Some of you might have wondered about my use of the word “unevangelical” in the subtitle of my soon-to-be published book. Others haven’t thought about it until this moment. In any event, I thought I’d develop the term just a bit.
To start with, I made up the word. I could have said something like non-evangelical, but that sounded too boring, and besides, I like making up my own words. Plus, I think “unevangelical” kind of catches your attention just a bit, and makes you wonder, “what?”
What an Evangelical Is
Basically, unevangelical means just what it implies: It is whatever is not evangelical. So, we should explore that for a moment. Most of you, whether you consider yourself an evangelical or not, have some kind of mental picture of what evangelicalism is. It could be a mega-church, a small pop-up church meeting in a school gymnasium, it could look like people carrying Bibles, people singing praise choruses with words projected on a screen, and lately, your picture of evangelicalism could look like Christian Nationalists with flags flying over their pickup trucks.
In reality, evangelism is something underneath all of that. Now the term evangelical has existed for years–Martin Luther used it to refer to his movement. My church growing up was called Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church, but it didn’t mean today’s sort of evangelical. Today’s evangelicals, in my understanding, out of the more fundamentalist style churches in the 1970s as a number of leaders like Jerry Fallwell and others saw the potential of merging Christianity with a political movement to reform the USA into their vision of a Christian nation.
Hallmarks of evangelicalism include a literal reading of the Bible (a very subjective literal reading); a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible (a topic for another time); a rejection of creeds in favor of “what we believe” statements; various social positions like being anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and more often than not some form of male superiority. There is generally a belief that baptism is only for adult believers. Many evangelicals also believe in a literal rapture. Another aspect of evangelicalism that I noticed as I was growing up was the tendency to quote Bible verses regardless of context rather than reading complete Bible passages.
Unevangelical
Now, there are many who still consider themselves to be evangelical who have abandoned many of the hallmarks I listed above, and that’s fine. It’s just a word. For me, I can say that I never was really an evangelical at heart, although I was part of the evangelical world for many years. I always believed in infant baptism, I held to the early church creeds, and so on. In writing my book, I went back in time, as it were, to the early church and tried to bypass Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Descartes to the best of my abilities to attempt to come away with a broader understanding of the whole of Christianity.
As I explain in the book, it’s pretty near impossible to escape Descartes and modernism, so what I have ended up with is a modern look at my own wonderings and how they tie in with the wonderings of the early Christians. Thus, unevangelical.
