'Exvangelicals': why more religious people are rejecting the evangelical label
Concerned about the rightwing stereotypes linked to the term, many say they no longer identify with it – especially after the 2016 election
Josiah Hesse
Friday 3 November 2017 03.01 EDT
I don’t identify myself with that term any more,” Boz Tchividjian said recently. He was talking about being “evangelical”, the movement his grandfather, the Rev Billy Graham, helped popularize in America. “Words matter,” Tchividjian said, “and ‘evangelical’ isn’t like Baptist or Episcopalian, which can be clearly defined. The minute you use that term to someone,, “you’re defined by how they interpret it.”
Tchividjian is among a growing number of religious people and groups in America who have stopped identifying as evangelicals in order to distance themselves from the more extreme elements of Christian society, while remaining true to their principles.
This fall, the 80-year-old Princeton Evangelical Fellowship dropped “evangelical” from its name. William Boyce, executive secretary of what is now the Princeton Christian Fellowship, explained the move, saying: “In recent years … we are seeing that more students either do not recognize or they misunderstand the term evangelical.”
And in a recent interview, Tony Campolo, a pastor and founder of the Red Letter Christians movement, said succinctly what others have also said publicly: “We feel uncomfortable calling ourselves evangelicals any more, because the general public assumes things about us that aren’t true. We are not for capital punishment, we are not pro-war, we don’t hate gays, we’re not anti-feminist.”
more
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/03/evangelical-christians-religion-politics-trump
= new reply since forum marked as read
suggested on another thread? Religious bigotry is deplorables behavior anywhere, but if it's going to be indulged here it should be taken to that subforum created for this kind of indulgence.
So some evangelicals are embarrassed. Good. But let's hope many are reconnecting their religion to their politics, not just changing labels.
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