American Evangelical Christianity

As I’m processing my experience and posting pieces here, I feel it is important to explain exactly what I mean when I say American Evangelical Christianity. It is a very specific amalgamation of ideas and people that create a specific way of viewing the world. Religion is diverse in how it gets implemented across time, location, and people groups and this religion is no different. So I’m not saying that all religion is harmful and I’m not saying that Christianity in and of itself is harmful. What I’m trying to convey through my experiences is that this specific implementation of it is.

I’m probably not going to do the best job at explaining or even capturing every facet, but I’ll do my best and hopefully you can get a better understanding for the specific parameters of what I mean when I say American Evangelical Christianity. I’ll be sure to link this post in all of my pieces when I mention it for easy reference.

I think I’ll reverse engineer it and build up the layers.

Christianity

First, we have Christianity. It is the simplest part of this. Jesus is God (not just a prophet representing God) and came to earth to show his people how to live better and care for each other. Don’t value wealth over people, women and children are valuable, treat people better than yourself, don’t judge people so hastily, work on yourself, make the world a better place, etc. etc. etc. Not so bad huh? These are generally good principles to live by and it’s probably safe to say that most religions are based on these kinds of ideas. There’s all sorts of rules and specifications and implementations that stem from this but that is the core.

Evangelical

Second, we have Evangelical. This is where it starts to get more specific in terms of those rules and implementations on top of the Christianity classifier. Think Billy Graham, John Piper, Francis Chan, David Platt, etc. etc. (notice these are all men.). If you’re really curious about their more individual views, feel free to go look them up. Just know that they’re very crucial people in this movement and a lot of people look up to them and take their advice. At this point, they are synonymous with messengers from God as the community inside this bubble never really questions the ideas they preach or publish books about. I used to take everything John Piper said as gospel and admired him so much.

Evangelical Christianity has a huge emphasis on spreading the gospel no matter the cost. And by gospel, it means this specific thing:

In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth and placed Adam and Eve in a beautiful garden called Eden to take care of it. One day, Satan in the form a snake came to Eve and tricked her into committing the first sin against God by eating a piece of fruit from a tree that God said not to eat from. She then got Adam to participate in this sin as well and they invoked the wrath of God. He casts them out of the garden because he can’t be in the presence of sin and they are officially estranged from him. However, he promises one day they will be reconciled again and eventually he sends that recompense for their sins through his son Jesus Christ (who is also God). Jesus teaches people how to live while he’s on earth, but his real purpose is to be a sacrifice to God and reconnect Adam and Eve’s descendants to him. This is God’s gift to humans. They will never be able to repay him and they will no longer have to feel his wrath or be sent to hell because of it. Because those descendants no longer live in the same place, the Holy Spirit (who is also God) is sent into believers’ hearts and acts as a go between until they die and go to heaven or Jesus comes back a second time to end the world. It is now believers’ duty and privilege to spread this good news to humanity and bring more people to accept Jesus as their God before it’s too late. ¹²³

So it is this gospel that Evangelical Christians are talking about when they ask you if you’ve accepted Jesus into your heart. From what I’ve experienced, Christians in general keep to themselves and practice their beliefs respectfully. They’ll share if you ask but respect that not everyone wants to talk about it. Evangelical Christianity is much different. It makes it everyone else’s problem and people in this specifier are encouraged to make other people uncomfortable by asking really pointed questions about what they believe and if they’ve ever considered Jesus as the answer to their problems. They are encouraged to be bold and share their testimony. They are asked on Sundays from the pulpit, ‘what if your neighbor dies today and goes to hell because you didn’t share the gospel?’. They are encouraged to see every interaction with an unbelieving person as an opportunity for God to work through them to save another soul from hell.

They also consider any push back from their approach as a compliment on how faithful they are to spreading the gospel. There’s an acceptance that people will hate you because you’re spreading the truth that the world needs and that God will reward you for it. There’s an acceptance that if people don’t want to hear what you have to say it is because they belong to Satan instead. It creates this weird perceived persecution complex that approves their behavior instead of signaling to them that they might be being rude or even culturally inappropriate.

The perspective is that this gospel they have is the one true way to be saved and go to heaven. A consequence of this belief is that every other belief is wrong no matter the culture or the significance of that culture’s religion. All other cultures are lost and are invalid. This feeds directly into missions work that are in the form of short- and long-term trips and an incredible amount of money from churches goes towards this.

There’s an initiative called the 10/40 window that has to do with the amount of unreached people groups in a specific section of the globe. It is extremely important to note that the section that is highlighted for this initiative is North Africa, the Middle East, and most of Asia…Areas that have rich cultural roots and communities in their own religions. It is a whole rabbit hole that I won’t be able to dive as deeply into in this post. However, there’s a belief that Jesus will only come back once that map gap begins to close and enough of those unreached people groups come to faith.

Image from The Joshua Project which is a key driver for this kind of mission’s work

This kind of perfectly ties into the last layer…

American

Third, the American classifier and I’ll even go a step further and say White American. While Evangelical Christians are global, White American Evangelical Christians are even more specific in their beliefs. The main idea here is that America is now God’s chosen land and people. Despite Christianity being an offshoot of the Jewish tradition, this particular subset of Christians believe that American’s are God’s true modern people and that God has chosen this land to be his kingdom on earth. American Evangelical Christians are convinced that they are the best and that the rest of the world is lost. They are the true Americans and if you don’t like it here, move back to your family’s original country (especially if your skin is any color but white).

They believe that America should fully be a Christian Nation from the top down. All of White Supremacy, the justification for the horrible deeds done to the Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, and many other things are wrapped up in this idea that God has chosen them and entrusted them with ultimate truth. So it’s reasonable to them that prayer and the 10 commandments be put back in schools, gay marriage revoked, women’s reproductive rights taken away, etc. etc. etc. They basically want the Bible to be signed into law and have no separation of church and state. Why should there be? The Bible is ultimate truth for everyone and anyone who says otherwise is under Satan’s influence.

Additional Classifiers

So that’s the overall umbrella of what I mean when I say American Evangelical Christianity. There’s a few more descriptors that apply to my experience as well that I’ll share below but a lot of them stem from one or all of those main three.

Calvinist

This set of ideas comes from a man named John Calvin. He was a pastor during the Protestant Reformation and a lot of his ideas are just accepted in the Evangelical Christian tradition. The famous acronym associated with him is T.U.L.I.P and it contributed to a lot of the internalized beliefs that I held about myself.

• Total Depravity, the idea that humans naturally want to reject God and are enslaved to sin. There is nothing you can do to save yourself

• Unconditional Election, the idea that God has predestined how many people he will save across the whole timeline of the existence of the earth

• Limited Atonement, the idea that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is only for those who are part of the elect. There are other ideas about Jesus’ death being a universal covering for all people regardless of if they believe specifically or not so it’s important to this theology that God doesn’t save everyone

• Irresistible Grace, the idea that if you’re part of the elect, becoming a believer is irresistible for you. God will track you down until you repent and believe.

• Perserverance of the Saints, the idea that once God has determined that you’re going to be saved you always will be. He will work to keep your faith alive until you die.⁴

If you actually go to The Gospel Coalition’s course in the footnotes, you’ll see that they’ve rearranged it to start with Irresistible Grace. Which is just really funny to me. It’s as if they know that this theology can be harmful to people and they’re trying to soften the blow of that very real and very believed tenant of Total Depravity.

You will totally see these themes in my writing from my journals and how I struggle to heal from it.

Reformed Southern Baptist/Presbyterian

I’m lumping these in together. My mom’s family is traditionally Presbyterian and my young childhood church was classified as such but a Reformed Southern Baptist Church is the church I spent my teenage/college years at. At this point it’s hard for me to figure out how to separate out a lot of the ideas except that Presbyterian’s do baby Christendom and Southern Baptists do adult baptism in addition. I know there’s more distinctions than that, but my upbringing was a mix of both.

The implications of these classifiers might be what you would expect. Here are some of the things that were just part of my understanding of what being a good Christian meant:

• little to no alcohol,

• tattoos, died hair other than natural, and piercings other than ears seen as sinful

• modest clothes (I covered up a lot and actually really admired the Amish way of dressing)

• media consumption was monitored

• homeschooling was God-tier education with private Christian school as an okay option if it was necessary

• lots and lots of line dances

You get the picture.

Parenting

My parenting experience was brought to you by Dr. Fucking James Dobson. This man has singlehandedly destroyed a generation in my opinion. I don’t have enough strong language to say how much damage his books Dare to Discipline and The Strongwilled Child did for me and countless other kids.

Now, I will separate some things. My parents did they best they could according to their morals, time, energy, and resources AND it affected me negatively by producing long lasting damage that I have spent a lot of time recovering from. I have come to accept that those two realities can exist at the same time.

The basic premise of his parenting is that children’s sin nature gets the best of them and results in deliberate acts of defiance against a parent’s God-given authority. It’s the parent’s duty to beat that out of them…and I will emphasize this…literally. I will fight anyone who says that spanking a child as a form of parental punishment is healthy.

I really suggest following along with STRONGWILLED on this topic because they’ve done a lot of great research mixed with their own experiences on how this kind of parenting has shaped the people impacted by it. I’ve got several pieces in my drafts that I’m working on about this topic from my own experience but I can’t say enough how much that particular Substack space has helped me process it.

Purity Culture

There’s a lot of resources out there for this topic so I don’t feel like I need to spend a lot of time fleshing it out but it’s definitely a classifier that affected me. Basically,

• women are valued for being virgins,

• our highest good in life is being a wife and mom,

• sex outside of marriage is sinful no matter what,

• men are seen as pigs who can’t help themselves and its women’s fault if they stumble. This is problematic for both men and women. Young boys end up seeing themselves in a really negative light and aren’t taught healthy sexuality. Young girls end up being ashamed that they have bodies and in the worst cases feel responsibility for their own rapes

• strict dress codes so you’re not seen as a slut

• women don’t have sex drives

• women owe their husbands as much sex as he wants because it’s his prize for waiting until marriage

• Female anatomy education doesn’t exist in a lot of cases or is piecemeal and women’s pleasure isn’t considered.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives you a broader picture of what I mean when I say American Evangelical Christianity and some of the other classifiers that influenced my experience growing up in this religious environment. I’ll be trying to write in such a way that explains some of these things in all of my posts but obviously there’s a lot of subtext baked into me. If you’ve ever got a question or want a clarification just ask!

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1. Foundation Documents of The Gospel Coalition

2. The Gospel in 6 Minutes | Desiring God

3. CrazyLove | Francis Chan | The Simple Gospel (crazylove.org/videos/y3Bn7ihYyvw/featured)

4. TGC Course | TULIP: The Five Points of Calvinism (thegospelcoalition.org)