Evangelical is a theological word before it is a political one. It comes from the Greek word for “good news,” and in the historic sense Dr. Marvin McMickle lays out, it describes a person who holds five convictions: humanity is fallen, redemption comes through faith in Jesus Christ, Scripture is the authority for those claims, the gospel is meant for the whole world, and the state must not impose religion. The counterfeit keeps the label and drops that content. Its clearest sign, in McMickle’s account, is a faith that reaches for the power of law to win what it cannot win by witness.
Most people meet the word on the news before they meet it in church. There it usually names a voting bloc sorted by race and party. In church history it names a set of beliefs about sin, salvation and Scripture. Confusion follows when a reader assumes the news meaning came first.
McMickle, who served as president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and teaches African American religious studies, learned the word in the opposite order. Nobody called his congregation evangelical when he was growing up. He first encountered the term in church history classes as a college and seminary student. In his words, “I learned the meaning of the word before it became politicized.” Lisa Fields describes a similar experience: she held evangelical convictions for as long as she had been a Christian but did not hear the word itself until college.
Where does the word come from?
The Greek noun is euangelion, “good news.” The King James Version usually renders it “gospel.” McMickle explains the English term as an extension of that word: it “simply is the way in which the good news of Jesus Christ is shared and spread.”
He points to the opening of Mark. In Mark 1:15, Jesus begins his ministry “saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” The idea behind “gospel” there is the same one the word evangelical carries. As McMickle puts it, “The word evangelical is in the New Testament.”
A word’s origin does not settle everything it later means, because words gather history. So McMickle moves from the Greek to a specific period, the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, and to figures he names in that movement, such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. The etymology tells you what the word is about. The history tells you what the people who carried it actually believed.
The five marks
McMickle summarizes the historic meaning in five convictions. Each one builds on the one before it.
- Fallen humanity. An evangelical has confessed faith in Christ and sought forgiveness for sin, which assumes that human nature is fallen and needs redemption.
- Redemption through Christ. That fallen condition is not the last word. Redemption is possible through faith in Jesus Christ.
- The authority of Scripture. The first two claims are drawn from the Bible, which is the authority for what the church teaches.
- Global evangelization. The gospel is meant for the whole world. McMickle grounds this in Jesus’ command, recorded in Mark 16:15: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”
- Separation of church and state. The government does not impose religion on anyone and does not punish anyone for declining it.
The order matters. The first three describe the message: the problem, the remedy and the source of both. These are the same essentials Jude 3 teaches, that salvation is by grace through faith in Christ and that Scripture is the authoritative Word of God. The fourth mark describes the mission: the message goes everywhere. The fifth describes the method: it goes by persuasion. McMickle adds a detail about the fourth mark that prepares for the fifth. Whether people say yes or no to the gospel, he says, is up to them. The church’s task is to preach.
Why the fifth mark is the test
Readers usually expect the first four marks. The fifth surprises them, and it is the one that turns the definition into a test.
McMickle connects it to how evangelicals understood conversion. Lisa Fields summarizes the idea this way: in the Great Awakening, conversion was seen as a supernatural act, something legal force could never produce. If God changes the heart, then a law cannot do the changing. McMickle draws the consequence plainly: you cannot make somebody believe, and you are not at liberty to punish, through the government, those who do not believe what you believe.
He also places the conviction in American history. He describes the founding era as a time when individual states had established churches, and when people outside those churches could be barred from public office or property. As he tells it, the First Amendment was meant to bring people out from under a government that imposed religion. Those historical details are McMickle’s account and are worth checking against a history of the period, but his logical point stands on its own. A movement that depends on free response to the gospel has every reason to keep the state from compelling faith.
That is why the fifth mark exposes the counterfeit. A person can recite the first four and still violate the fifth by asking the government to do the work preaching was supposed to do.
What makes evangelicalism counterfeit?
In McMickle’s telling, the word got “hijacked” in the middle of the twentieth century, when groups that felt marginalized by mainline denominations joined forces with political organizations to advance their religious aims through government. The problem, as he frames it, is what happens when an argument cannot be won by persuasion: “you try to create partnerships with political entities that can accomplish by law, by fine, by imprisonment, by loss of license.”
He sets that against the pattern of Jesus, who never told his followers to imprison or burn those who did not believe. And he draws the line in one sentence: “If you are trying to use the government to impose on society what you cannot win by witnessing,” then whatever else you may be, you are not evangelical in the historic sense.
He offers a second test that anyone can apply: listen for the content. He describes hearing a politician address a large Christian gathering and noticing what was missing: “the word grace never crossed his lips.” Neither did forgiveness or the universal reality of sin. A speech can be addressed to evangelicals and use their name while containing none of their message. When the first three marks are absent, the label is doing the work the gospel used to do.
McMickle also points out a narrowing. When a faith’s public values shrink to two or three issues, he asks what remains if those issues were resolved tomorrow. Poverty, homelessness, prison overcrowding and failing schools would still be there. His conclusion applies to any party: “you can’t take an ungodly approach to a godly solution.”
Doesn’t that mean Christians should stay out of law?
This is the most predictable misunderstanding. Every law reflects some moral judgment. If Christians could never support a law their convictions shape, they could not oppose injustice through public means either. McMickle himself does not argue for silence. He criticizes those who want churches alone to handle poverty while seeking legislation on other matters, which shows he expects Christians to care about what laws do.
The line his fifth mark draws is narrower. It concerns using the state to impose religion: compelling belief, funding a church people do not belong to, or punishing people for not believing. A Christian citizen arguing for a law that protects a neighbor is doing something else.
Here McMickle’s own applications are contested. He treats abortion as a matter the government should leave to the woman, while Jude 3 teaches that God forms both the woman and the child in the womb and that the unborn bear his image, and many faithful Christians see protecting the unborn as protecting a neighbor. The real disagreement is which questions fall under the fifth mark. The core test survives it: a faith that depends on the machinery of power to make converts, or lends its name to an agenda empty of grace and forgiveness, has stopped describing the gospel.
Who already holds the five marks?
McMickle proposes a simple exercise. Give the average Black Christian the five marks one at a time, without the label, and ask about each. His prediction: “If you gave the average person that list, they would say, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.” Lisa Fields makes the same observation: whether Pentecostal, AME or Baptist, Black churches across denominational lines mostly affirm these convictions, even though many have never identified with the word. The content of the label is already theirs.
That is why McMickle, who does not fault clergy who stop using the word, makes a different choice: “I’m gonna hang around and fight for it though.” Lisa Fields admits she had wanted to drop the term and names the problem with that strategy: “if your decision to jettison every word that’s hijacked, then you end up at some point with no words left.” McMickle argues that “Being evangelical is part of the theological vocabulary of the last 2000 years,” and surrendering it hands someone else the right to define the gospel in public. Whether a reader keeps the label or not, the five marks are what make a counterfeit recognizable.
What the real thing produces
McMickle’s last point moves from definition to life. Salvation, he insists, sends people out to serve: “You are saved so that you can put Matthew 25, 31 to 44 into practice.” That passage includes Jesus saying, in Matthew 25:35, “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” He pairs it with Luke 4:18, where Jesus reads in the synagogue at Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”
Read in context, the Matthew passage describes how the Son of Man will judge, and Jesus identifies himself with the needy. It does not teach that care for the poor earns salvation. It shows what genuine faith looks like, which matches Jude 3’s teaching that grace is the root and obedience the fruit.
Here the definition and the test meet. The real evangelical message begins with grace for sinners and ends with saved people feeding the hungry, taking in the stranger and visiting the prisoner. The counterfeit can keep the name and win a vote. It cannot produce that life.