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Something interesting has happened with the word 'evangelical' over the last several years. When I was growing up, my perception of 'evangelical' was that it was a big tent term that allowed people across various denominations to join together over some key doctrines.
It was a way to embrace others within Christianity and reject secondary and tertiary matters as primary. But it was more than doctrinal alignment. It was a specific view of the world that acknowledged glimpses of truth even amidst falsehood and found beauty in broken places.
It was also a term rejected by fundamentalists, who believed in smaller tents. I was Southern Baptist, but my mom read books like A Wrinkle In Time to my brother and me growing up. We thought about wider culture rather than immediately dismiss it. I praise God for that now.
Often when I hear people use the term perjoratively these days, they come from religious backgrounds far different than mine. They come from churches who would have probably rejected the label, and would reject much of how my family operated even as Southern Baptists.
When I read Carl F.H. Henry's Uneasy Conscience several years ago, it made sense of so much of my world and the tensions that I felt/feel even within my own denomination. I would say there are Southern Baptists who are evangelicals and SB's who are not evangelicals.
Even on issues such as racial justice, where evangelicals often (and often rightly) get a bad name, my understanding of racial justice and the voices I listen to are *because* of the evangelical sensibilities that were formed in me at a young age. The same with cosmic redemption.
This isn't any sort of defense of all the baggage that the term carries today, and I'm no historian, but it is interesting to observe how differently the label seems to be treated and what it has come to mean today.
