What is an evangelical? The word behind the election numbers, and what it really means

Where the word comes from

The word has changed meaning at least three times.

The Reformation. In the 16th century Martin Luther and his followers were known as Evangelicals, and the name told them apart from followers of John Calvin, who were called Reformed (Britannica). In Germany evangelisch still means roughly “Protestant”, which is why the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland calls itself the Protestant Church in Germany in English.

The 18th-century revivals. Evangelicalism in today’s sense grew from the revivals of the 1730s and after, in Europe, Britain and North America. Its leaders included John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, and the movement crossed denominations. The historian W. Robert Godfrey points out that in 19th-century America almost all Protestants would have accepted the label.

The 20th century. The NAE was founded in 1942 as what it calls a “middle way” between fundamentalist and progressive camps. The political meaning came later. In March 1976 someone at a campaign event in North Carolina asked Jimmy Carter, a Baptist running for president, whether he was a born-again Christian, and he said yes. That October Newsweek declared 1976 “The Year of the Evangelical” (Christian Science Monitor, 2024). Scholars estimate that Carter won about half of white evangelicals that year; in 1980 they went overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan.

Then came the survey question. Gallup added “Would you describe yourself as ‘born-again’ or evangelical?” to its polls in the summer of 1986, and Gallup’s Frank Newport says it did so “primarily as a way of understanding political issues.” From the start, then, the most widely used measure of evangelicals was built to study voters.

What the Bible says, and what it does not

The word evangelical is not in the Bible. What the Bible has is the thing the word is named after. Scripture below is from the Berean Standard Bible; the explanations are our own.

The gospel. The Greek noun is euangelion (Strong’s G2098), and Mark opens his book with it (Mark 1:1). The closest the New Testament comes to a summary is Paul’s reminder to the Corinthians of “the gospel I preached to you”: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1–4). Every major Christian tradition confesses those words.

Born again. Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (John 3:3). The Greek adverb anōthen (Strong’s G509) can mean “again”, “anew” or “from above”, which is why the WEB and ASV read “born anew”. Two verses later Jesus says “born of water and the Spirit”. Evangelicals usually read this as a personal conversion. Catholic, Orthodox and many other Christians connect it with baptism. The text alone does not end that argument.

Scripture and mission. “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16), and Jesus sends his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). 2 Timothy says Scripture is inspired and useful. It does not say Scripture is the only authority; that is a Protestant conclusion drawn from it and other passages.

What it does not say. No passage ties the gospel to a nation, a party or a race. Paul writes: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). When Peter stopped eating with the Gentiles, “for fear of those in the circumcision group”, and others followed him, Paul said they were “not walking in line with the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:11–14). Paul treated a line between peoples at the table as a gospel issue. He was writing about Jews and Gentiles in the church, not about modern voting.

The word in five Bibles: Galatians 1:8

The verb behind all this is euangelizō (Strong’s G2097), “to announce good news”. English Bibles nearly always translate it. The original Douay–Rheims, the Catholic translation from the Latin Vulgate, keeps the word itself:

The plainest “evangelize” in our five Bibles sits in the Catholic one. The verse is also a warning: for Paul the word had content, and it could be got wrong.

Bebbington’s four marks

The historian David Bebbington set out his description of modern British evangelicals in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (1989). It is usually called the Bebbington quadrilateral. These summaries follow the NAE’s.

These are a historian’s description, not a biblical list, and historians still argue over them. Timothy Larsen adds a fifth emphasis, the Holy Spirit, which brings in more Pentecostal and charismatic Christians. Bebbington answered a similar proposal from Darren Dochuk in 2014 by saying that at some times and places evangelicals have not stressed the Spirit. Timothy Gloege says the marks are too general to identify anyone, and the St Andrews Encyclopaedia notes that, out of context, they could describe Francis of Assisi.

Five ways of counting evangelicals

Each researcher has to choose a method, and the method largely sets the answer. Here are five, with the latest figure we found for each.

The last method needs explaining. In 2015 the NAE and Lifeway Research published a definition based on belief alone. Lifeway tested 17 questions and kept four. A person counts as evangelical by belief only by strongly agreeing with all of them: that the Bible is the highest authority for what they believe; that it is very important to them personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus; that his death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of their sin; and that only those who trust in him alone receive salvation as God’s free gift. Lifeway’s Ed Stetzer said they closely mirror Bebbington, with the stress on belief rather than behavior. The first phone survey in 2015 found about 3 in 10 Americans; Lifeway later said a live interviewer and people’s tendency to agree pushed that up. Its online surveys have found between 15% and 20%.

The label and the belief overlap less than people assume. In Lifeway’s 2017 survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, 24% called themselves evangelical and 15% were evangelicals by belief. Only 45% of the first group strongly agreed with all four statements, and 69% of the second group accepted the label. That survey is nine years old, and we found no newer published breakdown, so treat it as a guide.

What the election numbers measure

In Pew’s survey of September 28 to October 4, here is how registered voters said they would vote for the U.S. House. Pew notes that many registered voters are not expected to vote. Pew’s report does not define “White evangelical Protestant”.

Pew’s study of validated 2024 voters (an American Trends Panel survey of November 12–17, 2024, matched to official turnout records) found that 81% of White evangelical Protestant voters chose Donald Trump and 70% of religiously unaffiliated voters chose Kamala Harris. Three cautions apply to figures like these.

Check the group. “White evangelical Protestant” is a category of race and religion together, and Pew names the group in full. A headline that shortens it to “evangelicals” has changed the meaning.

Check the question. Gallup’s Newport writes that widely used exit polls rely on the “born-again or evangelical” question. Citing the political scientist Michele Margolis (Public Opinion Quarterly, 2022), he says the group is mislabeled if it is shortened to evangelical, because it includes people who accept “born again” but not “evangelical”. So an exit-poll number usually covers a broader group than the headline says.

Check which way the arrow points. A Pew analysis in 2021 followed 2,897 members of its survey panel from 2016 to 2020. Among White respondents who were not evangelical in 2016 and had warm views of Trump at some point, 16% began calling themselves born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020, compared with 1% of those whose views stayed cool or neutral. So politics may have shaped the label, and not only the other way around. Lifeway’s 2017 survey points the other way on one question: asked whether they would call themselves evangelical “if the term had nothing to do with politics”, about 1 in 4 Americans said yes, nearly the same as without that condition. On whether Christians should vote at all, see Should Christians vote?

Who the American picture leaves out

Black Christians. Pew’s 2023–24 study counts the historically Black Protestant tradition separately, and Pew says those churches were shaped by the experience of slavery and segregation. Lifeway calls African American Protestants overwhelmingly evangelical in theology. In Lifeway’s 2017 survey, African Americans were the group most likely to hold evangelical beliefs (30%, against 13% of white and 13% of Hispanic Americans), and they made up 23% of evangelicals by belief but only 14% of those who use the label. In the 2015 study, only 25% of African Americans who held the beliefs called themselves evangelical. Lifeway’s Scott McConnell said that for many African Americans the term is “a turn-off”, and that it is often seen as applying to white Christians only.

Latino Christians. In 2024, 17% of U.S. Latinos identified as evangelical Protestants, a share Pew says has been fairly stable since 2010. Among evangelical Protestants in Pew’s 2023–24 study, 70% are White, 12% Hispanic and 7% Black. Latino evangelicals also tend to accept the name: in 2015, 79% of Hispanics with evangelical beliefs called themselves evangelical.

The rest of the world. Depending on the definition, researcher Gina Zurlo puts the number of evangelicals worldwide between 393 million and 937 million, and Operation World’s Jason Mandryk estimates more than 700 million (Christian Post, reporting a World Evangelical Alliance webinar, September 2025). On her widest definition, Zurlo places 47% in Africa, 26% in Asia and 11% in North America. Mandryk said bluntly, “There is no such thing as the Evangelical”, because almost nobody uses the word in exactly the same way.

How other Christians see the word

Evangelicals. Baylor historian Thomas Kidd said in 2019 that they had gone “from being known as born again Christians, to being known as religious Republicans”, and he defines the tradition by the new birth.

Lutheran and Reformed. Lutherans used the name first, and a church called “Evangelical Lutheran” is using it in that sense. Godfrey stresses the same older meaning: someone who accepted the authority of the Bible to understand the gospel.

Pentecostal and charismatic. Operation World’s method treats them as nearly the same as evangelicals in some places and only partly overlapping in others. Zurlo’s count treats them as a separate layer, adding about 242 million.

Catholic. Vatican II says that all who have been “justified by faith in Baptism are members of Christ’s body” and are “correctly accepted as brothers” (Unitatis Redintegratio 3). The 1994 statement Evangelicals and Catholics Together, led by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus, called all who accept Christ as Lord and Savior brothers and sisters. Its signers spoke for themselves, not their churches.

Orthodox. The Orthodox Church in America describes baptism as a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, citing John 3:5.

Evangelical and Catholic: two differences that matter

On justification, see our page on Reformation Day.

Our take

This is our own view, not a ruling for any church, and it takes no side on any party or candidate. Readers who love the word and readers who have given it up may both disagree.

A word for what Christians believe about the gospel has become a word for how some white Americans vote, and that loss is real. We would say the same if that group voted the other way. A word built on euangelion should tell you what a person thinks about Jesus, and in American news it now mostly tells you something else. That matters to African American Christians who hold all four beliefs and hear a label that does not seem to include them, and to evangelicals in Nigeria or Kenya, whose faith has no connection with an American midterm.

Belief is the right test. Of the five methods we think the NAE/Lifeway approach is the strongest, because it asks what the word is about. Gloege is right that the marks are loose at the edges. But a word can be blurry at its edges and still mean something at its center, and 1 Corinthians 15 is a fairly clear center. If a person strongly agrees with those four statements, call them evangelical whatever their race or vote. If not, a yes on a survey does not settle it.

But evangelicals cannot put all of this on journalists. The belief test does not remove politics: in Lifeway’s 2017 survey, 65% of evangelicals by belief and 64% of self-identified evangelicals were Republican or leaned that way, and 30% and 33% were Democrats or leaned that way. Meanwhile, more than half of those who took the label did not strongly affirm the four beliefs, and Pew found White Americans with warm views of Trump especially likely to adopt the born-again or evangelical label. Some of the blurring came from inside. And the same data answer anyone who says a true evangelical must vote a certain way. Black Protestants, many of whom share these beliefs, vote very differently, and McConnell concluded that evangelical beliefs by themselves do not explain political behavior. The gospel Paul defines in 1 Corinthians 15 does not come with a ballot.

So keep the word, and use it precisely. Reporters should write “White evangelical Protestants”, as Pew does, or “white born-again or evangelical voters”. Christians who use the word should be able to say what the good news is without mentioning an election. Those who have laid the word down, especially Black Christians with long and specific reasons, owe nobody an explanation. We think it is worth keeping because the thing it names is worth naming.

Over to you

What word do you use for your own faith when someone asks, and how has that word changed over the last ten years? If “evangelical” was ever yours, tell us what made you keep it or let it go.

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