There are about 78 million evangelicals in America, according to Pew Research Center’s massive new survey of the religious landscape released on Wednesday. Most are white, Republican, and say religion is very important to them.
But not all.
The study—considered the most comprehensive look at religion in the United States, with more than 36,000 people filling out a 116-question survey in all 50 states—shows significant evangelical variety. Evangelicals are diverse: racially, politically, economically, and even in terms of religious practice.
Twenty-eight percent aren’t white, the Pew study shows. Twenty-four percent are Democrats or lean Democratic. On some issues, including government assistance for people in need and environmental regulation, an even larger percentage of evangelicals support the more liberal position.
Seven percent say religion is not important to them. Only half of American evangelicals attend church on a weekly basis, according to the Pew survey. And nearly a quarter say they never or almost never attend religious services. That’s more than 17 million evangelicals who don’t go to church.
Are they really evangelicals?
The term has long provoked arguments among social scientists, historians, and laypeople. It first appeared in English as an adjective that meant “of the gospel.” In Reformation England, for example, people talked about evangelical books of the Bible—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and nonevangelical books of the Bible, just as there are prophetic and nonprophetic books. British Protestants also sang evangelical hymns, but they didn’t think all their hymns were evangelical. Some were about the gospel; others were about baptism, God’s glory, or thanksgiving.
The first group of people to claim evangelical as a noun was the Evangelical Voluntary Church Association in England in the 1830s. It fought for the separation of church and state. A subsequent group, the Evangelical Alliance, organized in the following decade to fight for the rights of free churches—groups called “nonconformist,” “dissenting,” and then “evangelical.”
In the US, 100 years later, the evangelist Billy Graham started using the word as a term for people who supported his ministry. Evangelical was so broad it could include Baptists and Presbyterians but also Episcopalians and Wesleyans, and Dutch Reformed and Stone-Campbell groups, not to mention Lutherans, Pentecostals, Anabaptists, and Black churches.
Everyone kind of knew what it meant—something to do with the gospel—and no one had too strong of an association with the word.
Carl F. H. Henry, the first editor in chief of Christianity Today, told historian George Marsden that he and Graham and other movement leaders, such as L. Nelson Bell and Harold J. Ockenga, liked the word evangelical because it was really familiar but also up for grabs. They used it when they founded the National Association of Evangelicals, Conferences for the Advancement of Evangelical Scholarship, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Fuller Seminary, and Christianity Today, building a movement with the name.
Pollsters started asking about evangelicalism in the 1970s when presidential candidate Jimmy Carter said he was “born again” and political observers wondered if evangelicalism might be a “built-in power base” for the Democrats. Gallup did a survey and found that about 50 million Americans could be considered evangelical. The survey was written up in Newsweek, which put the words “Born Again!” on the cover, and Time, which declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical.”
According to sociologist Robert Wuthnow, however, many Americans only knew of the term because of polling, and many who said, “Yes, I am an evangelical,” actually only thought of themselves that way when it was asked in an election. Evangelical, for a lot of Americans, was associated more with politics than anything else.
Some historians, such as Matthew Avery Sutton, have argued evangelical really is just political. Others, notably David Bebbington and Thomas Kidd, have argued for a strictly theological definition.
Pew takes a different approach, which its researchers believe captures the more complicated reality of religion in America.
First, they sort Protestant denominations into three groups: evangelical, mainline, and Black, based on historical associations. So people who tell Pew they are Southern Baptist are counted as evangelical, people who say “American Baptists” are counted as mainline, and people who say “National Baptist” are counted as Black church.
But a large number of people don’t identify with particular denominations. Seven percent of Americans say they’re nondenominational. And some of the more than 36,000 who answered the questions on the recent survey told Pew they were “just Baptist,” “just Methodist,” or “just Christian.” Others gave answers including home church, independent Anglican, Calvinist, exvangelical, and Sabbath keeper. A number of Americans just gave researchers the names and locations of their specific congregations.
Pew asked those people if they considered themselves “born-again or evangelical Christians” and then sorted them based on their self-identification.
Not all scholars, not all evangelicals, and definitely not all evangelical scholars are happy with this. But Pew’s method produces an interesting picture with a lot of robust detail. Nineteen percent of evangelicals, for example, are first- or second-generation immigrants. And 55 percent think the growing population of immigrants in America over the last half century has made the country worse.
Most evangelicals identify themselves as conservatives and support conservative positions, like limitations on immigration. Sixty-five percent say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. Sixty-one percent say homosexuality should be socially discouraged. Forty-two percent would like to see cuts to government welfare programs.
But that’s not the whole story. Thirty percent of evangelicals identify as moderates. A few of the moderates—about 7 percent—lean Republican, the study shows. But most do not. About 7 percent remain independent and roughly 18 million evangelicals say they support Democrats. Thirty-one percent would like to see the government increase assistance for poor people, and about 44 percent evangelicals—more 34 million people—support stricter environmental regulations.
The Pew study shows notable regional variation among these Christians. More than half of evangelicals live in the South. Less than 10 percent are in the Northeast. Twenty-one percent live between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, and another 19 percent live between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
Evangelicals are getting more educated, the study shows. About 60 percent have attended college. Postgraduate degrees have increased by about 5 points over the past decade, so now there are more than 9 million evangelicals with a master’s degree or higher.
Evangelicals skew a bit older than the general population. The average American is 38 or 39. Pew’s survey shows 55 percent of evangelicals are over 50, while millennials between 30 and 49 account for just under a third, and 14 percent are between the ages of 18 and 29.
Pew also found a variety of religious beliefs and practices that might seem surprising. Fifteen percent of evangelicals don’t consider themselves religious, and nine percent say they’re not spiritual.
Most of those people still pray, however, and the majority say the Bible is important to them. Seventy-two percent of evangelicals pray daily, and another 21 percent weekly or monthly. Ninety-five percent say Scripture is relevant to them personally—but only about half read the Bible every week.
More than a quarter of evangelicals told Pew they seldom or never read the Bible.
Seventy-five percent of evangelicals feel a sense of spiritual peace and well-being on a monthly basis. For many, however, that is not an experience they have with other Christians. Sixty percent of evangelicals attend church on a monthly basis, and 40 percent attend prayer meetings, Bible studies, Sunday school, or small groups once a month or more. That’s a lot of evangelicals not worshiping with other evangelicals.
According to Pew, however, evangelicals who never connect with other evangelicals are still evangelicals. In the comprehensive survey, 23 percent of the country gets counted as part of this religious movement. But Pew’s report also shows that evangelical can mean a lot of different things and look a lot of different ways.
