agree that armies of "evangelical" voters have returned an "evangelical" president to the White House to pursue an "evangelical" agenda – whatever that means.

Long ago, Graham stressed that this term must be understood in doctrinal terms, if it is to be understood at all. He finally defined an "evangelical" as someone who believes all the doctrines in the ancient Nicene Creed. Graham stressed the centrality of the resurrection and the belief that salvation is through Jesus, alone.

"I think there are evangelicals in the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox churches," he said.

The journalism Bible basically agrees. The Associated Press Stylebook notes that "evangelical" once served as an adjective. Today it is a noun, referring to a "category of doctrinally conservative Christians. They emphasize the need for a definite, adult commitment or conversion to faith in Christ. ... Evangelicals stress both doctrinal absolutes and vigorous efforts to win others to belief."

The problem is trying to agree on the "doctrinal absolutes" that define evangelicals. Yet journalists must wrestle with this issue in order to grasp what happened, and what did not happen, on Nov. 2, according to pollster George Barna.

A new survey by the Barna Group claims that "born again Christians" – who cast 53 percent of the votes in this election – backed George W. Bush by a 62 to 38 percent margin. Meanwhile, "evangelical" voters backed Bush by an 85 to 15 percent margin.

What's the difference? In Barna's system, all "evangelicals" are "born again Christians," but not vice versa. In his polls, true "evangelicals" are a mere 7 percent of the voting population, while other "born again Christians" make up an addition 31 percent.

The difference between these groups is crucial for those studying the politics of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

For Barna, evangelicals affirm that "faith is very important in their lives today; believe they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believe that Satan exists; believe that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and describe God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today."

"Born again" Christians are those who believe they have "made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important" in their lives and that they will go to heaven because they have confessed their sins and "accepted Jesus Christ" as savior.

Thus, "evangelicals" are defined by specific doctrines. "Born again" Christians are defined by personal, often vague, spiritual experiences and feelings.

This can affect what happens in voting booths.

"In my experience," said Barna, "journalists use 'born again' and 'evangelical' interchangeably. ... As for assigning conservative perspectives to either the born again or evangelical segments, keep in mind that the born again constituency is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and many of the social views of that group have more in common with atheists and agnostics than they do with the more conservative evangelical constituency."

Red, blue and green (tea)

One perk of covering a White House race from day one is that early-bird journalists snag lots of one-on-one time with the candidate.

Thus, Candy Crowley of CNN found herself sitting with John Kerry in a super-ordinary coffee shop in Dubuque, Iowa. The veteran political correspondent ordered coffee.

The senator, from Massachusetts, ordered green tea.

The waitress, from Iowa, was puzzled.

"I advised the senator that he would need to carry his own green tea in Iowa and probably several other states, as well," quipped Crowley, speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in South Florida.

Yes, it's time for "post mortems" on 2004. So far, said Crowley, the experts insist the race was decided by – take your pick – the 22 percent of the voters that yearned for "moral values" or the 23 percent that were white evangelical Christians.

Crowley grew up in the Midwest and she thinks she can tell red zones from blue zones. Democrats have cornered the green-tea crowd, she said. Republicans are winning what Capital Beltway insiders now call the "Applebee's vote." This schism may have as much to do with cappuccinos and chainsaws as with the New York Times and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Faith played a major role, but it's simplistic to say that religious people voted for President George W. Bush and secularists for Kerry, said Crowley. The religious left has its own moral and spiritual beliefs and it will, in future elections, find ways to express them in the public square.

It would also be inaccurate to claim that evangelicals marched into voting booths and seized control. Bush won 52 percent of Catholic voters, facing a Catholic candidate, and 59 percent of the overall Protestant vote. The New York Times noted that the president, in four years, raised his share of the Jewish vote from 19 to 25 percent, winning two-thirds of the Orthodox Jewish votes.

The elites just didn't get it. "Somewhere along the line, all of us missed this moral-values thing," said Crowley.

This will be painful for journalists to hear. It is one thing, after decades of dissecting media-bias statistics, to know that armies of religious conservatives believe American newsrooms are packed with God-forsaken libertines. It will be harder for journalists to admit that they are blind to important stories.

Nevertheless, it's time to face the facts, said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"I am now taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America. 'Different' is too pale a word. We are alienated. We may live in the same country, but we treat each other like aliens," he said, in an essay called "Confessions of an Alienated Journalist."

"The churched people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible. ... My blind spots blot out half of America. And that makes me less of a citizen, and less of a journalist."

As a Catholic progressive, Clark said he finds it hard to hear "moral values" without thinking of "showy piety and patriotism, with more than a dash of racism and homophobia." He knows all about "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and Bubba the Love Sponge. How come so many other Americans know what it means to be "evangelical," "charismatic" and "born again" and feel at home at church suppers?

Right now, there needs to be "more self-doubt in the journalistic system, as opposed to arrogance," said Clark, reached at his office. "We need to be able to say that we don't know it all and that we need to learn. We need to take a step back."

Most of all, said Crowley, journalists and blue-zone leaders must grasp that many parents feel threatened by the "coarsening" of American culture. They feel attacked.

"It's like they are saying, 'I was made to feel like a freak because I go to church' or 'I was made to feel like I was an idiot because I believe in God,' " she said. "They're telling us, 'I want my family safe and I want to be able to teach my children what I believe is true.'

Can Christians vote 'no'?

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre is opposed to abortion and the rise of what Pope John Paul II has called the "culture of death."

But this does not mean that he backed President Bush.

The University of Notre Dame scholar is concerned about health care and fair wages. But this doesn't mean that he marched into a voting booth and picked Sen. John Kerry. During a year in which religion and politics constantly made headlines, MacIntyre published an essay that frayed nerves on the religious left and right.

"When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither," he said, writing for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. "When that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw ... so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives."

While some argue that good citizens must vote, MacIntyre said that the only vote worth casting in 2004 was "a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target."

These are fighting words for many politicos.

Late in the 2004 race, some religious activists spoke out against "single-issue voting," a phrase often used to condemn those who cast votes based on a politician's stance on abortion. Other activists said MacIntyre and other writers who advocated political abstinence were naive and irresponsible for focusing on so many issues.

In one of his "BreakPoint" radio commentaries, evangelical apologist Charles Colson said Christians must vote in order to take part in God's work in this culture. In this case, Colson was specifically rejecting the views of historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

Colson said that some Christians seem to yearn for a return to the past, when fundamentalists retreated from politics rather than face the temptation to sin through compromise. Is this retreat what Noll and others seek?

"That position is dead wrong and damaging to democracy," said Colson. "It's the utopian notion which assumes divine perfection in fallen humans. His assumption that we can support only candidates who have perfect scores according to our reading of the Bible makes me wonder how he votes at all. And if that9s the standard, all of us should stop voting."

Obviously, Noll disagrees, arguing that it is not wrong to seek consistency on faith-based issues. Here is his short list – race, taxes, trade, health care, religious freedom, the international rule of law and "life issues," such as defense of the unborn.

"Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith that grounds my existence," writes Noll, author of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republics have made "a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it."

MacIntyre agrees and cannot imagine embracing either major party, right now.

"Try to promote the pro-life case ... within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down," he said. "Try to advance the case for economic justice ... within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court."

The philosopher has, in recent weeks, declined to defend his essay or to state how a Bush win or a Kerry win might affect his political views.

One thing is certain: religious believers will face similar choices again, or worse. It's hard to imagine how the religious left can compromise on abortion or same-sex unions. It's hard to imagine how the religious right will cope with the rise of cultural progressives such as Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I don't feel that I need to elaborate on what I have written at this time," said MacIntyre. "Besides, I plan to write about this subject again at greater length. These issues are not going away because I do not believe that major parties have the right answers. I also don't believe they are asking the right questions."

After the Baptist baptism bus tour

They are some of America's most infamous religious statistics and conservatives have been known to quote them with glee.

The United Churches of Christ lost 14.8 percent of its members during the 1990s.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was down 11.6 percent. The United Methodist Church fell 6.7 percent and the Episcopal Church another 5.3 percent. But there was nothing earth shattering in the Glenmary Research Center's 2000 data. The Protestant mainline has been fading for a generation.

The Southern Baptist Convention's new leader knows all that.

The Rev. Bobby Welch also knows that his flock's totals have crept higher in recent years. But he isn't gloating. He's worried about the fine print in the baptism pages of the North American Mission Board's "Strategic Planning Indicators."

"The last thing I would want to do is put down what people call the church-growth movement," said Welch. "We've got a lot of fine people doing fine work and we have some fine churches out there that are growing. But I do think that sometimes we forget that just because we have church growth doesn't mean we're growing the church.

"Sometimes, we get so focused on filling up our church buildings that we forgot to ask if we're winning any new people for the Lord."

This is the way Welch talks when he starts wrapping his soft northern Alabama accent around the scriptures, statistics and theories linked to his favorite topic – evangelism. But the veteran pastor of the First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Fla., doesn't talk much about the kinds of large-scale evangelistic projects that grab media attention. His passion is for quieter forms of one-on-one persuasion that have a steady impact on church life.

That's why he cares that the number of baptisms has declined in Southern Baptist churches four consecutive years. What is just as disturbing, said Welch, is that the SBC's baptism rate had been parked on a statistical plateau since 1951 – averaging 384,000 a year while the nation's population boomed.

Immediately after his June election as president, Welch announced a high-profile project to promote evangelism efforts from coast to coast and beyond. He got himself a star-spangled bus and set out on a 25-day, 20,000-mile marathon to visit each of the 48 contiguous states and, by airplane, Alaska and Hawaii.

The goal is to baptize 1 million people between June of 2005 and June of 2006, which would require a jump of 600,000-plus over last year's total of 377,357. The purpose of the bus tour was to get people to take this challenge seriously, he said, during a post-tour visit to South Florida.

Part of the problem, he said, is that too many Southern Baptists are camped inside their big, safe, healthy churches and think this is enough. Most of them believe that the church is supposed to win converts – sort of.

"Not all evangelicals are evangelistic," said Welch. "They say they believe in evangelism, but they don't get out and do it."

The denomination's baptism statistics reveal other sobering truths. After the age of 11, it becomes increasingly difficult to win converts – even among children in church families. Also, only 40 percent of the adults baptized into Southern Baptist congregations are true converts. The rest were already members of other Christian flocks.

Welch describes this in blunt language: "What that means is that we're not reaching the pagan pool. ... We're just rearranging the furniture inside the church."

Christians have all kinds of excuses for why they don't talk to other people about faith and forgiveness, heaven and hell, he said. It's easy to say that modern Americans believe that "soul winning" is rude and intolerant or that all religions are paths that lead to the same eternal destination. Truth is, some people don't want to talk with real people who are facing real problems in the real world, he said.

"It's no harder to talk to people about Jesus today than it ever has been," he said. "The problem is that we've been frightened away from even trying. We've become content to wag our finger at the world and tell it how sorry it is and how good we are, instead of telling people about the grace of God. We've got to get over that."