Bonnie Kristian is deputy editor at Christianity Today. She is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, and widely published as a freelance journalist who writes on evangelicalism, the modern American right, foreign policy, civil liberties, electoral politics. The author of Untrustworthy and A Flexible Faith, Kristian is a graduate of Bethel Seminary with a Master of Arts in Christian Thought. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and their three children.
Evangelicalism is a favorite scapegoat of American public life. Christianity Today deputy editor Bonnie Kristian argues that the most common attacks fall apart under scrutiny, issuing a bold call for evangelicals not to be ashamed of their tradition and, instead, to preserve and deepen it.
Evangelicals are subjected to a steady stream of criticism about what they believe and how they live out their faith in public. This isn’t new: Evangelicals have felt slighted and misrepresented for a century. But in the current political era, a cottage industry consisting of podcasts, essays, and dozens of books has arisen―all dedicated to criticizing evangelicalism. The question is not whether evangelicalism has faults but whether the accusations are fair, coherent, and a path to destruction or reform.
Drawing on research, original reporting, and a lifetime in the evangelical movement, author and deputy editor at Christianity Today Bonnie Kristian addresses five serious criticisms of evangelicalism, offering a deeply informed and theologically sound defense. Kristian engages with the work of influential critics of evangelicalism―including Kristin Kobes DuMez, Beth Allison Barr, and Tim Alberta―as well as interviews with theologians, pastors, and thought leaders, to deftly dismantle bad-faith critiques while acknowledging where reform is necessary and desirable.
In Defense of Evangelicalism demystifies and humanizes evangelicals, demonstrating irrefutably that evangelicals are not the menace they’ve been made out to be. In fact, Kristian maintains, the evangelical movement is a force for good that every American should want to preserve.
“This kind, generous work reminds readers of the good that so many evangelicals represent. And unlike many commentaries on contemporary evangelicalism, this book leaves readers grateful for the realities Bonnie Kristian describes.”—Carl R. Trueman, author of The Desecration of Man
“Kristian has provided a vital service to the public. In Defense of Evangelicalism is an important book that deserves a wide reading and should invite many conversations.”—Rev. Walter Kim, PhD, president of the National Association of Evangelicals
“We need this book. It is everything a good defense should be: witty, intelligent, piercingly discerning, honest, and—at points—downright funny.”—Chris Butler, director of Christian civic formation at the Center for Christianity and Public Life
“What I appreciate about Bonnie Kristian’s work is her honesty, her intolerance for pablum, and the sharpness of her arguments—and all those qualities are on display here. You will be challenged and helped by this book.”—Jake Meador, editor in chief of Mere Orthodoxy
“Kristian exposes the fallacies, double standards, and blind spots in some of the most influential accounts of American evangelicalism today—while boldly confronting the ways in which evangelicals often fall far short of Christian ideals.”—Molly Worthen, author of Spellbound
“If you are an evangelical like me, you’ll come away challenged and encouraged. If you are not, you’ll come away with a better understanding of one of America’s largest and most misunderstood religious groups. This will be one of the most important books of the year.”—Daniel Darling, director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
“Kristian turns the tables on the critics—quick to acknowledge the charges when true, but relentlessly committed to exposing how unfair and inaccurate so many portraits of evangelicals are.”—Trevin Wax, author of The Thrill of Orthodoxy
Chapter One
Insincerity
If you look at how they behave, it's clear evangelicals are actually about cultural and political identity, not belief.
"I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, sent from God to die in my place," Rogerio told me. "And that's what I believe."
We were sitting in an airy lobby of the urban Pittsburgh megachurch that hosts the immigrant advocacy center where he works. Outside, a colorful, two-story mural declared the multiethnic congregation's commitment to "following Jesus in a diverse community." Inside, we were talking across a café table positioned behind the requisite coffee shop and next to the indoor playground, complete with climbing wall. Children trooped up the stairs for an after-school program, and the receptionist kept busy buzzing people in. I'd asked Rogerio, himself an immigrant from Brazil, what he meant when he called himself an evangelical, and he'd answered without hesitation. But he wasn't done yet.
"I believe in the Bible as the authoritative Word of God, and I do—or try to do my best to—follow and obey its commands," he continued. "My faith is personal, and I have my beliefs in what the Bible says and what the Holy Spirit guides me to do." He nodded toward his denomination's doctrinal standards, then pivoted from faith to deeds.
"One thing that I like about what I do is that we decided from the beginning not to get involved in the politics," Rogerio said of his advocacy work. "And I believe that this should be what we as Christians do as well. The politics divided us, but as Christians we have one mandate: to assist our neighbors, to love them. Jesus came and said, You need to love them as you love yourself. So that's what I live for."
Rogerio's account of his beliefs was fervent, earnest, the embodiment of 1 Peter 3:15, in which the apostle enjoins us to "be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have," and to do so "with gentleness and respect."
It was also entirely unremarkable. This is how evangelicals talk. It's how evangelicals think. "If any one mark clearly identifies them it is their total belief in an awesome, supernatural Jesus Christ," Time magazine wrote of young evangelical converts in 1971. And "not just a marvelous man who lived 2,000 years ago but a living God who is both Savior and Judge, the ruler of their destinies. Their lives revolve around the necessity for an intense personal relationship with that Jesus, and the belief that such a relationship should condition every human life."
Rogerio may be uncommonly well spoken, his answer polished by seminary education and readied by years of presentations of his faith to the immigrants he serves. Even so, what he said is typical. It's the kind of thing millions of evangelicals would say.
"Among all the major Christian traditions in the contemporary United States, evangelicalism exhibits the highest degree of adherence to many of the traditionally orthodox Christian theological beliefs," sociologist Christian Smith explains in American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving, a milestone study of the movement published in 1998. And that adherence is more than memorization, more than the capacity to rattle off answers for a pollster.
In addition to a national survey, Smith and his research team conducted hundreds of detailed interviews with churchgoing Protestants. Those conversations "substantiate[d] our survey data on beliefs, confirming that those who identify as evangelicals manifest very high degrees of concern with adherence" to orthodoxy, Smith writes. "Most evangelicals we interviewed pointed to right beliefs about God, the Bible, and salvation as central to their religious identities and values."
The interview snippets Smith shares range across evangelical church traditions, yet they all sound just like Rogerio. "I believe that the whole Bible is true," said one Reformed woman. "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he came into the world to save us, and he died on the cross and rose again from the dead, and he is sitting at our Father's right hand."
A woman in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination struck very similar notes. "Evangelicals believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and the whole truth," she told Smith's team. "Our first tenet is preaching Jesus Christ as the Gospel."
Smith's study went beyond theology to activism, practice, and politics, and there too he found that characteristic enthusiasm and care. "If ever liberal Protestantism was distinguished by its social-Gospel activism, it appears to be so no more," he writes. "The evidence suggests, instead, that evangelicals may be the most committed carriers of a new social Gospel."
This evidence was consistent in the national numbers and in-depth conversations alike. Smith's interviewees vocally rejected a "compartmentalized 'Sunday-morning' faith," a Christianity that moves the head but not the hands. As a Presbyterian man put it, "We're called to love our neighbor. That's society. So [we need to be concerned about] anything going on out there [that] affects your neighbor. And we need to love them. So social issues, like hunger or poverty, economic issues, social issues like divorce, crime, abortion, however people are hurting."
Other interviewees were just as effusive. "Not having faith would totally reorder my whole life. Even my thought life would be different," said one woman. If she doesn't care for people in need, "I have to question whether I really believe" in Jesus, said another. Evangelical faith is "costly on a daily basis," explained a third. "You know? Costly to love. Because it always throws my heart out there, instead of just living for myself. It's costly to serve other people. So I would say it's really reoriented my life."
It would come as a surprise to these folks to learn that none of this is real—that all their beliefs and purpose and service and sacrifice are, at best, a well-intended self-delusion or, more likely, a self-serving and politicized tribalism. It would come as such a surprise as to be literally incredible to them.
Yet this is a common charge against American evangelicals. "Increasingly, those who identify as evangelical are aligning not primarily with a theological system but with a cultural and political identity," wrote Jesus and John Wayne author Kristin Kobes Du Mez in 2021.
Evangelicalism "has become about shared political convictions," argued Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid in 2024, with self-ID motivated by "what it [means] politically, most of all [as] a way to signal support for Donald Trump."
"In the main," contended former evangelical Peter Wehner at The Atlantic the same year, "the white evangelical movement has for decades exacerbated our divisions, fueled hatreds and grievances, and turned fellow citizens into enemies rather than friends. This isn't true of all evangelicals," he allowed. "But it is fair to say that this movement that was at one time defined by its theological commitments is now largely defined by its partisan ones."
Now, there is a truth here. Remember the Muslim and Buddhist "evangelicals" from the introduction? That self-ID is wrong, but it does exist, and it's not meaningless. It tells us something that these people who reject the evangelical tradition still want the label. Consciously or not, they've realized that evangelical has taken on political meaning in America. They've concluded—incorrectly but not unreasonably—that "to be very religiously engaged and very politically conservative means that they are evangelical," as Ryan Burge, the political scientist, has explained at The New York Times.
So Du Mez, Hamid, Wehner, and critics like them might argue that Rogerio and other evangelicals who understand their faith as he does are the outliers. Holdovers, maybe. Anachronisms who'd be more at home in the evangelicalism of the 1990s, when Smith published Embattled and Thriving. They're the exceptions Wehner grants, those "good and gracious people who seek to be peacemakers, including in the political realm."
That kind of caveat is a good start and evidence of an effort at good-faith engagement.
But these allegations of evangelical insincerity turn on two errors. One is the mistaken acceptance of a simplistic, self-ID version of evangelicalism—an is or isn't model in which anyone who declares themselves evangelical simply is, no matter how short they fall by every other measure. Hamid describes "evangelicals" who don't go to church, don't believe in the divinity of Christ, and, in some cases, affirm different religions entirely.
Their self-ID tells us a lot about contemporary politics. It tells us a lot about how the media uses evangelical these days. But it tells us nearly nothing about evangelicalism itself. This is a movement with some fuzzy boundaries, but it's not an empty container into which anyone can pour anything and everything. If atheists call themselves evangelicals because they like Trump, that doesn't mean evangelicalism includes atheism. It means those atheists are low-information voters who've been grossly misinformed.
Imagine having this conversation about other major religions or branches of the church. For the sake of argument, let's say that the black church in America should be excluded from evangelicalism and treated as a separate movement. This is a revealing comparison because the "very high level of evangelical support for Donald Trump is like nothing seen in America's recent religious-political history," observes Mark Noll, the historian, "except for the even higher percentage that since the 1960s Democrats have received from Bible-believing, born-again African Americans."