Chapter One

1

Who Are Evangelicals?

I know a man who resigned from his evangelical church as a result of a youth-sponsored coffee house (it was a fund-raiser for a missions trip). The kids were hosting several youth bands, and one of them played that Mick Jagger classic "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." That same night, two middle-aged women who'd grown up on the Stones bobbed, weaved, and clapped hands overhead like something out of Woodstock. They too considered themselves evangelicals. Full disclosure: I was one of those two women.

The point being, as with every mode of religious expression on the American landscape, evangelical Christianity has its contradictions and champions, saints and sinners, workhorses and weirdos. There is not one "bloc" of the American population that fits into a category called evangelicalism. Evangelicals can be white, African-American, Asian, or Hispanic. There are the educated and the uneducated; the rich, the middle, and the under-class; the tax-paying upright citizens; the down-and-out drug addicts and prostitutes; the right-wing conservatives and left-wing liberals. It is better to think of evangelicalism as a river carrying life-giving water to its many branches and streams.

The individuals who inhabit the landscape may come and go. But the river remains, a mystical life force that nourishes otherwise disparate groups and, in a way, holds them together. When today's inhabitants are gone, the river will do the same for those yet to dwell upon the land.

It can, and does, get messy when a mighty river cuts through the crags of everyday life. For believing evangelicals, the source of the river abides in absolutes.