To be or not to be… an evangelical.

I identify as an evangelical, but it got a lot harder in 2003 when the US bombed Baghdad and evangelicals were supporting President George W. Bush on that bombing.

A month or two later, I read a newspaper article about American evangelicals trying to convert people in Baghdad. We bomb their city and then tell them about Jesus?

Then when Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won in the Electoral College, it became even harder to be out as an evangelical.

But at least I’m not alone. There are a lot of evangelicals who were totally dismayed that an admitted abuser of women moved into the White House.

In April 2018, sixty evangelicals met in Wheaton, Illinois, to discuss how to be people of fa in a world where the labels “right-wing” and “Trump supporter” have become associated with the word evangelical. “World evangelical leaders confer at Wheaton” reported the Wheaton Record. The meeting was called the Wheaton Consultation on Evangelicalism.

“Several Christian leaders walk out after evangelical meeting turns to Trump-bashing” was the headline of an article on CBN News.

The Washington Post even took an interest, publishing “I was an evangelical magazine editor, but now I can’t defend my evangelical community” by Katelyn Beaty as an opinion piece in the Acts of Faith series.

All the while, I’m writing a memoir on being an evangelical and a feminist. Do I need to reject what has been my identity for a long time?

Actually, ever since my pro-choice book in 1994, some evangelicals have decided I’m not really one of them. Never mind that Christianity Today magazine and other leading voices in 1973 accepted legal access to abortion as an improvement over back-alley or self-induced terminations. And never mind that I’m still a born-again Christian.

Postscript in 2019:

I was encouraged when Christianity Today came out in opposition to Trump on December 19, 2019, with an editorial “Trump Should Be Removed from Office.” I even re-subscribed.

I had worked for CT back in 1970 and 1971 as a summer intern and even been offered a permanent job, but I chose to return to graduate school instead. I continued writing some occasional reports for CT as a free lancer, and I continued subscribing–until one year when the issue of women preaching led to a CT cover depicting a woman in the pulpit as if she were at sea with a storm raging around her.

There are several reasons why I continue to call myself an evangelical, but my friendship with Virginia Ramey Mollenkott has been one of them.

“You don’t have to accept their version of what an evangelical is,” she said. “It’s a good word, and we don’t want to let them own it.”