An Evangelical Manifesto--Skeel
The response to “An Evangelical Manifesto”-- which was released a week ago, with the endorsement of many prominent evangelicals, and is designed to “address the confusions and corruptions that attend the term Evangelical in the United States” and to describe the proper role of evangelicals in public life– seems to be a collective yawn. There have been yawns in the media (see Alan Jacobs’ excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed) and everyone I have queried personally has responded with an electronic yawn. But is everyone yawning for the same reason? I don’t think they are.
Many of those who would not call themselves evangelicals are likely to read the manifesto, if they do read it, to try to understand just who evangelicals are. The most obvious ways to define evangelical would be to develop a single theological definition that includes most of this jelly-like group, to attempt to identify the major subgroups of evangelicals, or both. “An Evangelical Manifesto” seems to adopt the first approach, providing a list of seven beliefs that evangelicals hold. Seven is already a bit on the cumbersome side– the best known definition, which is discussed in the first footnote of this article, has four.