Evangelical is a word about news before it is a word about anyone’s politics. It is built on evangel, the gospel, and it first named a family of Protestants who agreed on a few convictions about Scripture, conversion, the cross and sharing the faith. Black Christians have held those convictions from early in American history. So the word was never reserved for white people. The political meaning came later and sits on top of the older one. It did not replace it.
The confusion has a cause. Most people meet the word in a news story or a poll, where it describes a voting bloc. If that is the only definition you have, asking whether the word belongs to you sounds like a question about politics. Answering it well takes three steps in order: what the word means, who actually lived that meaning, and how a different meaning got attached. Wheaton College theologian Dr. Vincent Bacote lays out that sequence, and each step depends on the one before it.
What the word was made to name
Start with the root. The English word evangel comes from the Greek euangelion, meaning good news. When the New Testament speaks of the gospel, that is the word underneath. Mark opens his account with it: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). As Bacote puts it, “the term root word is evangel. That’s the word for gospel. That’s the word for good news.”
A root alone does not tell you how a word was used, so the historical sense matters too. The term described Protestants of many kinds: Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans. These groups argued hard about plenty. What made them one family was agreement on four convictions:
- the Bible carries real authority;
- a person needs a conversion experience;
- that conversion centers on the saving work of Jesus on the cross;
- this faith is meant to be shared.
There is no party on that list, no nation, no ethnicity and no policy agenda. The definition is theological from top to bottom. An evangelical, in this older sense, is someone who believes and spreads the good news about Jesus. Bacote is blunt about how far popular usage has drifted: “If you ask people today what evangelical means, they’re probably not leading with those four things.”
With that definition in hand, the reader’s question becomes a different question. It is no longer whether you belong to a political movement. It is whether you believe the Bible, have turned to Christ, trust his work on the cross, and want others to know him. Any believer of any background can answer that.
The people who held it before the label
If the word names a set of convictions, then the people who held those convictions belong to its story, whether or not they wore the label.
Bacote reaches back as far as Phillis Wheatley, the African American poet and Christian. She probably would not have called herself evangelical. But she believed this evangel, and her faith fits the description. The claim concerns substance, not vocabulary.
The same holds for a whole tradition. Measured by those four markers, the history of the Black church is largely an evangelical history, because those markers are, in Bacote’s words, “essentially what black Christians have believed.” How closely Black congregations tied themselves to the institutions that used the name varied. The convictions did not. He states it simply: “black church has always been about being good news and particularly good news where it’s important to proclaim this faith.”
For Black Christians, practicing that faith was also inescapable, a matter of existential survival and often physical survival. Some believers lean toward the vertical side of faith, their standing with God. Others lean toward the horizontal side, how people live together. Even Black believers who stress the vertical will eventually speak to the horizontal, because “you don’t have the luxury” of ignoring it.
This corrects a common assumption. Many people picture Black Christians as late arrivals who borrowed a white movement’s faith and then its name. The record runs the other way. The convictions that define the word were held deeply in Black churches, under conditions that tested whether belief could survive real life.
Where the experiences parted
If Black and white evangelicals shared the same core beliefs, why does the word feel so different to many Black Christians? The doctrine did not differ. The emphasis did.
Part of the white institutional movement formed for a defensive purpose. An interdenominational coalition, drawn mostly from white denominations, rose in reaction to the mainline churches, where people were questioning the authority of the Bible and core claims about Jesus. That defense was needed. But it set the movement’s center of gravity. In Bacote’s words, “a lot of the history of white evangelicalism has been about getting the information right.”
The obvious reply is that white evangelicals cared about missions and personal piety. Bacote grants that. His claim is about weight. When being a gospel person means first holding correct beliefs, right living tends to trail behind as an assumption, like a caboose. How those beliefs shape a life, especially on race, gets less attention than it should.
That is where many Black evangelicals hit a wall. They joined parachurch groups or predominantly white churches and loved what they were learning about the Bible. They agreed on doctrine. Then they raised questions about race and met apathy, or were called divisive, which Bacote says still happens. The result is a crisis of belonging: the beliefs are shared, but “it’s like the majority gets to say, which issues are the ones that matter.” A person can belong fully by conviction and still feel like a guest in practice.
Tom Skinner shows the pattern clearly. A former gang leader converted to Christ, he built a preaching ministry large enough that Bacote compares him to a Black Billy Graham. At the Urbana missions conference in 1970 he gave an address called The Liberator Has Come, preaching a gospel that reached the whole of life, including the realities of slavery and racism in America. The response, mostly from white students, was explosive. Skinner also had a radio program on Moody. When his broadcasts began addressing urban crises and justice, Bacote says, Moody Bible Institute sent a letter canceling the program because it had become too political.
Stay inside certain limits and you are welcomed and platformed. Apply the gospel to the whole of life on certain subjects and the welcome can turn to suspicion. Skinner was not pushed aside for rejecting evangelical belief. He was pushed aside while preaching it.
How a gospel word became a voting bloc
Only now, with the definition and the history in place, does the political meaning make sense. It is the third layer.
Bacote offers his account with some caution, and readers should keep it. Observers began treating evangelicals as a voting bloc, which they arguably were by the late 1970s and early 1980s. That framing intensified roughly twenty years ago, during the second Bush administration, when many evangelicals worked in the White House and the media began asking who these religious people tied to politics were. The question moved from what evangelicals believe to how they vote.
Surveys then widened the category. Someone who answers “evangelical” in a poll may not know the Bible well, may rarely attend church, may not be especially moral. “But they kind of like Jesus, they kind of like the United States,” Bacote says, and their deepest commitment is usually to some version of Republican politics. By around 2016 the term had reached a fever pitch, heard as “a political or sociocultural identity rather than a theological identity.”
The easy mistake is to treat the most common meaning as the true one, and the theological meaning as a polite story told afterward. The order of events rules that out. A poll can measure how people who claim a word vote. It cannot tell you what the word was coined to describe.
The stakes are larger than accuracy. When a word that means good news becomes shorthand for a voting pattern, the gospel starts to look like a party platform, and the kingdom of God gets confused with one nation’s politics. Separating the two protects the message, not just the dictionary.
If the word is damaged, why keep it?
This is the strongest objection. If most people now hear politics when you say evangelical, insisting on the older meaning can look stubborn. Communication depends on what listeners hear, not on what a word meant decades ago.
Bacote takes that seriously. He compares it to a recurring pattern with the word Christian. Every so often, believers uneasy with its connotations start calling themselves Jesus followers or friends of Jesus. They have not dropped their commitments to the Bible, to Jesus or to sharing their faith. They want distance from what the label suggests. He asks openly whether evangelical should go the same way.
The comparison helps, and it also shows its limit. Swapping labels can lower a barrier in one conversation. It cannot change history, and it can quietly hand the older meaning to whoever uses the word loudest.
Bacote’s answer comes through John Perkins, the Mississippi leader known for racial reconciliation and community development and the author of Let Justice Roll Down. At Wheaton in 2018, at the height of the controversy, Perkins was asked whether Christians should still use the word. Bacote recalls it this way: “He says, of course we should. And his reason was because of the root word.” Perkins would not give up a word whose most important part is the gospel.
The weight of that answer comes from who gave it. Perkins had been beaten so badly that he carried a steel plate in his head. After his conversion he faced his anger and chose to love his enemies instead. In Bacote’s words, “if anybody had a good rationale to say, you know what, I’ve had it with that label,” it was Perkins. A man with every reason to walk away from the word kept it.
This does not oblige every believer to use the label in every setting. Some Christians drop it for good reasons, and Bacote does not condemn them. The claim is narrower. Losing control of a word’s popular meaning is not the same as losing the right to it. A Black Christian who believes the gospel does not need permission to stand in a tradition Black believers helped carry.
Nor should frustration become the whole story. Each generation of Black evangelicals faces a moment of deciding whether to stay or go, and the experience is not new: “It’s a cycle. It’s wash, rinse and repeat.” Some stay and keep pressing for change. Others move to other settings. Bacote’s concern is that they stay in the work, and he points to Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” Disappointment with an institution does not cancel that calling. As he puts it, “there’s still work for us to do. And you can do that work, and you can still be a person who’s hopeful, even as you describe your great disappointment.”
That is where the word finally points. Paul wrote, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16). A gospel offered to everyone who believes cannot belong to one race, and neither can a word built on it. Keep the label or set it aside; the thing it was made to name has been yours all along.