I. The Bebbington Quadrilateral

David Bebbington first published his definition of evangelicalism in 1989 in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. With little resistance, in just a few years, it achieved a “near monopoly position,” according to historian Timothy Larsen, “with no rival anywhere near as influential or popular.”Footnote ⁴ Some have suggested it started as a definition with certain qualifications: applicable only to British evangelicalism and not evangelicalism generally. But historians have, nonetheless, used it for evangelicals in America and all over the world and Bebbington did not object.Footnote ⁵ He has supervised numerous dissertations on twentieth-century American evangelicalism, and they quote his four-part definition of evangelicalism without qualification.Footnote ⁶ By 1998, the quadrilateral was established enough among historians that the New Oxford History of England used it without any reference to Bebbington as the source of the four-part definition.

Following the scholars, journalists have relied on the quadrilateral as the accepted definition. Time magazine used the four marks as early 2005.Footnote ⁷ The Washington Post cites the quadrilateral with some regularity in its religion coverage.Footnote ⁸ By 2017, it was even common to see prominent evangelicals use Bebbington's definition as a normative rule, allowing them to leverage the historian's authority to dismiss those they did not want to be “real” evangelicals.Footnote ⁹

Mark Noll's respected scholarship seems more responsible than anything else for bringing about the dominant status of the Bebbington definition. Noll is an incredibly influential historian, not only through his scholarship but as someone who built institutions and developed networks of scholars committed to the study of evangelical history.Footnote ¹⁰ He has called the quadrilateral “the most serviceable general definition,” “the most useful general definition,” and “the most effective.”Footnote ¹¹ There was a time, however, when Noll said a definition like Bebbington's—a normative, theological definition with three to five key emphases—was “not entirely helpful.” In 1986, three years before Evangelicalism in Modern Britain was published, Noll preferred a social, cultural description to theological “marks.” He defined evangelicals as, more or less, people who liked Billy Graham. Evangelicals, he said, are “those most willing to be defined by the activities of the best-known evangelists—Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham.”Footnote ¹² Noll appears to have revised his opinion somewhat dramatically after reading Bebbington. By the time Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994, he embraced Bebbington and cited his four “key ingredients of evangelicalism.”Footnote ¹³ He has reused Bebbington's formula at least half a dozen times in just his single-author monographs, consistently praising it in superlative terms.Footnote ¹⁴ Historians of American evangelicalism—not a few of them trained by Noll—have done likewise.

There are, however, several serious problems with the Bebbington quadrilateral. The first is that it is not clear what kind of thing evangelicalism is in the world. Is it a theology? A religious movement? A spiritual orientation? Or something else? Examining the marks does not clarify the matter. Take just one: What kind of thing is “biblicism”? It seems like it should be a belief about the Bible, perhaps a doctrine regarding the inspiration and infallibility of the text, or something about how the Bible—not tradition or hierarchy—is the ultimate authority. But biblicism could also indicate a belief about the right way to read the Bible—a hermeneutic, such as literalism. Or biblicism might not be a theological conception but religious practices. Perhaps “biblicism” is found in reading practices, such as devotional reading and life application. It is also possible that biblicism is not a theological claim and is not a practice, but an emphasis. Perhaps it is not a specific belief about the Bible nor a particular use but the special significance given that belief or practice. In that case, evangelicals would not be marked by doing devotional reading but by thinking that it is important. Not by believing the Bible is infallible, but regularly reiterating that claim.

In fact, biblicism seems like it is all of these things sometimes, none of them at others. Bebbington himself says “biblicism” means a “particular regard for the Bible” but offers no clarity on what the particulars of that “particular regard” might be.Footnote ¹⁵ He never says what kind of thing it is in the world. The same is true of the other three marks, and “evangelicalism” itself.

This leads to the second serious issue: the definition is ahistorical. Bebbington wants the four marks to apply equally, for example, to Methodists in 1740, low-church Anglicans in 1850, and Charismatics in 1980, even though the three groups are separated by centuries and do not share any organizational structures, much less a common theological articulation. They do not all approach the Bible in the same way—nor the cross, nor conversion, nor activism. Nor would they all agree those are the most important four issues, discounting, for example, ecclesiology, creeds, and practices of prayer. Bebbington actually acknowledges this. He writes, in one rather tortured sentence: “Variations there have certainly been in statements by Evangelicals about what they regard as basic.”Footnote ¹⁶

Variations there have been, as well, in the use of the word “evangelical.” Far from being a stable analytical category, there is, as historian Linford D. Fisher writes, a “long and surprising history of this word.”Footnote ¹⁷ “Evangelical” entered English from the German in the 1500s as an adjective. It was used to mean “of the gospel,” either in the sense of “concerning the saving work of Christ” or in reference to the biblical books of Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John. An “evangelical hymn” was not a hymn written by an evangelical person or sung in an evangelical church but a hymn about Christ's death. An “evangelical sermon” was a sermon about salvation. An “evangelical history” was a study of the four canonical accounts of Christ's life and ministry.

As the word evolved, “of the gospel” also came to connote “true Christian.” The Puritan Cotton Mather used the adjective “evangelical” thirty-nine times in his New England church history, Marginalia Christi Americana, published in 1702. He wrote, for example, about “evangelical worship” and “evangelical church order.” For him the word indicated that something was in accord with the Gospel and, therefore, right. This is the same way, notably, that Unitarian minister John Grundy used “evangelical” in 1813 when he argued that trinitarian Christians take their theology from the Apostle Paul's epistles and later Christian tradition, while Unitarians’ teachings relied on the Gospels, and Unitarianism was thus evangelical Christianity.Footnote ¹⁸

In the 1730s, when Bebbington's story starts, no one uses the word as a name. Those who identified with the revivals of George Whitefield might have called themselves Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, or “New Lights,” but they would not have used the word “evangelical.” Historians are divided over whether the anachronism is useful for understanding Whitefield. Thomas Kidd, citing Bebbington, describes the trans-Atlantic evangelist as a “key figure in the first generation of Anglo-American evangelical Christianity,” a leader in the “fractious milieu of the early evangelical movement.”Footnote ¹⁹ Harry S. Stout, meanwhile, worries that “studies of Whitefield have too often abstracted him from the age in which he lived” and only uses “evangelical” as an adjective or when referring to the modern movement.Footnote ²⁰ Frank Lambert uses the term sparingly.Footnote ²¹ Douglas L. Winiarski avoids it altogether. Winiarski writes that no one “used the term in its nominal form to identify a distinctive group of people or a specific religious subculture” and warns the Bebbington definition is essentialist and “masks far more than it illuminates the popular religious cultures of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.”Footnote ²²

The word does not seem to have been used as a noun until the 1800s. Perhaps the first group to take it for a name was the Evangelical Voluntary Church Association, established in the late 1830s to advocate for religious disestablishment in Great Britain. The group died after a few years. Another, similar group was founded in 1846 when a number of non-establishment churches joined together and formed the Evangelical Alliance to advocate for religious liberty at home and abroad.Footnote ²³ These people were called “evangelical,” though the more common appellation was “Nonconformist” or “dissenter,” and their hallmark was opposition to state churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy.

The word “evangelical” was also used in the 1800s to refer to people involved in missions and proselytization. To spread a religion was “evangelical.” Numerous Protestant organizations used the word this way in this period, describing themselves as evangelical because they were focused on evangelization. However, as Fisher points out, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jesuits, and Christian Scientists also all called themselves “evangelical,” and for the same reason.Footnote ²⁴

By the early 1900s, “evangelical” was commonly used as a synonym, more or less, for “Protestant.” Look closer, though, and it seems the word was especially useful to contest the boundaries of Protestantism, to make an argument about who was or was not really Protestant. Benjamin B. Warfield, the renowned defender of Calvinism, used the word in 1920 to oppose a Federal Council of Churches’ ecumenical plan, “The Plan for Union of Evangelical Churches.” Warfield said the ecumenical project was not rightly evangelical, because it did not require all the churches to agree to some important doctrines, such as the Trinity (a doctrine also noticeably absent from the Bebbington definition). At the same time, someone like Shailer Mathews, champion of the social gospel, could also claim the word. In fact, Mathews said “modernism” was nothing more than “the use of scientific, historical, social method in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.”Footnote ²⁵ American religious historians are of course quite well versed in the “fundamentalist-modernist controversies” but have not often noticed that both sides laid claim to “evangelical.”

It was not until after World War II that, as historian D. G. Hart puts it, one party of Protestants “commandeered” the term.Footnote ²⁶ It was, even then, as historian Donald W. Dayton writes, an “essentially contested concept.”Footnote ²⁷

The Bebbington definition does not acknowledge any of this. It takes, instead, one version of the contested concept and renders it eternal and ahistorical. The definition is normative, not descriptive. That makes it very useful for theological partisans who want to adjudicate who is or is not a “real evangelical” but problematic for historians trying to position various historical figures who would not themselves have used the word as a name.Footnote ²⁸

This leads to the third and perhaps most major problem: even when historical subjects do use the word and are working on a project to claim that identity and own “evangelicalism,” and even when those people would agree with all four parts of the quadrilateral, the Bebbington definition still is not useful. The Bebbington quadrilateral does not help a historian understand the evangelicals who should be easiest to understand as evangelicals. Consider the case of the founding of Christianity Today.

II. Constructing Evangelicalism

When Carl Henry and others started constructing evangelicalism in the 1940s, American Protestantism was primarily organized in denominations, with occasional transdenominational cooperation on missions, Bible publication, and revivals. The one significant exception to the rule was fundamentalism. This movement was organized by the publication of The Fundamentals, connected by a distinct print culture, and associated with Dwight L. Moody and the Moody Bible Institute.Footnote ²⁹

In the early 1940s, a number of fundamentalists were unhappy with fundamentalism. They did not feel it represented them, or that they wanted it to. Urban pastors, such as Harold J. Okenga; missionary doctors, such L. Nelson Bell; modern, polished revivalists, such as Billy Graham; and smart journalist-turned-theologians, such as Carl Henry, grew to dislike the brand. They thought fundamentalism impossibly petty, ill-organized and divisive, and too backward and hidebound to really reach the modern world with the message of Jesus Christ. They sought to create an alternative, updated form of the movement. Something more serious, more organized, and, most of all, more respectable. They branded themselves evangelical.

The word was useful because it was familiar but did not specifically name anything. Nobody was using it for anything particular. “Nobody,” as Henry later recalled, “wanted the term.”Footnote ³⁰ They claimed the new, as-yet-undefined identity with the foundation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, the Conferences for the Advancement of Evangelical Scholarship in 1944, Fuller Seminary in 1946, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 1950. They were still working to construct the movement in 1955 when they started planning Christianity Today.

The idea for the periodical was first conceived in 1951 by Wilbur Smith, a Moody-trained Bible scholar with a special interest in apocalyptic prophecy. Smith, at the time, was a professor of English Bible at Fuller. When he suggested the magazine, he was imagining something like the popular fundamentalist periodicals, such as Moody Monthly, Sunday School Times, and Sword of the Lord, but a little more highbrow. The magazine could serve as a rival to the liberal Christian Century. Footnote ³¹ He told Graham his idea, and Graham picked it up a few years later. Graham wanted a broader base of support for his crusades, especially as he was starting to go into Europe. He thought a magazine might serve to define evangelicalism and distinguish it from fundamentalism. “Fundamentalism,” Graham wrote in a letter to a friend in January 1955, “is in need of an entirely new approach.” A magazine, he suggested, could “plant the evangelical flag.”Footnote ³² The same day he wrote another letter to L. Nelson Bell, his father-in-law, asking him if he would start a magazine.

Bell was good person to consider this proposal. He knew magazines. He founded the Southern Presbyterian Review in 1942 after returning to the U.S. from his medical mission in China.Footnote ³³ The periodical united conservative members of the denomination in the fight against the denomination's modernists. Bell understood how a magazine could articulate a position and bring people together under a common banner. He knew how it could organize a movement. From his doctor's office in Asheville, North Carolina, Bell began planning what would become Christianity Today.

Bell started, logically enough, with his existing networks. Who did he know? Who did he trust? Who liked Billy Graham? He went through his personal files, his address books and mailing lists, and his memories of colleagues and supporters, and he came up with some names.

Bell wrote a list on the back of a prescription pad. He started with the name of the man he thought could fund the enterprise. On the top of the page, in blue ballpoint, he wrote “Howard Pew.”Footnote ³⁴ Pew was a Presbyterian and president of Sun Oil Company. Bell and Pew had begun a correspondence in 1953, sharing concerns about the liberals ruining American Presbyterianism. Bell knew Pew had deep pockets and funded a lot of conservative causes. Bell then wrote down the name of his son-in-law, Billy Graham. Graham was, of course, too busy with his crusades to oversee a magazine, but he would serve as the face or figurehead of evangelicalism, much as Moody had embodied fundamentalism. Bell then listed three more businessmen: Maxey Jarman, Howard Butt, and Walter Bennett. Jarman was a Baptist and the chairman of General Shoe. He was known for starting his business meetings with prayer and crediting God with the corporation's successes in annual reports. In 1955, he could credit God with gross sales of 165 million dollars.Footnote ³⁵ He used some of that money to support Graham's crusades. Howard Butt Jr. was also a Baptist. Heir to the H-E-B grocery store chain, Butt was more interested in ministry than business and had used some of his family's fortune to support Graham's crusades.Footnote ³⁶ Walter Bennett was another supporter. He was a public relations man, the head of the advertising agency that produced and distributed Graham's radio show.Footnote ³⁷

Bell came back to the list later and added a few more names in pencil: Harold Ockenga, himself, Carl Henry, and Paul S. Rees, a minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church and a past president of the National Association of Evangelicals. He thought the later four men might serve as an editorial board. “Executive editor?” he wrote, “or all alike help?”

Next to Graham's name, Bell added a note: “honorary chairman.” Grouping Pew, Jarman, Butt, and Bennett's names together, he wrote “finance.”

The theology of these men, and any doctrinal differences the Baptists might have had from the Presbyterians or the Presbyterians from the Baptists, did not seem to matter. After all, they all supported Billy Graham. The one question was about Carl Henry, but that was a question about his position in the conversation about fundamentalism, not about theology. Henry was important to the project because he was a former journalist with experience as a reporter and editor at small Long Island, New York newspapers.Footnote ³⁸ Henry, a Baptist, was also a theology professor at Fuller and had made a name for himself with The Uneasy Conscience of a Modern Fundamentalism.Footnote ³⁹ Nevertheless, Graham worried Henry might be too associated with fundamentalism to plant the flag for evangelicalism.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was not a question of theology, but style. Could Henry set the right tone? Henry allayed these concerns with a memo to Bell in March 1955. He proposed a distinctly evangelical editorial policy for the magazine. It “must not be belligerent for the sake of being belligerent,” Henry wrote. “On the other hand the magazine must not become wishy-washy.”Footnote ⁴¹ In another letter, Henry reiterated the point to Graham. The movement, he said, should be guided by “an irenic spirit which knows no compromise.”Footnote ⁴² Above all, he argued, the magazine would need to be strategic. That satisfied Graham, and Henry joined the project in June.

J. Marcellus Kik came onboard at about the same time. Kik, a native of the Netherlands, was one of the fundamentalist students who left Princeton Theological Seminary with J. Gresham Machen in 1929 to join the new Westminster Theological Seminary.Footnote ⁴³ Kik graduated the next year and moved to New Brunswick, Canada, where he became a Presbyterian pastor. Kik launched an eight-page paper in 1935 to fight the “deadening influence of ignorance and modernism” in the Canadian Presbyterian church.Footnote ⁴⁴ He edited Bible Christianity until it folded in 1951.Footnote ⁴⁵ When he heard that Billy Graham was interested in starting a magazine, he reached out and offered his experience and expertise. Bell accepted and introduced Kik to Henry and Henry to Kik.Footnote ⁴⁶ The editorial team was thus formed; the nucleus of a new conversation came together.

III. Thirteen Months of Letters

In September 1955, Bell, Henry, and Kik began an intense, sustained correspondence as they planned and prepped the launch of Christianity Today. While they met in person a few times and talked on the phone a few times, most of the communication was done in thirteen months of letters typed in triplicate. Kik made arrangements with Grand Rapids publishers to provide books for the magazine to review; he reported back in a letter sent to both Henry and Bell.Footnote ⁴⁷ Henry researched typography and priced printers; he reported back in a letter sent to both Bell and Kik.Footnote ⁴⁸ The men made arrangements to buy a Kodak photocopier; the details were mailed to each simultaneously in California (Henry), North Carolina (Bell), and New Jersey (Kik).Footnote ⁴⁹ Most of the effort, however, and most of the correspondence, focused on names for writers. The “contributing editors,” as the magazine called them, would define the magazine and define evangelicalism. As Henry, Bell, and Kik conceived it, they were shaping a movement when they picked these names. It was not just a question of who would write or who could write. It was about how each name would define evangelicalism for the world. They needed, as Henry put it, “the most strategic names.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Bell agreed. “We must examine each man,” Bell wrote, “in the light of the effect his name will have.”Footnote ⁵¹ With each name they were making a decision about who was in and who was out. They were drawing the lines around evangelicalism.

They did not start, however, with abstractions or ahistorical terms. They did not begin with four marks or emphases. They started with who knew who. One early list shows how this worked. Twelve names were submitted by Bell, ten by Henry, seven by Kik, and seven by Graham. The names reveal the network of connections and conversations that Christianity Today was trying to bring together to form a new conversation which would be sustained by and centered in the magazine.

Bell for example, suggested a number of conservative Presbyterians. He put in the names of Oswald T. Allis, who founded Westminster Theological Seminary with J. Gresham Machen; William Childs Robinson, who wrote the lead article for the first edition of Bell's Southern Presbyterian Review; and C. Darby Fulton, a former missionary to Japan and the current head of missions for the Presbyterian Church in the United States.Footnote ⁵²

Graham had Southern Baptist connections. He suggested Kyle M. Yates, who was a Baylor professor who helped translate the Revised Standard Bible, and two seminary presidents: New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary president Roland Q. Leavell and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Duke McCall. Graham also had connections from his crusades. He suggested bringing in Edward L. R. Elson, who was President Eisenhower's personal pastor; Arthur J. Moore, the Methodist bishop of Atlanta, Georgia; and William Fitch, a Presbyterian pastor in Glasgow, Scotland who had helped organize Graham's crusade there earlier that year.Footnote ⁵³

Kik had some other international names to put on the list. He suggested G. C. Berkouwer, a leading theologian in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands; Pierre-Charles Marcel, president of the Société Calviniste de France and a student of Dutch Reformed thinker Herman Dooeywerd; and Canadian Presbyterian pastor W. Stanford Reid.Footnote ⁵⁴ Reid had studied with Kik at Westminster and his father, W. D. Reid, had financed Kik's magazine in the 1930s and 1940s. Kik also brought connections to the Dutch Reformed churches in U.S. He recruited two correspondents from Grand Rapids, Michigan: Jacob Eppinga, who was pastor of a Christian Reformed Church and a regular writer for his denominational magazine, The Banner, and Bastian Kruithof, who was a Reformed Church minister and a trustee of Hope College.Footnote ⁵⁵

Henry brought a lot of academic connections to the table. He put in several seminary professors, including Wilbur Smith at Fuller and C. Adrian Heaton at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He suggested John Theodore Muller, a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri and editor of the Missouri Synod Lutheran magazine, Der Lutheraner. Henry also offered a few names of people who were not pastors or biblical scholars. He put the names of two Christian philosophers on the list: W. Harry Jellema from Calvin College and Gordon H. Clark from Butler University, along with Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison. Harrison was the three-star general who had headed armistice negotiations to end the Korean War, and he was also president of Officers’ Christian Fellowship.Footnote ⁵⁶

These were impressive men, and they were chosen for their gravitas and respectability. This would be fundamentalism, rebranded. It would be the flag for evangelicalism, marking it as a new movement. Nevertheless, Henry, Bell, and Kik saw some of the limitations of their networks, too. The way they were constructing evangelicalism was not as broad as they wanted it to be. It did not include everyone they wanted to include.

The networks were narrow, first, in terms of denominational diversity. “As I look over our list,” Henry wrote, “I see it veering heavily in a Presbyterian direction—and we need to watch this . . . for a greater balance.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Of course, the list was not all Presbyterians, but most of the men on the list were identified with Reformed theology. Henry himself thought that Reformed Christianity has synonymous with biblical Christianity, but evangelicalism could not be so narrowly defined as to only include people who endorsed Calvinist doctrines of predestination.Footnote ⁵⁸

Henry and Bell wracked their brains for more names. Bell thought of W. A. Criswell, the megachurch Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who was also Graham's official pastor.Footnote ⁵⁹ He thought of Ole Hallesby, chairman of the Norwegian Lutheran Inland Mission, but then he heard that Hallesby was accused of tax evasion.Footnote ⁶⁰ “His inclusion would not be wise for this and other reasons,” Bell reported back to Henry and Kik.Footnote ⁶¹ Henry thought of F. F. Bruce, the head of Biblical History and Literature at the University of Sheffield, England. Bruce belonged to the Brethren Church. Henry also thought of C. S. Lewis, but Lewis turned him down, leaving Henry to wonder about whether the author of Mere Christianity was “weakening his conviction.”Footnote ⁶² There were other Anglicans he could reach out to, though. On the proposed list of contributors, Henry penciled in “Phillip Hughes,” meaning Philip E. Hughes, a scholar who grew up in South Africa and was president of the Church Society, an evangelical reform group in the Church of England. He wrote “Pollock” for John Charles Pollock, an Anglican pastor in Somerset, England (who would later write an authorized biography of Graham). Then he veered to Presbyterians again, and wrote “Thomson,” James G. S. S. Thomson, a Scottish Presbyterian who taught Hebrew and Old Testament at Edinburgh.Footnote ⁶³

Even with these additions, though, there were a lot of people the editorial team wanted to include in the conversation who were not well represented by the contributing editors. “I wish,” Bell wrote, “that we might have one or two more evangelical Methodists. (I realize that they are as scarce as hen's teeth).” He returned to the complaint early in 1956. “We need,” he wrote, “to have more representatives from the Methodist and Lutheran groups.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The editors, it seemed, just did not know many Methodists or Lutherans. They did not have those connections.

There were numerous other religious groups that Henry, Bell, and Kik did not even consider contacting. There were many denominations that might have been sympathetic to the project—and might have been brought into evangelicalism—but were ignored. The Church of the Nazarene, for example, had more than one hundred thousand members in 1955. Similarly, the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) also had more than one hundred thousand members. Both were holiness churches with roots in the nineteenth-century revivals on the American frontier. There were also smaller holiness churches, including the Church of Christ (Holiness), the Holiness Methodist, the Primitive Methodist, the Wesleyan Methodist, and the Pilgrim Holiness churches. There were also restorationist churches, notably the Independent Christian Churches and the Churches of Christ. And there were Anabaptist churches, including the Mennonite Church, the Evangelical Mennonite Church, and the Missionary Church.Footnote ⁶⁵ These groups could all be considered conversionist, biblicist, etc., but they were not connected to Henry, Bell, or Kik. They were not part of the editors’ networks, and they were not brought into “evangelicalism.”

The editors also did not think about reaching out to non-white Christians. They were not in any networks with non-white Christians, and it did not occur to them to find African American, Hispanic, or Asian Christians who might be interested in the magazine. There was no discussion about this line they were drawing. They did not ever say evangelicalism would be white. It was just assumed.

Graham had, of course, integrated a crusade for the first time in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1953. However, he also accepted the segregation of his crusade in Dallas later that same year. There was no Black minister on Graham's team until 1957 when Howard Jones, an African American pastor from Cleveland, joined the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1955, the editors of Christianity Today could have thought of evangelicalism as a multiracial identity. But they did not. The evangelicalism they constructed was white.

IV. Evangelicalism's Theological Lines

As they composed and revised their contributors’ list, evangelicalism took a distinctive shape. They used their networks and made connections and in the process refined their definition of the movement. A lot of the lines they drew were implicit, cultural lines, but some were explicit too. In their thirteen months of correspondence, the editors made some theological decisions about what would and would not count as evangelicalism.

It was, however, in the process of picking and choosing names of contributors that the editors worked out the specific theological issues. There was no broad conversation about first principles or special marks. They dealt with doctrinal issues as they came up in conversations about specific people. The question, in each case, was concrete: do we want this person in or out?

From the start there were certain questions that were off the table, theological issues Henry, Bell, and Kik agreed should have no part in the defining of evangelicalism. The magazine would entertain no debates about church government. This was, as they understood it, the condition of a transdenominational movement. Presbyteries mattered to Presbyterians, bishops were important to Methodists, and democratic governance and congregational autonomy was life-or-death to Baptists. Evangelicalism would have to bring those groups together, and many more besides. To do that, the magazine would have to simultaneously acknowledge the vital import of issues of church governance to their respective parties and make those issues completely marginal. The same was true with sacraments. Twentieth-century Protestants were not about to come to a consensus on baptism after hundreds of years of disagreement. Nor were they likely to say the rite did not really matter. Evangelicalism would have to be constructed so that sacraments were recognized as simultaneously important and off limits. The editors were quite pragmatic about this.Footnote ⁶⁷

Other issues never even came up. Henry, Bell, and Kik never bothered with questions of free will and predestination. They did not discuss whether historic creeds should have any place in evangelicalism. They did not talk about sanctification, perfectionism, or eternal security. It was apparently taken for granted that these sometimes-divisive issues did not matter to the definition of evangelicalism.

There were four issues that did come up: eschatology, faith healing, atonement, and—interwoven with the other issues—the inspiration of the Bible. As they made decisions about names, these were the critical theological issues that required a decision. These were the lines they had to draw, and the issues they had to agree on as they decided what evangelicalism would be.

The issue of eschatology came up quite early. It became an issue because Kik had published a short book on Revelation 20. In Revelation 20, the biblical prophet envisions a millennium when “the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan,” is locked away in a bottomless pit. During that time, the Christian faithful are resurrected and reign over the earth with Christ. Then Satan is loosed again, and there is a final confrontation between God and the dragon, the saints and their persecutors. Premillennialists say this prophecy will be fulfilled in future human history, literally and temporally. Christ will return to earth and rule as king over everything for one thousand years, which will be followed by a battle called Armageddon and then the final judgement. This interpretation had been quite important to fundamentalists. In many ways it defined them and explained for them their position in the world.Footnote ⁶⁸ Kik rejected this interpretation, reading the scripture passage as a more metaphorical account of the ongoing struggle between good and evil and the ultimate triumph of Christ over sin.

For Wilbur Smith, this was intolerable. The Fuller professor thought Kik's book was a “nonsensical, ridiculous interpretation of the Word of God.” He wrote Bell to protest Kik's involvement in the magazine. “How can a man with views like this,” he wrote, “become the editor of a paper in which you or I would participate?”Footnote ⁶⁹

At the time, Smith was not directly involved in the planning of the magazine, but since he had proposed the idea of Christianity Today to Graham in the first place, he felt some ownership over the project. And he felt very strongly about this: premillennialist eschatology had to be an essential feature of evangelicalism.

Bell disagreed. That was the old, fight-y fundamentalism. Evangelicalism was going to be different. It was not going to concern itself with end-times prophecy. It was not going to define itself by obscure points of eschatology. Bell told Smith to calm down and be reasonable. Premillennialism was not that important. “I just know, my dear brother, that you do not mean all you say in that letter and I am going to disregard it,” he wrote. “When our Lord returns and what transpires after His return simply must not divide those of us who believe God's Holy Word to fully inspired and wholly authoritative.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Thinking about Kik and the question of eschatology, Bell clarified that the critical theological line—defining evangelicalism—would be this understanding of the Bible. He explained this in a subsequent letter to Henry. “The one outstanding, important thing is that we believe in the complete authority and inspiration of the Word of God,” he wrote. “We must present this viewpoint to a generation of ministers who have their thinking and faith crippled by the institutions which they have attended.”Footnote ⁷¹

Smith did not accept this. He did not think you could separate the inspiration of the Bible and the premillennialist interpretation of Revelation 20. Lots of people said they believed the Bible was inspired, including Mormons and Catholics. Premillennialism was the defining doctrine that proved a “high view” of scripture, he argued.Footnote ⁷² It was the doctrinal fruit by which you knew the health of the hermeneutical tree. Affirmation of biblicism was meaningless, Smith thought, unless it led to the affirmation of premillennialist eschatology.

Bell did not convince Smith to change his mind. Smith did not convince Bell. The issue was settled, instead, by an appeal to authority: Harold Ockenga. Ockenga sided with Bell, told Smith to stop agitating, and that was that.Footnote ⁷³ The first theological issue was settled, and the line was drawn: eschatology would not be a defining issue of evangelicalism.

The second theological issue that came up was faith healing. Specifically, the editors had to decide if they were going to invite Oral Roberts to be a contributing editor. Were pentecostals going to be a part of evangelicalism? The largest white denomination of pentecostals, the Assemblies of God, was a member of the National Association of Evangelicals, but the editors of Christianity Today still hesitated to include them in evangelicalism.

The defining feature of pentecostalism is normally thought of as glossolalia, or the “gift of tongues.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Pentecostals said Christians could experience a spiritual baptism—in addition to water baptism—in which God would endow them with “power from on high” (Luke 24:49). The sign of this power was an ecstatic, miraculous language, a “tongue.” Pentecostals prize the gift of tongues, and some have gone so as far as to say that all real Christians speak in tongues—a controversial position, and one that alienates Christians they might otherwise align with. This was not the main issue for Bell, however. As a doctor, he was put off by the practices of faith healing.Footnote ⁷⁵

Roberts's ministry, in the mid-1950s, was focused on faith healing. His first miraculous healing, by his account, happened at a night service in Nowata, Oklahoma with a congregation of about three hundred. While he was praying for people, he heard God tell him: “You will feel My presence in your right hand” and “through my presence, you will be able to detect the presence of demons.” He touched a small deaf boy and felt a warmth “like an electrical charge” surge from his elbow through his hand. Roberts said: “You tormenting spirit of deafness, come out!” and the boy was healed.Footnote ⁷⁶ Roberts began filming his healing crusades for television broadcast in 1954, becoming one of the nation's leading televangelists.Footnote ⁷⁷ From Bell's perspective, this was just exploitation of people's physical needs. The emphasis on miracles and miraculous healing was a problem. Roberts “preaches the true gospel,” Bell wrote, but the message of salvation got lost in the hubbub and spectacle.Footnote ⁷⁸

Pentecostals were also just not respectable. Like the fundamentalists that Bell, Henry, and Kik were unhappy with, the pentecostals were associated with a lower class. “If we do not eliminate these men (at least for a year or two),” Bell wrote in a second letter on the pentecostal issue, “we are not going to have the stature we must have.”Footnote ⁷⁹ This was not exactly a theological argument, but this was how Bell decided where to draw this line.

Henry was not willing to permanently exclude pentecostals. For one thing, there were a lot of them. The Assemblies of God had only been founded in 1914, and it already had more than one hundred thousand members.Footnote ⁸⁰ Pentecostals represented “tremendous potential” for the growth of evangelicalism, if they could be brought into the movement. And if they were not included in evangelicalism, they might end up on the other side of things. “Have you noticed,” Henry asked, “how the ecumenical movement is now deliberately cultivating them?”Footnote ⁸¹ Still, there probably was not any danger of pentecostals joining the National Council of Churches just yet. Henry thought the best decision was to ignore them for the time being.

Perhaps the most in-depth theological debate the editors had, in thirteen months preparing to plant the flag for evangelicalism, was the third issue: atonement. The question of how atonement would define evangelicalism came up when editors considered James Stuart Stewart, a Church of Scotland minister who was, at the time, chaplain to the queen in Scotland.

Henry wanted nothing to do with him. He had reason to believe, he told the other editors, that Stewart was wishy-washy on atonement theology, and maybe the authority of the Bible too. Henry was adamant he would not include the queen's chaplain in evangelicalism without some clarification on the point. “The theological divides turn on truth,” Henry wrote, “and unless it is untrue that he repudiates our Lord's propitiatory atonement and the final punishment of the wicked, as well as holds a disappointing view of scripture (despite his emphasis that they are inspired) we set a precedent we may live to regret.”Footnote ⁸² Despite his tone and talk of “repudiation,” Henry did not exactly imagine himself at the head of an orthodoxy tribunal. He did think the editors’ networks could inquire, though, and that friends could ask friends to give assurances of Stewart's true views. That is how networks worked and how evangelicalism was being organized.

Bell sought to provide the assurance Henry wanted. This was a rumor, surely, which should not be given credit. The Monday after Thanksgiving, Bell wrote Henry: “With reference to Dr. James Stewart, where have you gotten the idea, Carl, that he does not believe in the substitutionary atonement?” Thinking about it more, Bell wondered if Henry just had not over interpreted something. Stewart might have, in an article or sermon somewhere, explained Jesus's death on the cross in other terms, but that should not be misunderstood. “I think,” Bell wrote, “he takes the position that the substitutionary atonement is but one aspect, although the most important, of the whole doctrine of the atonement.”Footnote ⁸³

When Henry read the letter, he thought Bell was missing the issue. Bell, perhaps, was not theologically sophisticated enough to understand the nuance, or maybe the older man just was not up to date on the scholarly debate. “As to the doctrine of the atonement, Nelson,” Henry replied, “the plain fact is that many theologians today subscribe to substitutionary atonement, or vicarious atonement, but repudiate propitiatory atonement.”Footnote ⁸⁴ This was a subtle distinction Henry was making. “Substitutionary atonement” is the doctrine that Jesus died as a replacement or substitution for sinners. It is the belief that Christ, as expressed in 1 Peter 2:24, bore “our sins in his own body on the tree” and thus, as it says in 1 Peter 3:18, traded “the just for the unjust.” Henry thought the proper understanding of this doctrine, however, included the idea that Christ's death was done to appease God. The crucifixion was the “propitiation for our sins,” according to 1 John 2:2, because it satisfied a righteous God's demands for justice. Henry believed a lot of theologians—and specifically Stewart—were compromising the doctrine of the atonement by abandoning propitiation. If they seemed like they were not because they still talked of substitution, that just made them sneaky. And evangelicalism needed to be clear on this issue.

Bell let the matter go. It is possible he understood the issue as well as Henry did, disagreed with him, and decided to just ignore the younger man's condescension. Alternatively, it could be that Bell did not understand the issue as well as Henry did and also did not think these distinctions were that important. Perhaps he would not himself have passed the litmus test Henry was proposing. Either way, Bell let Henry draw this line. Stewart's name was not added to the list. Atonement was established as a litmus test, even if one that was only sometimes applied.

For the editors, the clearest consensus on a theological issue was on the inspiration of the Bible. Henry, in his writings at the time, averred that “evangelical Christianity is the religion of the Bible.”Footnote ⁸⁵ They all agreed that the Bible's inspiration and authority was the most important issue and returned to the principle of biblical inspiration when discussing other theological matters.

Sometimes, however, the doctrine of the Bible was so important that other theological issues did not matter, while other times the doctrine of the Bible was so important because other issues did matter. Bell, for example, in the context of the debate about eschatology, clearly put the inspiration and authority of the Bible over everything else. Belief in premillennialism, the gifts of the spirit, or the doctrines of the sacraments were matters of “liberty” for the discerning, Bible-reading Christian. The important thing was the authority of the Bible.Footnote ⁸⁶ Henry, on the other hand, thought the correct understanding of atonement was directly connected to the question of the Bible's authority. Ministers who thought the Bible was “inspiring” but not “inspired” could not be counted on to hold firm to the truth. In the one case, the belief in the primacy of the Bible made other doctrines secondary. In the other, the belief in the primacy of the Bible made other doctrines nonnegotiable.

There were other differences, too. When it came to the question of what commitment to scripture and a “high view” of scripture looked like, not everyone at Christianity Today agreed. Howard Pew, for example—the big donor paying for the project—said the cost of funding the magazine would be worth it if it “gets preachers back to preaching the Bible.”Footnote ⁸⁷ An important part of what he meant by this was that ministers would stop criticizing capitalism. “We can never hope to stop this Country's plunge towards totalitarianism,” Pew wrote a few years before he started funding Christianity Today, “until we have gotten the ministers’ thinking straight.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Pew believed the clergy were undermining American free markets with unfair and uninformed critiques of business. Ministers, he said in 1960, “were doing more to promote socialism and communism than anyone else.”Footnote ⁸⁹ They needed to be reeducated. They need to refocus on the Bible.

That was not quite the same thing Kik was thinking. Kik normally took a back seat in discussions about theological lines, deferring to Henry and Bell. When he thought about the possibilities for a magazine to change how people thought about the Bible, though, he got excited. “If we can encourage ministers to buy good commentaries,” Kik wrote, “it will mean a great deal to enrich their preaching.” Kik said he had seen the effect before: “Several of us [in Canada] have made it a project to place good books in the hands of our fellow preachers. You would be surprised to note the difference in their preaching.”Footnote ⁹⁰ His concern was with the sophistication of sermons.

Kik and Pew were not necessarily working at cross-purposes. Using a commentary would not preclude pro-business sermons. Nor would the embrace of free markets mean a minister could not study the Gospels in Greek. But evangelicalism's definitive theological commitment to the importance of the Bible, it is fair to say, meant different things to different people.

For the editors planning Christianity Today, though, these differences did not matter. They agreed—or agreed enough—to make this line a definitive line. This was critical to the shape of evangelicalism. Even if they were inclined to make exceptions, this line was the line. “I would waive the view of the Bible in a few cases,” Henry confessed to his fellow editors, possibly thinking of C. S. Lewis. But that would be a mistake: “If we make one admission on this nebulous level, we shall be hard pressed to justify other exclusions.”Footnote ⁹¹

It was in the context of specific names that these decisions were made. When Henry, Bell, and Kik planted the flag for evangelicalism, they had to decide what it stood for. In their letters, they decided that it stood for the authority of the Bible and propitiatory atonement. They decided it did not include pentecostals, but it could. And they decided the historical character of the apocalypse would not be a defining issue. The conversation they were constructing was going to have some limits, even though they were not the limits one would have imagined, starting from the Bebbington quadrilateral.

V. Evangelicalism's Political Lines

As the editors constructed evangelicalism with these theological lines, they were also drawing political lines. In the thirteen months of correspondence, they discussed several public policy questions. In the process of picking and choosing names, they made decisions about evangelicalism's political shape.

There were three major issues that Henry, Bell, and Kik took positions on: first, the Cold War and the fight against communism; second, right-wing, free-market economics; and third, racial segregation.

The editors did not debate the Cold War much. They all agreed communism was evil and diametrically opposed to Christianity. They thought it a godless religion in competition with Christianity for eternal souls. When a sinner came down the aisle in one of Graham's crusades, the editors of Christianity Today all saw the saved soul as victory in the Cold War. The battlefield might be in Berlin, Korea, or Vietnam, but it was also in the hearts of every man and woman who needed to accept Jesus. The editors also all agreed that America needed spiritual resolve to successfully oppose the Soviet Union. There was, in a sense, a spiritual front to this conflict between nations and ideologies.Footnote ⁹²

They did discuss the Cold War briefly, though, as they approached the publication of the first issue. Henry had written a piece called “Fragility of Freedom in the West” arguing that the “Western conception of freedom needs to be revitalized” by religious renewal. “The modern crisis, in which the West itself is entangled more deeply than its leaders suspect, is, a religious crisis,” Henry wrote. “Decision for or against the living God is revealed as the upper side of the decision for or against the dignity and worth of the individual.”Footnote ⁹³ The editors agreed to use the piece to connect evangelicalism with cold warriors and identify it with the cause of anti-communism. A letter from Henry notes their success: the House of Un-American Activities Committee—the controversial congressional committee that investigated communism in the United States—had published two thousand copies of the article for distribution. The article, Henry reported, “has the enthusiasm of some friends at the Pentagon.”Footnote ⁹⁴ There was interest in publishing more—perhaps as many as two hundred thousand. This would give the new magazine a good deal of publicity and ensure evangelicalism was seen as a positive force in the fight against communism.

There was more discussion and more caution about a second political line: economic policy. This came up first with the question of Henry's involvement. Henry did not see eye to eye with Pew on the issue. Pew was 100 percent, always in favor of capitalism. Free markets were always good, and any regulation of business, organization of labor, or restrictions on capitalism were bad. Henry, for his part, was no lefty. He thought unions, for example, should only be allowed under certain conditions. As he told Bell and Kik: “I would defend the right of labor to organize, after it answers the question, for what?”Footnote ⁹⁵ But he thought Pew went too far. As Henry later recalled, he had a conversation with Pew about this early on. The two men talked “about the theological drift and the political-economic drift among many church leaders.” Henry remarked that “even capitalism, loosed from biblical values, could assume a monstrous form.” Pew replied that, “if it did, it would cease to be capitalism and accumulate collectivist features.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The two men seem, in this conversation, to have decided to act as if they basically agreed on the substance of the issue. They may have willfully misunderstood each other. There was a real difference that lurked in the background of the evangelicalism they were constructing.

Henry noted the possible problem on the issue of economics in an early letter to Graham. He said he might not be the man to helm the magazine because of “my conviction that American capitalism is not beyond Christian criticism.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Graham did not really want the magazine to be about economics, though, and did not think evangelicalism was going to be defined by the issue. In principle, yes, capitalism could be critiqued. But would Christianity Today really do that? The editors could probably mostly ignore the matter.

The issue came up again when Henry, Bell, and Kik were coming up with names for contributors. Henry asked if they would need to include Howard E. Kershner in some way, perhaps as a contributor or even an editorial associate. Kershner was a close ally of Pew's and a strong advocate of free market capitalism, which he wrote about extensively in his Pew-funded periodical, Christian Economics.Footnote ⁹⁸ Like Pew, Kershner believed capitalism was the only economic system in accord with the Bible and that even modest regulation of business was one step from total tyranny. Henry thought Pew might insist, as a condition of his financial support, that Kershner be involved in Christianity Today. Bell said that was not the case and tried to reassure Henry he would not have to accommodate Kershner. “I doubt if Mr. Pew would expect him to be an Editorial Associate,” Bell wrote. “His name would identify us with the extreme right-wing economic group.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Pew did later try to get more editorial control over the magazine, and at one point pushed for Kershner's involvement in the editorial process.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The power play failed, though, and Henry retained editorial control. Evangelicalism would, the editors agreed, reserve at least the right to criticize capitalism, even if there were few reasons to actually do so.

The most significant political issue that came up in the planning of Christianity Today was racial segregation and how evangelicalism would define itself with regards to Jim Crow. A year after the Supreme Court ruled against the segregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, segregation had to be discussed.

Henry, as he remembered it later, took a strong stand. The magazine had to address racial segregation. “I urged that Christianity Today address the race problem,” Henry wrote in the 1980s, “and that we might as well do so in our first Christmas issue.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ His memory is suspect, though. The editors’ correspondence does not show Henry taking this strong stand or, actually, any strong stand on the issue. The “race problem” did come up in the correspondence, but Henry assumed evangelicals would be white and thought they could just agree to disagree on Jim Crow.

Racial segregation came up—as all these issues did—in the context of a discussion about a specific person and whether or not that person should help define evangelicalism. That person was W. A. Criswell.

Criswell—Graham's pastor, added to the list of contributors by Bell—was a widely respected name among fundamentalists. He was a prominent Southern Baptist leader. And a hard-line segregationist. His association with the magazine might mean that Southern Baptists would see themselves as evangelical. But it would probably also mean evangelicalism was identified with Southern racism. In early 1956, Criswell made it very clear the problem part of the “race problem” was people trying to end segregation. At an evangelism conference in Columbia, South Carolina, Criswell preached that integration was “idiocy” and “a denial of all that we believe in.” He said integrationists were “all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up,” meddlers “trying to upset all of the things that we love as good old Southern people and as good old Southern Baptists.” Heaven, Criswell said, would be integrated, but on earth it was silly to let liberals intimidate you into changing your ways. Some Southern Baptists, according to Criswell, had been so intimidated they even stopped saying “chigger,” lest the colloquial name for the larval mites be mistaken for another word common in the South. Now, he joked, cowed Southern Baptists were saying “cheegro.” Criswell's rhetoric was shocking enough that a Northern Baptist leader wondered whether he had been misquoted, and the liberal Christian Century cautioned that Criswell did not speak for all Baptists. Graham felt it necessary to tell reporters that even though Criswell was his pastor, the two men had “never seen eye to eye on the race question.”Footnote ¹⁰²

With a mere seven months until their first publication, the editors of Christianity Today had a decision to make: was Criswell part of evangelicalism? Henry, for his part, thought it would be “parochial” to drop Criswell from the list of contributors. “I would rather retain Dr. Criswell,” he explained in a March 1956 letter, “and be brave enough to be critical of his view on race relations while we retain him, then to detach him from our enterprise.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Evangelicalism, as Henry imagined it, would have room for staunch segregationists. The magazine and the movement would be open to all views on Jim Crow, or at least all white views.

Kik more or less agreed with this, but thought the best course was caution. As with the issue of economics and the question of pentecostals, the best thing might be to avoid anything definitive. “It does not seem wise to me in the first few issues,” Kik said, “for us to tackle the race situation. It is something the three of us must consider very carefully.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Bell seconded the call for caution, and Henry went along with it. Christianity Today avoided the issue of race for the first year. In 1957, when the magazine finally published an article on the race problem, it was an article in favor of segregation. “Segregation has the potential to develop into a partnership of mutual respect,” wrote a Bible professor from Illinois. “The unfortunate fact is that ardent Christian integrationists, however conscientious, are one cause of the worsening race relations in the South today.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The piece was accompanied by an unsigned editorial, probably written by Henry, arguing that legal segregation was bad but that integration by force of law was just as bad. Both Jim Crow and Supreme Court-mandated desegregation were contrary to Christian principles.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The magazine—when it finally took a position—took a so-called “moderate” stand, which was actually quite acceptable to Southern racists.

Henry realized later this was a mistake. Just as Graham changed his position, evangelicals evolved along with the broader American culture on the issue of segregation. When Henry drafted his autobiography thirty years later, he said Christianity Today should have taken a stand against Jim Crow from the start. It did not, he said, because the editors deferred to Bell. Bell was the older man, and he was from South. Since segregation was a Southern issue, Henry decided to trust Bell when Bell said segregation was not about racial animosity. According to Bell, there were very practical reasons why white parents did not want their kids to go to school with African American children. Like cleanliness. “In the deep South,” he told Henry, “Negro children are so filthy, infected with disease, and immoral.” Northerners did not understand, according to Bell, because there were so few African Americans where they lived. In the South, the ratio of Blacks to whites was the big issue. Besides, the Civil Rights Movement was really being stirred up by communist agitators. Bell had it on good authority, he told Henry, that Martin Luther King Jr. had sent a telegram to the White House that was “worded identically like those received from Communist sources.” Bell also told Henry about rumors King “shacked up” with his secretary.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Bell, as a matter of fact, was as staunch a segregationist as Criswell. In the Southern Presbyterian Journal, he published numerous articles making arguments that segregation was biblical. Bell himself wrote that Blacks were inferior to whites because they were the descendants of Noah's son Ham, and Ham's descendants were cursed to servitude. The Bible did not support racial equality, he said. Trying to force equality would just cause “confusion, strife, hatred, and bloodshed.” In the magazine, Bell did recommend that whites be courteous to Black people, though. They should, he told his Presbyterian readers in 1946, say “thank you” and pat Black children on the head.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Since Bell had that experience with segregation, Christianity Today let him draw the line on this political issue. He decided, and the other editors agreed, that evangelicalism would be sympathetic to segregation and any criticisms would be muted and moderated, made into criticisms of legislation that could not really change people's hearts.

Henry did not feel good about this later. While drafting his autobiography, he chastised himself for accepting Bell's argument that segregation was about ratios and not race. He knew, deep down, that Bell was a racist. “Nelson's humorous anecdotes about Southern blacks,” he recalled, “left his editorial colleagues with the impression that the South's problem was more than one of ratio.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

When Henry revised his autobiography for publication, however, he edited all this out. He cut out the part about Bell's racist jokes, the rumors about King's communism and adultery, and the statement about how filthy Black children were. Henry did not explain how Christianity Today decided segregation was not the real problem with the “race problem.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Instead he protected Bell. Because evangelicalism, as Henry constructed it in 1955 and 1956, was about who knew whom, who trusted whom, and who supported Billy Graham.

Evangelicalism had a definite political shape at the end of the 1950s. It would of course change over time, but at the end of the 1950s, it was soft on segregation, procapitalist with a few reservations, and very adamantly anti-communist. None of this, notably, could have been predicted with the Bebbington quadrilateral. All of it can be explained, though, by looking at that moment in time and asking: “Who liked Billy Graham?”

VI. Defining Evangelicalism

Henry, Bell, and Kik spent thirteen months planning and prepping to plant the flag for evangelicalism. They made a lot of decisions in that time and drew a lot of lines to define evangelicalism. Then, in October 1956, they mailed off the first issue of Christianity Today, and people could subscribe to the magazine and, in that process, subscribe to the religious identity, too.

The magazine could not control the definition of evangelicalism completely, though. The editors’ lines were not fixed forever. New issues would emerge. New articulations of issues would come to seem important and new people would step forward to do the articulating. There was always competition for attention and trust. People would continue to identify with Billy Graham for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but the strength of that feeling could vary, and there were other religious leaders people also liked, and not all who took the name “evangelical” agreed about all these people all of the time. Sometimes, evangelicalism could seem like a single community that everyone imagined they were a part of. Other times, evangelicalism would seem more, as historian Robert K. Johnson wrote, like “a twelve-ring circus” with twelve or more different ring masters.Footnote ¹¹¹

The real meaning of “evangelical” would always be contested. It would be in flux. What is interesting, though, is that the Bebbington quadrilateral does not explain that flux. Focus on a moment in history when evangelicals are defining evangelicalism, drawing lines, and making decisions about who they trust, and the four marks do not explain why they do any of the things they do.

The founding of Christianity Today should be an easy case for a definition. The editors were consciously constructing evangelicalism. They took thirteen months. They documented their decisions in triplicate. But the Bebbington definition does not provide any basis for understanding why the editors planting this flag decided that an ardent segregationist was evangelical, but Queen Elizabeth II's Scottish chaplain was not. It does not shed any light on why eschatology did not matter and ecclesiology did not matter but communism was very important. It does not get at why pentecostals were not evangelical but could be evangelical at some later date. The Bebbington quadrilateral does not explain why evangelicalism was white. It is not useful if you want to think about evangelicalism as a historical reality.

If, on the other hand, evangelicalism is an imagined community, organized by communication networks, then one would not start with conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. Instead, the first questions would be who likes whom, who trusts whom, and who talks to whom. The answers to those questions will explain why this movement includes some people and not others, why the religious identity takes the shape it does. It will explain why Carl Henry, when he had to decide whether one minister was or was not an evangelical, sat down in October 1955 and wrote a letter asking the critical question: What do you think of Billy Graham?