Evangelicals Quotes

A desire to rescue secular America from fallen grace has driven conservative evangelicals at least since the 1970s, when Jerry Falwell formed the Moral Majority as a vehicle for conservative Christians to muscle their way into national politics. ~ Nina Easton

Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent. ~ David F. Wells

Mike Pence, the most anti-science religious fundamentalist in Washington, is now in charge of America's biggest science project ever: finding a cure for the coronavirus. I think we all better start praying. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

I think what you'll find is overall, overwhelmingly, evangelicals would prefer me to Barack Obama. ~ Newt Gingrich

White Evangelicals neither obscure nor ignore their religious convictions when they declare their allegiance to the 45th president. In fact, their actions indicate a preeminent concern with upholding orthodoxy. In the case of President Trump, observers should focus on discerning the orthodoxy of an actor who is perceived as religiously legitimate primarily because he engages in actions in support of religiously defined group interests rather than as a result of statements of belief or piety of behavior. While fear, nostalgia, racial resentment, and white nationalism have all been analytical pieces of the Trump support puzzle scholars have been weaving together since November 2016, a critical aspect of Trump support is to assert, rather than deny, that he is indeed unexpectedly religiously orthodox in the conduct of his presidency ~ Gerardo Marti

Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy.
The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions. ~ Mark Sundeen

Today, the greatest challenge facing American evangelicals is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world. ~ C.J. Mahaney

In particular, the emerging call from our nation's evangelicals to protect God's creation is substantial. ~ Jim Clyburn

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task.

If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance.

For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.

Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you.

Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basi ~ William Lane Craig

This has led evangelicals to ethnocentrism, to asserting their historically contingent cultural values as "biblical truth." In the conservative direction, this has closed off productive dialogue between evangelicals and mainline Christians on gay marriage - because if the Bible has an obvious stance on the matter, as most evangelicals believe, the other side must be intentionally denying the truth. In the liberal direction, this has led green evangelicals to ignore the role contemporary experiences and theology have played in their reinterpretation of the Bible on environmental matters. ~ Jonathan Dudley

Perhaps what is really being proposed by the Evangelical fundamentalists is a return not to the 1950s family but to the family of biblical days. The Old Testament is clear that this was a strong patriarchal family. Men were permitted several wives and concubines. Children were legitimately conceived by these concubines outside of marriage ... Is this the Evangelical's idea of an ideal family? ~ Ira Reiss

The first question we needed to address in response to the popular "Take America Back for God" slogan concerned the precedent of Jesus, and in this light we must judge that the slogan can lead us into temptation. The second concerns the meaning of the slogan itself. I, for one, confess to being utterly mystified by the phrase. If we are to take America back for God, it must have once belonged to God, but it's not at all clear when this golden Christian age was.

Were these God-glorifying years before, during, or after Europeans "discovered" America and carried out the doctrine of "manifest destiny" - the belief that God (or, for some, nature) had destined white Christians to conquer the native inhabitants and steal their land? Were the God-glorifying years the ones in which whites massacred these natives by the millions, broke just about every covenant they ever made with them, and then forced survivors onto isolated reservations? Was the golden age before, during, or after white Christians loaded five to six million Africans on cargo ships to bring them to their newfound country, enslaving the three million or so who actually survived the brutal trip? Was it during the two centuries when Americans acquired remarkable wealth by the sweat and blood of their slaves? Was this the time when we were truly "one nation under God," the blessed time that so many evangelicals seem to want to take our nation back to?

Maybe someone would suggest that the golden age o ~ Gregory A. Boyd

The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept. ~ Francis Collins

Christ at the Checkpoint is primarily a public relations scheme to dissuade American evangelicals from pro-Israel views. ~ Mark Tooley

The only power God recognizes in His church is the power of His Spirit whereas the only power actually recognized today by the majority of evangelicals is the power of man. ~ A.W. Tozer

When I heard of the shady tactics of the Moonies, my initial indignation was modified by empathy. I remembered only too well all the innocuous-sounding "fronts" operated by Evangelicals in order to witness to sinners, e.g., coffee houses, concerts, philosophical forums, religious surveys. None of these was ever billed for what it was. The idea was to hook the unsuspecting sinner and win an opportunity to tell him the gospel. Similar Machiavellian tactics govern various interpersonal contacts. A campus leader or foreign student may find himself the object of an Evangelical's friendly attention, not realizing he has been singled out for "friendship evangelism" because of his potentially strategic position. ~ Robert M. Price

I think the church is often a culprit in the busyness, especially in the evangelical church. Again, it's part of being Americans. Part of being evangelicals too is that we're highly activist. We are always diving in, willing to solve problems, and again there's a lot good there. But we also need the theological balance that the Kingdom is not ours to bring or ours to create. ~ Kevin DeYoung

I owe my nurture to evangelicalism. The evangelical wins hands down in the history of the church when it comes to nurturing a biblically literate laity. When we think of evangelism, evangelicals are the most resourceful, the most intrepid, and the most creative. But evangelicals themselves would say that they have never come to grips with what the whole mystery of the church is. ~ Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke Of Norfolk

If the evangelicals vote, they determine the election. ~ Ted Haggard

The pain of losing Deborah still brings tears. And I cannot mask my profound disappointment that God did not answer yes to our prayers for healing. I think He's okay with that. One of the phrases we evangelicals like to throw around is that Christianity is 'not a religion; it's a relationship.' I believe that, which is why I know that when my faith was shattered and raged against Him, He still accepted me. And even though I have penciled a black mark in His column, I can be honest about it. That's what a relationship is all about. ~ Ron Hall

We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals? ~ Lord Byron

What we need is evangelicals and Catholics who discern the primary demand of our time: a celebration of our heavenly participation in the eternal Word of God. Only a heavenly minded Christian faith will do us any earthly good. ~ Hans Boersma

I, for one, am quite willing to join the 'forgive, forget and move on' crowd, but it does make me wonder if Evangelicals are going to sound believable when they say that they tend to vote Republican because of their religious commitments to the family. ~ Tony Campolo

Evangelicals usually fail to challenge the system not just out of concern for evangelism, but also because they support the American system and enjoy its fruits. They share the Protestant work ethic, support laissez-faire economics, and sometimes fail to evaluate whether the social system is consistent with their Christianity. ~ Christian Smith

I am now convinced that we evangelicals have often seriously misrepresented the beliefs and practices of the Mormon community.. Let me state it bluntly to the LDS folks here this evening: We have sinned against you. ~ Richard J. Mouw

The reason we fear to go out after dark is not that we may be set upon by bands of evangelicals and forced to read the New Testament, but that we may be set upon by gangs of feral young people who have been taught that nothing is superior to their own needs or feelings. ~ Philip Yancey

While contemporary non-Evangelicals have virtually reduced faith to 'courageous ignorance,' Evangelicals have hardly been faithful in defending God's objective communication of truth. ~ Ronald H. Nash

In spite of their gross theological error, charismatics demand acceptance within mainstream evangelicalism. And evangelicals have largely succumbed to those demands, responding with outstretched arms and a welcoming smile. In so doing, mainstream evangelicalism has unwittingly invited an enemy into the camp. The gates have been flung open to a Trojan horse of subjectivism, experientialism, ecumenical compromise, and heresy. Those who compromise in this way are playing with strange fire and placing themselves in grave danger. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

Evangelicals have to face it (like Roman Catholics of 16th century had to): Increasingly, our version of Good News is neither news nor good. ~ Samir Selmanovic

Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for. ~ Glen Duncan

I applaud the growing commitment of Evangelicals to the needs of the poor and oppressed in urban America. ~ Tony Campolo

To avoid the hard necessity of either obeying or rejecting the plain instructions of our Lord in the New Testament we take refuge in a liberal interpretation of them. We evangelicals also know how to avoid the sharp point of obedience by means of fine and intricate explanations. These are tailor-made for the flesh. They excuse disobedience, comfort carnality and make the words of Christ of none effect. And the essence of it all is that Christ simply could not have meant what He said. His teachings are accepted even theoretically only after they have been weakened by interpretation. ~ A.W. Tozer

Evangelicals too often fall short in their actual teachings about Judaism. ~ Elliott Abrams

Descartes argued "I think, therefore I am," and people after Freud translated that into the modern vernacular by saying, "I feel, therefore I am a self"; modern evangelicals of the relational type seem to have added their own quirk to it by saying that "I feel religiously, therefore I am a self." The search for the religious self then becomes a search for religious good feelings. But the problem with making good feelings the end for which one is searching is, as Henry Fairlie argues, that it is possible to feel good about oneself, even religiously, "in states of total vacuity, euphoria, intoxication, and self-indulgence, and it is even possible when we are doing wrong and know what we are doing." This kind of self-fascination is by no means an excrescence of an otherwise robust sector of religious life. It is at the very center of evangelicalism. ~ David F. Wells

I believe most evangelicals know that defeating Obama is at heart of our country's future. ~ Newt Gingrich

And all of this then enables Webb to say that Paul's appeal to the creation of Adam prior to Eve is not proof of a transcultural ethical standard. But if a theological argument has to deny significant portions of Scripture for its support, it should surely be rejected by evangelicals who are subject to the authority of the entire Bible as the Word of God. Webb's three ways of denying the historicity of Adam's creation before Eve in Genesis 2 are three steps on the path toward liberalism. ~ Wayne A. Grudem

I'm a New Testament Christian. I reject and throw out titles. I'm not a fundamentalist, though I'm fundamental in all of my doctrine. I'm not an evangelical, because that means that I exclude the Catholics and main-liners, and Orthodox. I'm a believer who loves Jesus and I work with everybody else whatever their denomination; Catholic, Orthodox, charismatic, main line, evangelicals, anyone who loves Jesus. ~ Bill Bright

One of the things that evangelicals do really, really well is to make giving a joyous, social enterprise. Too often, the world sees giving as a burden, a sacrifice, when in fact it's more like an opportunity to help others and oneself at the same time. ~ Nicholas Kristof

Most Christians throughout history have believed that God knows everything that is to come. This is often referred to as the "classical" view of divine foreknowledge, and it is still what the majority of evangelicals believe. There are, however, a number of variations within the classical view. Some, called Calvinists, believe that God foreknows all that shall come to pass because he has predestined it. Others, called Arminians, believe God foreknows all things simply because they shall come to pass, though humans to some extent determine it by their free will. ~ Gregory A. Boyd

Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white. ~ Christian Smith

I have spent the last 30 years forming the religious right. I write a letter every week and send a newspaper every month to 200,000 pastors who are broadly called evangelicals, bringing them up to date on what is happening in Washington, in the state capitals, in the culture, and what we need to do about it. And of course I'm criticized for it, and of course I have calculated the positives and the negatives, but I have long been at peace with what I do. ~ Jerry Falwell

Even evangelicals realize that Pinocchio's father was a carpenter too. That's the old joke. ~ Robin Williams

In our day, most of popular evangelicalism has little realization of the wonders of justification by perfect righteousness. Without any covenantal moorings and by seeking to
avoid speaking of God as angry with sinners, modern evangelicals have little left to say about justification except to focus on one's faith, one's very personal, individualistic relationship with Christ. ~ Douglas M. Jones III

But it was never actually that big a deal. Jenkins didn't really disbelieve in the Resurrection: he merely questioned the historical veracity of the New Testament narratives. It was mildly interesting: one side saying "I really believe that Jesus was the Son of God, and that the Bible gives a journalistically accurate account of the circumstances surrounding his birth," and the other saying "I also really believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but I think that the story of Mary and Gabriel may be a legend." A real disagreement, an important one, but not a fundamental fault line along which a church can split. The people who think that the stone really was rolled away, and the people who think that it was rolled away in a very real sense are clearly part of the same religion. But it is hard to see how people who think that it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the stone was rolled away, provided we live in the way that Jesus would have wanted us to, are part of the same religion; or, indeed, of any religion at all.
I think that this is what some evangelicals think some liberals think. I think they may be right. ~ Andrew Rilstone

Conservative evangelicals don't want government support for our faith, because we believe God created all consciences free and a state-coerced act of worship isn't acceptable to God. Moreover, we believe the gospel isn't in need of state endorsement or assistance. Wall Street may need government bailouts but the Damascus Road never does. ~ Russell D. Moore

Younger evangelicals "want the world to like them and to think them a part of the world. ~ Erick Erickson

Increasing Spiritual Error The same is true of the raging apostasy within the Church. The term, Evangelical, has lost its meaning, as some who claim to be Evangelicals are proclaiming that there are many roads to Heaven and there is no Hell. A Second Reformation is going on in the Church today, but unlike the first, which was based on a call to return to the Bible, this new reformation is calling people to jettison the Bible in behalf of their own feelings and beliefs. As the Church grows increasingly weak from its internal rot, society continues to plunge into darkness. ~ David Reagan

If you read history you will find that the Christians begin the most for the present world are just the ones that thought the most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot. in the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark one Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so in effective in this. And that Heaven and you'll get the earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you'll get neither. ~ C.S. Lewis

There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it. ~ Samantha Power

[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be "cast out" like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we've preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it's in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus' warning, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are" (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a "son of hell. ~ Bradley Jersak

The Gospel of John tells us that the Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of glorious grace and truth, was also the Word through whom all things- all phenomena in nature, all capacities for fruitful interaction, all the kinds of beauty- were made. To honor that Word as he deserves to be honored,evangelicals must know both Christ and what he has made. ~ Mark A. Noll

Evangelicals have largely misinterpreted Aquinas, and they have placed on him views that he did not hold. ~ Norman Geisler

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. ~ Molly Worthen

Evangelicals need to take a good look at what their issues are. Are they really being faithful to Jesus? Are they being faithful to the Bible? ~ Tony Campolo

It's a new day for the Democrats when it comes to matters of faith, and the younger Evangelicals are aware of this and many of them are moving into the Democratic camp. ~ Tony Campolo

It occurred to me that we now as a culture, as a people have legitimately become the progeny of the Digital Age. Ostensibly, we subsist within a dehumanized frontier--a computational, compartmentalized, mathematized collectivist-grid. Metrics have prohibitively supplanted ethics. Alternately, the authentic aesthetic experience has been sacrificed and transposed by the new breed of evangelicals: the purveyors of the advertising industry. Thus the symbolic euphoria induced by the infomercial is celebrated as the new Delphic Oracle. Alas, we've transitioned from a carbon-based life form into an information-based, bio-mechanical, heuristically deprived and depleted entity best described as "a self-balancing 28-jointed adaptor-based biped, an electro-chemical reduction plant integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts." Consequently, we exist under the tyranny of hyper-specialization, which dislodges and disposes our sense of logic, proportion and humanity from both our cognitive and synaptic ballet. ~ Albert Bifarelli

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin. ~ Christian Smith

Dogmatic kind of biblical literalism that gained increasing strength among evangelicals toward the end of the nineteenth century was reduced space for academic debate, intellectual experimentation, and nuanced discrimination between shades of opinion. ~ Mark A. Noll

It's amazing how quickly evangelicals turn into evangellyfish with no spiritual vertebrae when they start to lose money, job security, cultural clout, or public support. ~ Mark Driscoll

Trump's dictatorial tendencies and mendacity, negative attributes for many voters, poised him perfectly to manipulate the evangelical mind. Like the biblical god evangelicals worship, Trump is a thin-skinned authoritarian with totalitarian tendencies. He craves love and punishes any disloyalty or slight. Evangelicals have been taught to worship and adore that type of being above all others. This strain of religion cultivates a veneration for extreme authority. Studies bear this out: religious fundamentalism and a tendency to submit to authoritarianism are highly correlated. Trump acted like the character evangelicals worship and benefited from their ingrained adulation. Evangelicals were simply seeing in Trump a character they'd been taught to revere. As if to prove the point, Ann Coulter called Trump her "Emperor God". ~ Andrew L. Seidel

A recent survey said that 51% of Americans don't know any evangelicals – even casually. ~ Kevin Roose

You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group. ~ Ted Haggard

It was the evangelicals who led the fight against slavery, child labor, poor factory conditions, and the abuse of the poor and the insane. Much of what we value in modern social legislation, and perhaps take for granted, grew out of the ministry of Wesley and Whitefield and their successors. ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

I believe a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry. To a frightful degree, I think, evangelicals fuse the kingdom of God with a preferred version of the kingdom of the world (whether it's our national interests, a particular form of government, a particular political program, or so on). Rather than focusing our understanding of God's kingdom on the person of Jesus - who, incidentally, never allowed himself to get pulled into the political disputes of his day - I believe many of us American evangelicals have allowed our understanding of the kingdom of God to be polluted with political ideals, agendas, and issues. ~ Gregory A. Boyd

The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen. ~ Molly Worthen

I think evangelicals would do better if they concentrated less on bolstering the formal authority of the Scripture - which I certainly would want to affirm - and more on displaying how biblical texts can shape lives in salutary ways, how they are fruitful texts, how they are texts one can live according to. ~ Miroslav Volf

I think the real place where most evangelicals have trouble with the Democratic Party is on the issue of abortion. ~ Tony Campolo

Ed Stetzer, a missiologist, pointed out, "When the Reformers (and later evangelicals) deemphasized the apostolic nature of the church, they inadvertently lessened the sending nature of that apostolic church. The church that 'reformed' lost touch with the God who sends, and the mission of the church suffered. ~ Terry D Shiver

As the writings of Walton and others suggest, many evangelicals view the requirements of U.S. national security in the here-and-now and the final accomplishment of Christ's saving mission at the end of time as closely related if not indistinguishable. ~ Andrew J. Bacevich

Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I'm about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market. ~ Michael S. Horton

There is a bigotry rampant in America, against evangelicals. It is the last respectable bigotry. ~ Michael Novak

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us. ~ Tony Campolo

Before we examine some of those questions in more detail, it is important to affirm the genuine evangelical standing of those who have differing positions on these questions. Evangelicals who hold to these various positions all agree that Scripture is inerrant, and they have a commitment to believe whatever is taught by Scripture. Their differences concern the interpretation of various passages relating to these events, but their differences on these matters should be seen as matters of secondary importance, not as differences over primary doctrinal matters. ~ Wayne A. Grudem

At root, evangelical anti-intellectualism is both a scandal and a sin. It is a scandal in the sense of being an offense and a stumbling block that needlessly hinders serious people from considering the Christian faith and coming to Christ. It is a sin because it is a refusal, contrary to Jesus' two great commandments, to love the Lord our God with our minds. Anti-intellectualism is quite simply a sin. Evangelicals must address it as such, beyond all excuses, evasions, or rationalizations of false piety. ~ Os Guinness

Like everyone else, evangelicals have a right to present arguments on all the issues, but the moment we present them as part of some "Christian" platform we abandon our moral high ground. ~ Philip Yancey

Evangelicals sometimes expect too much or, to put it more precisely, we look for a kind of change God hasn't promised. It's possible to expect too little, but under-expectation is usually a cynical reaction to dashed hopes for too much. We manage to interpret biblical teaching to support our longing for perfection. As a result, we measure our progress by standards we will never meet until heaven. ~ Larry Crabb

... evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companionate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-so-distant memory. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

Dr. Ockenga had been a student of Machen's at Princeton University and followed him out. But then Ockenga, like Dad, became a critic of the fundamentalist's endless civil wars and started looking for a new way to present a friendlier evangelical faith (and face). He helped invent a movement called the New Evangelicals. Their mascot was Billy Graham. Other figures like Carl Henry, founder of Christianity Today magazine (and a man who became bitterly jealous of my father in later years), criticized fundamentalism's failure to address the world's intellectual and social needs. A movement was born - modern evangelicalism, a fundamentalism-lite where everyone could more or less do their own theological thing, as long as they "named the name of Christ" and paid lip service to the "inerrancy" of the Bible. On ~ Frank Schaeffer

I have noticed a more drastic shift in the church world and especially in the evangelical church world during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Values of justice and compassion for the poor are now associated mainly with the liberal end of the Christian spectrum (if associated with Christianity at all), while evangelicals are known primarily for political conservatism. ~ Mike Slaughter

Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region's high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents. ~ Mike Davis

Significant numbers of American evangelicals reject the way some have distorted biblical passages as their rationale for uncritical support for every policy and action of the Israeli government instead of judging all actions - of both Israelis and Palestinians - on the basis of biblical standards of justice. ~ Jim Wallis

American Evangelicals are fond of quoting the Declaration of Independence when it insists, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Curiously, not as much fondness is found for quoting what comes later in the very same sentence: "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. ~ Gordon Runyan

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations. ~ Tony Campolo

Evangelicals are distraught over the state of America because they have not been taught that we're aliens here. ~ John Piper

So, if someone like Richard Dawkins indignantly protests that his passion about these sorts of things -- the passion that drives the "God Delusion" -- should not be taken as a religious passion, I am happy to accept that. I do nevertheless think that often Dawkins and company show the sociological characteristics of the religious. This comes across particularly in what Freud calls the narcissism of small differences, the hatred of those who are close to them but not quite close enough. Just as evangelicals can differ bitterly over the true meaning of the host, so the New Atheists loathe people like me who (like them) have no religious belief but who think that science as such does not refute religion.
[Is Darwinism a Religion? - Michael Ruse] ~ Michael Ruse

Modern evangelicals like to compare holy things to soft drinks, designer clothes, [and other products in] our modern consumerist culture. The problem with this is not ... the comparison to a created thing. The problem is that it is ... bad poetry. The Bible compares God to very mundane things, but does so with poetic wonder. God shall come down like rain upon the mown grass; as showers that water the earth. ~ Douglas Wilson

Yet opponents should not herald the demise of evangelicalism. Although much of popular evangelicalism cannot intellectually meet the analyses that call it into question as a viable explanation for human origins and destiny, for most evangelicals it does not need to. Because of the transition from comprehending their religion as a set of doctrines to conceptualizing their religion as an emotional relationship with God, evangelicals have actually made their religion more resilient to intellectual challenges. Calling into question evangelicalism's intellectual foundation ultimately does not undermine the religion because for many evangelicals their adherence was never about those foundations anyway. Evangelicalism becomes true because it FEELS true. Modern evangelicalism has largely transitioned to a new form of truth, one based not on intellectual assent to propositions but on emotional connections. ~ Todd M. Brenneman

The great historian of religion Martin Marty once said every religion serves two functions: First, it is a message of personal salvation telling is how to get right with God; and second, it is a lens for interpreting the world.
Historically, evangelicals have been good at the first functions- at "saving souls". But they have not been nearly so good at helping people to interpret the world around them- at providing a set of interrelated concepts that function as a lens to give a biblical view of areas like science, politics, economics, or bioethics.
As Marty puts it, evangelicals have typically "accentuated personal piety and individual salvation, leaving men to their own devices to interpret the world around them. ~ Nancy Pearcey

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication. ~ Tony Campolo

We're seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C. ~ Ted Cruz

Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual. ~ Mark A. Noll

Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age. ~ Gary Bauer

The piety of "having a personal relationship with Christ" ... is alien to the New Testament ... but evangelicals elevate it to the shibboleth of salvation! Unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus, buster, one day you will be boiling in Hell. Sheesh! Talk about the fury of a personal savior scorned! ~ Robert M. Price

I hear very little from evangelicals about the impact of gun proliferation on violent crime, much less an issue like nuclear disarmament. I hear almost nothing about health care for the poor and protecting widows and orphans, both biblical mandates, and scant mention of the thirteen million children who die worldwide from malnutrition in a year. I hear scornful dismissal of concerns about global warming, an issue viewed seriously by the vast majority of scientists. I hear talk about family values, but when an administration proposed legislation to allow mothers to take unpaid leave after childbirth, conservative religious groups opposed it. ~ Philip Yancey

Sometimes people ask me how I can be both a Catholic and a scientist, particularly a scientist who, at least for some research, studies evolution. I tell them that they are confusing us with Evangelicals. Catholics don't have anything against evolution. A literal interpretation of the Bible, the kind that says that the earth is six thousand years old, has never been a part of our religion, at least not since the Saint Augustine warned against preaching idiocy to Pagans in 415 AD. He said that if you tell people that they have to believe in things that they know are not true and that do not matter then they will never believe you when you tell them things that are true and that do matter, things about Christ and the resurrection. The Church's friendliness towards science is not to protect science. It is to protect Christianity. ~ Gina DeMarco

Uganda can greatly benefit from American evangelicals if they separate the Scott Lively extremists from the Rick Warren-type of moderate evangelicals. ~ Roger Ross Williams

The mission of Patrick Henry College was to attract and cultivate academic stars from the ranks of home-schooled evangelicals, then send them off on graduation day to 'shape the culture and take back the nation,' in the words of a common home-schooling rallying cry. ~ Nina Easton

Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves. ....In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work better if we recognized that all of us posses values worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledge that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship. ~ Barack Obama

Judge not lest ye be judged" has become the battle cry not only for biblically illiterate secularists, but for professing evangelicals as well. Postmodern hypersensitivity is not a malady merely for unbelievers; Christians are downright allergic to judging. ~ Todd Friel

I believe in the premillenial, pre-tribulational coming of Christ for all of his church, and to summarize that, your first poll, do you believe Jesus coming the second time will be in the future, I would vote yes with the 59 percent and with Billy Graham and most evangelicals. ~ Jerry Falwell