I think I’m having an identity crisis. Within Christian ranks, where everybody seems to carry a label of some sort, am I an evangelical, a Calvinist, a progressive, a classical Christian, an orthodox Christian, a fundamentalist, a modernist, or “none of the above?” I suspect that the people I hang around with at church have formed their own ideas about which niche I belong in, and I’m also pretty sure that many of these perceptions would come as a shock to me.

Since “evangelical” seems to be the label du jour these days, I picked up a little book called Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden. He begins his book by saying, “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.” Hmmm. I don’t usually feel angry, but maybe if I read on I will learn something.

That seems simple and fairly accurate. Jerry Falwell has even adopted it as a quick definition of fundamentalism that reporters are likely to quote. A more precise statement of the same point is that an American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with “secular humanism.” In either the long or the short definitions, fundamentalists are a subtype of evangelicals and militancy is crucial to their outlook. Fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives, the are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to fight.

Well, that’s a starting point at least. It would be clearer if we knew exactly what an evangelical is.

To provide a little historical perspective, it turns out that American protestants of the Civil War and Reconstruction period believed that a Christian millenium was not far away. This was an age of revivals that seemed capable of bringing the majority of the citizenry to Christ. There were campaigns against drinking, sabbath-breaking, prostitution, and the Roman Catholic church. Only slavery seemed an obstacle to America’s becoming a righteous Christian nation.

What actually happened was the “Gilded Age” of evangelicalism.

The era marked by the assassination of two presidents and the impeachment of another, a stolen election, and a reign of rampant political and business corruption and greed, was well named by Mark Twain. A veneer of evangelical Sunday-school piety covered almost everything in the culture, but no longer did the rhetoric of idealism and virtue seem to touch the core of the materialism of the political and business interests. It was a dime store millenium.

Reaction set in and we entered the era of the crusades (1890-1917). Fundamentalism was the disappointed reaction of Bible-believers after World War I failed to usher in universal peace, and it came to be identified with literal Bible belief and a rejection of the modern culture. So we have a broad evangelical movement that includes angry fundamentalism at its conservative end and a Billy Graham style “peace with God” at the other. It’s interesting that denominations are not an important part of the mix.

Among evangelicals there is a general disregard for the institutional church. Marsden observes that, “Little seems to hold it together other than common traditions, a central one of which is the denial of the authority of traditions.”

I have come to the conclusion that I no longer strongly identify with the mainline (oldline) Presbyterian Church, it’s rich evangelical heritage in America notwithstanding. I am fairly comfortable with what I understand of the evangelical movement, more comfortable with the fundamentalist end of the evangelical continuum, which includes Reformed (Calvinist) theology.

Dave, who could have saved a lot of time by just saying “yes.”