Thread by @csraac

How about a history thread to close the week?

Let's talk about "evangelical."

There are lots and lots of debates about “who is an evangelical.” I’ve contributed to some of them! But there’s another version of the question which is kind of funny but maybe illuminating: When was evangelical?

When, that is, did the term come into use, historically?

It’s curious this doesn’t come up more in discussions of Bebbington quadrilateral, the 81%, etc., etc. Scholars aren’t bound by people’s self descriptions, of course, but it’s a place to *:start*. And usage matters.

So I did a little digging around in Google Books …

The word first crops up in the mid 1500s, taken over from the German, where “evangelisch” was (and is) synonymous with “protestantisch.”

Worth noting: “evangelisch” is an adjective, not a noun.

By the 1630s, “evangelical” is a regular English word, but it’s never used as a name, that I can find. It’s always an adjective.

Like this:

Or this:

From what I can find, this is how Jonathan Edwards used it, and John Wesley too. “Evangelical” for them is not a religious group, not a name of their religious ID, but means something “of or relating to the Gospel.”

There are several instances of “Evangelical hymns” in the 1700s. They aren’t hymns for people who are evangelical. (Because there aren't people who call themselves evangelical). They’re hymns about doctrines of salvation, as opposed to, say, advent hymns.

Then, in the 1840s, there’s an evolution: you start seeing “Evangelical” as a name. More specifically, you start seeing “Evangelicalism” — as an *insult.*

"Evangelicalism" here means the opposite error from ritualism. An over-emphasis on sincerity, authenticity, spontaneity.

And people really didn’t like it.

Here’s another attack, from a sermon at Oxford in the 1840s:

People we, today, might call evangelical explicitly disavow "evangelicalism." “The Christian Observer”—a newspaper associated with William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect—said word would only be used by “some wilting scoffer,” never by “those who reverence Evangelical doctrine.”

Later that decade, “evangelical” gets used--I think for the first time--as a self-description. This happens because of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846. books.google.com/books?id=qvBiA…

The Alliance was committed to religious liberty for non-state churches. The unifying issue of these first “evangelicals” was disestablishment.

The more common name was “Dissenter,” but they did use “Evangelical.”

The name wasn’t regularly used and used like we use it now, as far as I can tell, until the 1940s, when the National Association of Evangelicals picked up the term in the U.S.

In his book _Reforming Fundamentalism_, historian George Marsden says he asked Carl Henry, one of the NAE’s founders: why “evangelical”?

books.google.com/books?id=uufvZ…

Henry said because nobody was using it, and they could define it how they wanted.

That certainly doesn’t settle the debates about the definition of the word, who’s really evangelical, and who gets to draw those lines. It doesn't tell you whether or not Bebbington's quadrilateral is useful. But ...

But as a religious historian, I'm always concerned about anachronisms. I try to be careful not to impose modern categories on the past.

So I find it helpful to ask how a word was used and when it was used, and ask “when was evangelical”?

The answer, it turns out, is the 1840s and the 1940s, in two very different moments. Which is the kind of weird answer I hope for, with a Friday-afternoon-history-Twitter thread.

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