It wasn’t enough to introduce yourself as a “Christian,” you were suspect if you didn’t qualify yourself as an “evangelical Christian.” Two weeks ago, a missionary with Operation Mobilization and I were discussing Operation World, that famous prayer guide for missions to unreached people groups, now in its seventh edition. If you were raised as I was, then you’ve been schooled in equating evangelicalism with Christianity itself, as if the Ryrie Study Bible was written by the Apostle Paul. But the problem goes back further than that. There are more evangelicals in the US, and in the world, than white, politically active ones.
Immediately after the 2016 US presidential election, many a news reporter was scolded for writing: “81 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.” No, -as their editors seem to have learned since- 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. Part of the problem of course is conflation. It was meticulous work, and not that I was ever fully successful at it, but my point is: since 1993 in earnest, I have just assumed that there is something like “white American evangelical Christianity.” I didn’t necessarily judge it, but I did have to reckon with it if I hoped to be faithful in my calling. During my time outside the US borders, I went to bed almost every night with the weighty self-scrutiny: “Did I speak and teach the “evangel” (the good news, the Gospel) that day as directly as possible from the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures, or instead did I give my listeners MY version of the Gospel, which is invariably entangled with how I was raised as a white American evangelical Christian?” Every sermon I wrote I first had to go back and tease out those threads which were white and/or American.
I’m not qualified to speak into the White Russia question, but I can into the white evangelicalism one for two reasons: 1) because I’ve reflected extensively on the question in relation to the 2016 US elections, and 2) because I spent fourteen years of my life as a cross-cultural missionary in India and Pakistan. What made the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (literally “ White Russia”) so distinct from regular “Russia” so that in 1991 it had become its own differentiated country, Belarus? But when my terminology slipped and I used the phrase “white American evangelicalism,” he was right to stop me and ask exactly what I meant.
The back-and-forth correspondence I was having with a colleague at work was proceeding just fine, thank you, when I was using the term “white American evangelical.” After all, I was referring to a recognizable demographic, a group of people who regularly get counted, consulted, and polled.
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