It is 11 a.m. on a Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area and I am headed to
brunch. It's an unusual scene for me because
where I grew up the type of dedication I'm showing to
eggs was reserved for this.
Church -- where the enthusiasm comes from food for the Soul and not the stomach.
Today, fewer people in the United States are keeping the faith. Protestants no
longer make up the majority of U.S . adults. Yet, discussions about evangelicals
seemingly dominate the political landscape. We're going to protect
Christianity. The right to keep and bear arms it's not bestowed by man but
granted by God and Christians overwhelmingly. Made up the majority of
Congress in 2016. So how does this national focus on Christians affect
their perceptions, their politics, their beliefs, and the nation? So I believe that
many people believe evangelicals are part of a political party rather than a
subset of the Christian faith. The word evangelical is sort of been hijacked and
has become to be known as more of a right-wing
purist type of political term. Hey fam. I'm Imaeyen. This is AJ+ and this Sunday
we've traveled in hopes of finding out what it really means to be an
evangelical and whether faith and politics should be interwoven.
Only 6% of adults in the U.S. are evangelicals, and yet the candidates and
the news media were obsessed with them. And they still are.
How much support do you think Donald Trump has within the evangelical community?
God bless the great state of Florida.
It's revenge of white America. It is revenge of evangelical right-wingers.
And I noticed a curious thing.
Whenever I would hear the word evangelical, it was almost always synonymous with white Christians.
And a series of campaign controversies didn't stop him from winning 81% of the white evangelical vote.
This overwhelmingly white depiction of evangelicals is
vastly different from what I had known growing up as a kid in the south.
These images made me question the actual definition of evangelical and who gets
to be one. Are they evangelical? Or them? To be evangelical means different things
to different people and that's part of the reason why it's so difficult to
define the term.
To get a better understanding of the term evangelical, and the people who
identify as such, I visited one of the most Bible-minded cities in America:
Houston Texas. That's where I met Avis Blake-Thomas.
An evangelical Christian really is -- in my opinion -- about the basic doctrines, the
basic beliefs, the core beliefs of Christianity.
Evangelical Christian to me s a little bit of redundancy because every Christian knows that one of the
key components of being a Christian is to spread the good news -- to spread the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Blake-Thomas is a pastor
and co-founded the open Bible Academy, a nonprofit organization that gives free theological
biblical training. She says she's seen the word evangelical be co-opted. You
have people that identify as evangelical but don't share evangelical belief. I am
an evangelical, but not from a political viewpoint. I'm an evangelical from the
basic understanding of what it means for the Christian faith.
She believes many of the people identified as evangelicals are totally unfamiliar with the Bible,
the tenants of the Christian faith, and the history of evangelism. In most cases
Christians in America, particularly today, don't have a good understanding of the
Bible. So, they don't know what they believe. They don't understand that it's
more than going to a two-hour service on Sunday. The evangelical movement began as
a populist revolt in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was anti-intellectual and
anti-elitist, and it was often spread by untutored preachers who used common
storytelling to spread their message.
And then a little quirky decade called the 1980s happened.
The 80s are when a former actor named Ronald Reagan -- who was
divorced and rarely attended church -- watched an alliance between the
Republican Party and religious leaders emerge --one that helped him win the
White House. It was a political act by the political right which created the
religious right. It was politically created for the sake of the Republican Party.
Christian writer and evangelical Jim Wallis
says the GOP's plan was a concerted effort.
Literally there were operatives, political operatives, from the right who came to mega-church pastors
and said, "I'll make you a household word. Give me your list." And that's how they
created the Religious Right. Soon faces like this one became one of those
associated with the religious right. That's conservative activist Jerry
Falwell and along with the political action group called the Moral Majority.
He pushed for a more conservative religious agenda. The Moral Majority
mobilized conservative Christians in politics. Wallis says Falwell's
politics and interpretation of the faith represented a major change in how
evangelicals were seen. Before Falwell, people like evangelist Billy Graham were
the face and the voice of mainstream Christianity in the United States.
Do you love God? Do you love him with all your heart? With all your soul and your mind?
And by Wallis' definition, this guy is also an evangelical.
King spoke frankly about the racial divisions within the American Christian Church.
And actually this obelisk behind me is dedicated to his memory outside a modern chapel in Houston, Texas.
I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the
shameful tragedies that 11 o'clock on Sunday morning is one of the most
segregated hours and if not the most segregated hours in Christian America.
50 years after King's assassination the exact same problem still plagues the
American Christian Church, racial division, according to Wallis. And we saw
that firsthand in the aftermath of the 2016 election cycle when the vast
majority of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump but the majority of
evangelicals of color didn't. Evangelicals, if they're gonna be really
evangelical, should name and denounce racism as a sin from their pulpits. How
many white churches have done that?
You're a chosen race. You're not a black Christian or a white Christian. You're a Christian who's white or a Christian who's black.
Pastor Ikki Soma says part of what keeps the church divided is the
variation and how black and white parishioners see the world.
For many white evangelical Christians and black evangelical Christians, the way that they
view the world is different even though they read the same Bible and trust the
same Jesus. The lenses that we study the Bible through this colored by our
culture. Soma is a Japanese born U.S. citizen who grew up attending mostly
white churches and was naturalized 15 years ago. He doesn't identify as either
a Republican or a Democrat, but says he's seen how politics is intersected with
religion. In fact when you hear the term evangelical you're probably more likely
to see it presented this way. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. A
person for their Christian convictions is going to be put in jail because they
refuse to bow to a decision that is suspect at best. You're gonna be held
seriously, seriously to account by God if you don't vote.
The word evangelical has a different meaning in the United States than it does internationally, according
to Wallis. And he says that's because the U.S. does a poor job of
representing people of color in general.
In fact, there are more than two billion Christians worldwide, according to Pew. That's about
a third of the global population and Christians are so widespread that no one
region can claim to be the center of global Christianity.
About 26% of Christians live in Europe, 37% in the Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa is home
to 24% of the population. For Wallis being a Christian means a commitment to
the Bible, Jesus, and the poor.
"America first," for example, is a heresy.
It's not "America first," it's Jesus first. But if our gospel isn't good news to the poor,
it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, period. And white evangelicals in America are
not known to have a gospel that is good news to the poor.
The Bible also has two thousand verses about the poor compared to just twelve on homosexuality, according to
Wallis, but you've probably heard much more about those verses on homosexuality in news coverage.
We're talking about marriage. We're talking about an institution that has survived and served this civilization
for over 5,000 years with one definition.
You are never going to stop AIDs until you stop treating homosexual sodomy as a civil right and start treating it
as a form of conduct to avoid.
Do these types of depictions really mean that the news
media doesn't understand religion? Wallis thinks so. And he says that the
news media's portrayal of faith is a big part of the problem.
Media, who are not very faith friendly, like to paint Christians in the worst possible way. And
And so if you make religious right synonymous with Christian or evangelical synonymous
with white evangelical then that makes Christians look bad.
If the media have a religious literacy problem, it's not alone. Americans don't know much
about religion. Pew Research says that those most likely to be knowledgeable
about religion in the U.S. have an advanced college degree. This lack of
understanding may explain the public's perception -- a perception that makes it
much more difficult for self-identified Christians, according to Blake-Thomas.
Those of us who are true evangelicals get a bad rap because they see the
evangelical term used in the political sphere. The challenge is that in the
marketplace when people hear the term "evangelical," and they then see how those same
people their values may not match or their understanding does not seem to match ours.
She says she believes it's just one reason why the Christian faith is on the decline in the U.S.
When you have people that just simply identify with it from a political standpoint, they don't
bring to the table those same sets of beliefs. They they see it as political expediency
versus a belief system versus a part of religion.
So how do evangelicals go about fixing what seems to be a public relations problem?
Well the first thing can be realizing that faith doesn't have a political party.
We shouldn't be religious right or really just left. I don't take that on either. We should be Christians.
It's Jesus first.
And just because you're evangelical, it doesn't mean that you don't struggle
with understanding issues of identity, race, gender, and sex.
The Christian can still struggle with sins like racism, prejudice, and things like that.
So I would say the place that the church has in politics is [to] encourage their members to be upright citizens.
Either we're Christian or we're not. And we will be known by our fruit that we bear.