“Don’t Call Him Evangelical — How to Remember Jimmy Carter’s Faith, And How Not To” was the title of the article in my email inbox. As a native Georgian, cradle roll Baptist and proud former partner in President Carter’s work of racial justice and reconciliation known as the New Baptist Covenant, I confess, my hackles — wherever they are — went up.
Don’t get me wrong: I get it. My own history with the term “evangelical” is deeply fraught. It’s embarrassing now to confess that in the zeal of my youth I once stuffed tracts in every locker at my school asking, “What Is Life’s Greatest Question?” (Spoiler alert: The answer, it claimed, was ‘Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”)
Trey Lyon
If your brain filled in the last five words of that sentence perhaps you, too, are — or once were — an evangelical.
Not that kind of …
Since then, I’ve often shunned that term. Even as a “missionary” I all too quickly added “not that kind, though — less proselytizing, more community development” — lest someone think I’m here to Doctrine of Discovery this place.
In these electronic pages and others, many have recently used an equally abrupt follow-up when self-identifying as Baptist — “not that kind of Baptist, I’m a Jimmy Carter type of Baptist.” As others have said better than I, President Carter was, perhaps, the best of us Baptists. Not Jesus, but not that far off.
“President Carter was, perhaps, the best of us Baptists. Not Jesus, but not that far off.”
All this is worth reflecting on. What’s in a name? Any culture feels the imperative to give vocabulary to the myriad identities it contains. “Evangelical” has its roots in that Greek word roughly transliterated euangellion — the angellion part being news/message and the eu prefix telling you that news is good.
Of course, what your dusty Greek dictionary doesn’t tell you is that this isn’t just a phrase, it’s a historical reality that predates the Gospels.
Early church
A calendar dating from 9 BCE states, “Since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings (εὐαγγέλιον) for the world that came by reason of him.” If your brain automatically inserted “Caesar” before Augustus you’re on the right track — and if the rest of that proclamation sounds awfully similar, then remember what N.T. Wright says of the treasonous confession of the early church: “To say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ is to say ‘Caesar is not.’”
It turns out, as Christians, we don’t get to colonize the term “evangelical” — unless, that is, we fully acknowledge that colonization isn’t discovery, but taking what isn’t yours and claiming you found it. The early church used this term to ape the empire. Caesar isn’t Lord, Jesus is. This is shot through the New Testament but we miss it, because our culture isn’t that one.
Paul writes to the church in Philippi, imploring them to unity with trademark rhetorical flair, daring them to be one as they are when their voices swell to sing their favorite song, their “How Great Thou Art” — “Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
Hear this song with the political and spiritual implications of its day, of worshiping Caesar and demanding loyalty to him, which aren’t in the text but in the historical record of Philippi and the time:
Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death —
even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
When we realize that the “good news about Jesus Christ” was a counter-narrative — even a lampoon of the state — it makes that term “evangelical” hit a bit different.
Who’s an evangelist?
When I began working in the tech world, I was honestly a little freaked out to find the largest companies in the world have positions with the term “evangelist” in the title. A manager once implored me to lean on my church experience and prepare a training in the spirit of “Have you heard the good news about…?” a new software feature.
“The largest companies in the world have positions with the term ‘evangelist’ in the title.”
If that feels cheap and tawdry to you, I imagine you feel similarly when the word “evangelical” is bandied about as a political and ideological demographic. It is problematic enough that there is now an entire movement of folks who proudly profess to be “exvangelicals.” I sympathize with and align with these folks. I don’t want any part of the “turn or burn” mentality I grew up in.
And in the darkest of my moments of resentment and anger I’ve felt like Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, wanting to confront self-assured folks like I once was: “I reckon you think you been redeemed?” Of course, that character winds up tortured, not by others, but by himself — and the way of hatred and bitterness leads to death.
I’m not sure if I want to be an evangelical, but I am fairly sure that, when understood as one who proclaims and lives the good news of Jesus Christ, Jimmy Carter was, and is, an evangelical.
I know the point that article in my inbox was making — that evangelicals are a monolithic Christian religious group, characterized by seminal movements and beliefs around biblical inerrancy, coalescing into a uniquely American force that is, in this moment, inextricable from white Christian nationalism. I get that argument — and perhaps they’re right.
“I’m not quite ready to cede the term.”
I’m not quite ready to cede the term, though. The late, great Tony Campolo regularly said he was asked, “Are you an evangelical, or do you believe in the Social Gospel?” He would reply, “I don’t have to choose! Jesus said the work of the proclaiming the good news included proclaiming recovery of sight to the blind, feeding the poor, setting free those imprisoned and oppressed and canceling debt — the gospel is good news for everybody or it’s good news for nobody.”
I’m OK with that definition of evangelical.
Who is a Christian?
In the movement Campolo helped start, Red Letter Christians, a friend of a friend recently wrote, “Yes, I love the T-shirts that say, ‘I am not that kind of Christian.” But I am tired of having to preface a description of myself that must first come with explanations for why I do not identify with — the immediate images of hatred, judgment and exclusion that come to mind when you say the word ‘Christian.’ I am no longer a Christian.”
If you’re taken aback by that, but you get it nonetheless, I feel you. Many LGTBQ friends whose gifts were used and abused by the church until they dared emerge in the fulness of who God made them to be have been dropping that term left and right.
And still their light shines and their ministry continues. Of course, I also often think of the other Campolo line: “Tell me about the God or Jesus you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him either.”
“Tell me about the God or Jesus you don’t believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him either.”
So, to the original question: Evangelical? Christian? Baptist? It seems to me there are at least two ways to help reconcile my own contradictory relationship with these labels.
One comes from my first “boss” in congregational ministry and my current pastor. When that great annual Baptist tradition of deacon election rolls around, for nearly 30 years he has said some version of this, “What we are doing now is identifying who should be ‘capital D’ Deacons, for this is a role established by the early church for service to the church and care for its members and community. But the truth is the best kind of ‘capital D’ Deacons aren’t the people who seek it out or impress us; the best candidates are the ‘little d’ deacons — the ones who serve and jump in, never seeking attention or fame. They do the work because they see the work is there to be done, as Jesus would and does.”
There’s something to the idea of capitalizing things. Proper-nouning something suggests at least the appearance of legitimacy. There is an academic argument that “capital E” Evangelicals represents a movement in the world and certainly American religious history. If that’s true, I’m glad to claim and fight to be a ‘little e’ evangelical. I’d wager Jimmy Carter was too.
And this gets at the second way I’m wrestling with it all: What “Christian,” “Baptist” and “evangelical” all have in common is that they were, at their origin, terms used not by a community of religious followers of the way of Jesus, but terms of derision used by those outside the tradition. The “Christians” of Antioch were “little Christs” — perceptibly week and powerless because they refused to physically fight back, always talking about death to self as the way of Jesus.
“Baptists” were “Se-baptists” and “Ana-Baptists” and here, just after their 500th anniversary, it isn’t inconceivable that religious conversion should include ritual — but it does seem inconceivable that religious ritual would confer national citizenship. And if “evangelical” has forever linked the term to Jesus of Nazareth and not Caesar Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, or any other emperor, then a great usurpation has, indeed occurred.
It begs the question, of course, “What kind of Christian? What kind of Baptist? What kind of evangelical?” These are questions for deeper conversation and relationship. Could they even be, as Peter reminds us, a chance to “give a reason for the hope that is in us, yet with gentleness and respect?”
I think it’s the kind of Christian who takes my understanding of eternal judgment from the sheep and the goats and not from Jonathan Edwards — the Jimmy Carter kind of Baptist — and the kind of evangelical that still would pass out tracts, but with a slightly different answer, sourced from another evangelical Baptist Georgian, Martin Luther King Jr.
For “life’s greatest question” is surely, “What are you doing for others?” Imagine a world where everyone asked that question. Wouldn’t that be good news?
Trey Lyon worked in religious and non-religious institutions and communities for 20 years, including seven years in community development, social justice education and community organizing while creating literacy programs and leadership initiatives for students in generational poverty. He now works in tech integration for higher education. He lives in Georgia.