Who Is The Evangelical?

So just who, and what, is the Evangelical that we hear about so often in the mainstream media? The term, today, is used as a pejorative and if it were possible to do, would flash red to alert the reader to pay particular attention to what they are up to. Evangelicalism is a very big tent, a revival tent of sorts, with room enough for many diverse church goers. At times, most recently at the Iowa straw poll, it's more like a huge tailgate party. I was an Evangelical for the better part of the 1980s, my highwater mark when I went to $100 a plate fundraiser for Pat Robertson's 1988 bid for the presidency. We needed a Christian president, I thought, who was also informed and intelligent and Pat filled that bill. Contrary to the accepted opinion on the Left, Evangelicals do not merely march in lock-step to to the commands of their favorite televangelist. They all hold to the same social issues because those issues are very clear in God's Word. They tend to back candidates that openly admit to going first to the Bible. They are generally, model citizens. They pay their taxes, give generously to charities and proudly send their sons and daughters off to the military making our armed forces America's most distinguished and honorable group! The Evangelical has been a blessing to this nation who ushered in Ronald Reagan and kept Al Gore and John Kerry out of the White House. It obviously failed with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and with Barack Hussein Obama. Evangelicals are red state, or would it be more apropos to say red states are evangelical? Without the resurgence of the fear of God within the evangelical community from the 1970s to today, America would be already past tense as I write this. As if at a state fair, they can easily move from the Evangelical tent to the Tea Party tent and mingle without any questions. When they enter the Libertarian tent, they can be viewed suspiciously even though they tend to feel at home. They fill Ohio Stadium, Notre Dame Stadium, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Bryant-Denny Stadium and Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. They fly the Stars and Stripes (as I do) in front of their homes. They often have blended, interracial families. They coach youth athletics and swarm to coastal beaches (when they're not repairing homes in Appalachia) without littering the sand with bear cans. They read, read, read and are more at home, in politics anyway, listening to the spoken word rather than watching carefully crafted television news reports. They hunt, they fish and they vote. Their children tend to be polite and respectful of their elders. For all of this, they are feared and ridiculed. The other day, while watering the flowers, my cell phone rang. I rarely get phone calls on my cell phone for to me it is more of a constant conduit of news with a quaint app that lets you make phone calls in an emergency. It was a Gallop/USA Today pollster and I was as excited as a Democrat chief-of-elections finding a box of votes under the ice cream maker in the back of the hall. One question asked of me was if I were an Evangelical. Futilely, I attempted to explain the problem with the concept of Evangelical but had no other choice than to answer...yes. Such is it with much of America. All who are part of "Christianity," who apply Biblical truth to social issues, are labelled...Evangelicals. As an aside here...as has happened so often, I left the computer to go downstairs to listen to the radio program the White Horse Inn, which we have done faithfully at 8:30 Sunday evenings (101.5 FM in Pittsburgh) for almost two decades, and returned to the computer with a quote. By the way, I highly recommend that you go to their web site (http://www.whitehorseinn.org/). C. S. Lewis once said "The problem is not so much the de-Christianization of England, as the de-Christianization of the church." This is the problem with much of Evangelicalism today. The American pulpit, to a great degree, has failed the church. Christianity and Christendom have been united. The cross of Calvary is not preached, rather the felt needs of the congregation. The name of Jesus is ever-present but the person of Jesus Christ is unknown, the blood shed on Calvary for our sins ignored. One glaring example of our lack of discernment is Glenn Beck. Here is a man who saturates his broadcasts with Biblical terminology and a near worship of the state of Israel but exalts a false christ of Mormonism. This doesn't seem very important to the Evangelical. In fairness, if they were properly discipled in their churches they might not be so enamored with the patriot Glenn Beck. The Evangelical is weak on doctrine and without doctrinal truth there is no Christianity. The Evangelical comes too close to thinking of America as God's nation thus failing to separate the declaration of our redemption in the birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ from the Declaration of Independence. Politically the Evangelical can be naive, as I was with Pat Robertson. The media often points to the belief in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture where the Christians are taken away, leaving the unbeliever to face the Antichrist. This false doctrine permits the Christian to adopt the attitude written on a t-shirt I saw in a Christian bookstore where a pair of sneakers was all that was left as the basketball fan was taken up, out and off of his seat at a basketball game. The Evangelical voter can all too easily be taken in by the evangelical rhetoric of a run-of-the-mill establishment politician whose evangelical words are so strong that vetting of their history is not necessary. Still, the Evangelical has been a blessing to America but only insofar as they are citizens who still have their heads above water in a culture that is drowning. Unfortunately, because of the confusion enhanced by the media, the unbeliever thinks that he must necessarily come under that Evangelical tent if he were ever to consider his fallen condition before God. Should God have mercy on us as a nation and should His Spirit move over this land with His convicting power of irresistible grace, that Evangelical tent will not even be noticeable in the mass of humanity, at least not in the definition it has assumed in the last 40 years.