The difference between Protestants and Evangelicals?

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SINGLE MAIN difference – confession of salvation vs belonging to the church

Because of the influence and visibility of fundamentalists and Evangelicals in the US, it has become common to conflate the two. For those of us who are evangelical but not fundamentalist, it is most distressing to find people making assumptions which don’t apply about what we believe.

Just to confuse things further, in Germany and perhaps elsewhere in continental Europe, it is not uncommon for the term “Evangelical” to be applied specifically to the Lutheran church. One consequence is that some non-fundamentalist Evangelicals in Australia and elsewhere are actively seeking a term which describes us and is not confused with US style fundamentalism.

The first thing to say is that in the Anglophone sense, Evangelicalism is a subset of Protestantism and Fundamentalism is a subset of Evangelicalism.

One belief is that the Bible is inerrant. It was without error in all of its claims about the nature of the world and the nature of God. A second belief is that the only way to salvation is through belief in Jesus Christ. A third belief, and one that is most well known, is the idea that individuals must accept salvation for themselves. They must become converted. Sometimes that’s referred to as a born-again experience, sometimes a little different language. Then the fourth cardinal belief of evangelicals is the need to proselytize, or in their case, to spread the evangel, to evangelize.

• Evangelicals: The Evangelical movement began among Protestant Christians who wanted to get back to the basics. Three essential doctrines where 1) the authority of the Bible, 2) a personal salvation experience (being born again), and 3) the importance of evangelism.

Fundamentalism is actually two movements which coalesced in the immediate post World War I era.

The first part was a reaction against German higher criticism as well as against the “social gospel” movement which had increasingly emphasized “social” at the expense of “gospel”. This is important, because the underlying, and often not clearly articulated, perspective of the social gospel was that the world was getting better, people were wealthier and happier, and that, if the world’s strugglers could be lifted to the conditions of the well-off, that would be the Kingdom of God, and people would automatically follow the ethics of Jesus until the end of the world.

Fundamentalism was not a denomination; rather it was an attempt to express the minimum working definition of a Christian, partly to combat what it saw as extremes, and partly to facilitate cooperation between Evangelical Christians. Fundamentalism was almost entirely an American movement.

Now different members of the evangelical community have slightly different takes on those four cardinal beliefs. But what distinguishes the evangelicals from other Protestants and other Christians is these four central beliefs that set them apart.

Mainline Protestants have a different perspective. They have a more modernist theology. So, for instance, they would read the Bible, not as the inerrant word of God, but as a historical document, which has God’s word in it and a lot of very important truths, but that needs to be interpreted in every age by individuals of that time and that place.

Mainline Protestants tend to also believe that Jesus is the way to salvation. But many mainline Protestants would believe that perhaps there are other ways to salvation as well. People in other religious traditions, even outside of Christianity, may have access to God’s grace and to salvation as well, on their own terms, and through their own means.

Mainline Protestants are much less concerned with personal conversion. Although they do talk about spiritual transformation, they’ll often discuss a spiritual journey from one’s youth to old age, leading on into eternity. So there is a sense of transformation, but there isn’t that emphasis on conversion — on that one moment or series of moments in which one’s life is dramatically changed.

Finally, mainline Protestants are somewhat less concerned with proselytizing than evangelicals. Certainly proselytizing is something they believe in. They believe in sharing their beliefs with others, but not for the purposes of conversion necessarily. The idea of spreading the word in the mainline tradition is much broader than simply preaching the good news. It also involves economic development. It involves personal assistance, charity, a whole number of other activities.

The Whig Party was a conservative^[13] political party that existed in the United States during the mid-19th century.^[13] Alongside the slightly larger Democratic Party, it was one of the two major parties in the United States between the late 1830s and the early 1850s as part of the Second Party System.^[14] Four presidents (William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore) were affiliated with the Whig Party for at least part of their terms. Other prominent members of the Whig Party include Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, William Seward, John J. Crittenden, and John Quincy Adams. The Whig base of support was centered among entrepreneurs, professionals, planters, social reformers, devout Protestants (particularly evangelicals), and the emerging urban middle class. It had much less backing from poor farmers and unskilled workers.

In terms of American politics, I don’t think it’s straightforward to predict where evangelicals will end up. Moreover, the media tend to use the classification fairly carelessly, as a synonym for ‘conservative Christian’ or ‘Republican churchgoer’. In fact, I think there is a great diversity of political beliefs among evangelicals (though the two-party system suppresses that diversity at the polls). Part of this is generational or age-based, but I also have a sense that some political points spring fairly naturally from the evangelical worldview.

For example, the evangelical environmental movement makes perfect sense within the context of the history above. It’s a matter of engaging with the world in a positive way, in order to take care of it (and it can be seen as oppositional, like in the Hitchen list above). Equally, many evangelicals care about social and economic injustice in a manner that doesn’t match the stereotype that evangelicals ipso facto have right-wing views. This is not to say that evangelicals are automatically left-wing or liberal either! Probably, most evangelicals would be considered socially conservative, and may even regard such issues as overriding priorities when choosing candidates. For what it’s worth, I don’t think that an evangelical’s ‘ideal’ US political party would greatly resemble either the Republicans or the Democrats, but they do seem to be the only games in town.

^{1. Encyclopedia of Christianity (Wm. Eerdmans, 2001) under “Evangelical Movement”
2. Evangelical truth: a personal plea for unity, integrity and faithfulness, John Stott (InterVarsity Press, 2005)
3. What it means to be an evangelical today, John M. Hitchen, Evangelical Quarterly 76(1):47-64, 2004.
4. Evangelicalism in modern Britain: a history from the 1730s to the 1980s, D. W. Bebbington (Unwin Hyman, 1989).
5. The Evangelical Anglican Identity Problem, J. L. Packer (Latimer House, 1978).}