I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion — for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions."

This observation from nineteenth-century French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville mimics the convictions held by most of the Americans tasked with shaping national and state governments in the newly established United States of 1776. After all, when European settlers first came to America in the seventeenth century, many were seeking a new home where they would be able to worship God as they saw fit.

Now, it'd be difficult to drive through any town in America without passing at least one church marquee boasting its congregation as the first — First Baptist, First Presbyterian, First . . . Church. But the following churches are the first of the first. Below is a list of the oldest still-worshipping congregations in each of the original 13 colonies, all of which have been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Virginia

Name:St. John's Episcopal Church
Date founded: 1610
Location: Hampton (Map it)
Meeting time: Sundays at 9:30 a.m.
Denomination: Episcopal
Fun fact: Not only is St. John's the oldest English-speaking parish in America still in existence, but it is also home to the oldest communion silver still used by an American church. The chalice and patens were made in London in 1618.

In his post in Christianity Today this week, Everything Is Terrible: How Bad Stats Fuel Disillusionment, Ed points out that bad statistics are making things out to be much worse than they are, especially regarding young Christian Evangelicals and sex. He also points out that media are all too quick to use these bad statistics to denigrate the church.

The reason why I mention all this, is that one of the sources that he mentions as being particularly bad, was a source that I had used in a post a few years ago at Internet Monk entitled Increasing Marriage Age and Its Implications.

How do youth in the church look compared to society at large? Well there is some good news, but it is not overly good. For example, according to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), when we look at youth in society between the ages of 18 and 23 who are in a relationship but not married, 93% are sexually active. Among conservative protestant youth, that number is 80%. Look out over your congregations Pastor, according to the numbers, on average 80% of your college and career group who are currently dating are sexually active. The number is lower that society at large but not by much.

I used the quote above because the conclusion I drew was faulty. As Ed points out:

But Wait! There is a problem here—it turns out that the question asked if they considered themselves as a "born-again Christian, evangelical, or fundamentalist," not if they actually were practicing.

The mistake and assumption that I made was the the same mistake pointed out in an email by Ted Olsen to Ed Stetzer:

[The] assumption is that 80 percent of evangelicals being 'sexually active' means that 80 percent of committed, Bible-believing, church-going evangelicals are 'sexually active.' That's the mistake.

At the Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim recently reviewed Steven Miller's excellent book The Age of Evangelicalism, which I also reviewed at The Gospel Coalition. In my review, I suggested that evangelicals' necessary engagement in politics has defined evangelicals by their politics and politicians, such as George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.

Swaim helpfully raises the problem of the use of the term "evangelical" in the media:

For the past 20 or 30 years, ["evangelical"] has designated nearly any Christian believer, Protestant or Catholic, who feels strongly about his or her faith. Which is to say that it's not a very helpful word. Indeed, many evangelicals, or rather people who might otherwise be known as evangelicals, have long since disavowed the term. Steven Miller in "The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years" doesn't work very hard to define it; he says only (in a parenthetical aside) that evangelicalism is "the label commonly given to the public expression of born-again Christianity." That definition is at once too narrow and too broad. It's too narrow because it deals only with "public expression"—that is, politics—as if evangelicalism were primarily a political creed. And it's too broad in that it conflates people who want nothing to do with one another. What, other than perhaps a rough similarity in voting patterns, do followers of the mega-church Texas pastor Joel Osteen have to do with members of the primarily northeastern Orthodox Presbyterian Church? Not much.

Many readers will know historian David Bebbington's standard definition of evangelicals as Protestant Christians marked by biblicism, crucicentrism (the centrality of Christ's work on the cross), activism, and conversionism. I have argued – and continue to argue in my forthcoming biography of George Whitefield – that for eighteenth-century evangelicals, an emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit was also a defining mark, one that set them apart from their forebears more than biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism.

I agree with Swaim that the term evangelical, as used in the media, obscures fundamental differences between those lumped together as people who "feel strongly about their faith." There are at least four types of Christians who often get cast as evangelicals who really are not evangelicals, if that term has any meaning.