Please read the title of this post aloud, and then, if your situation allows, sing it in your best Kermit the Frog voice.
I suggest this because it’s fun, and also because I’m hoping it will set a mood and a tone here for what follows, which is yet another discussion of the often-contentious and never-ending argument about the definition or description or boundaries of “evangelicalism.” Since we’ll be revisiting an older post on the subject titled “Fightin’ words in the ‘evangelical definition wars,’” maybe it will reduce the temperature of the fightin’ and warring a bit if we all start out with a little “Rainbow Connection.”
That older post from 2024 gathered some initial reactions to Matthew Avery Sutton’s splashy contribution to this discussion, “an article in the Journal of the Academy of American Religion that summarizes and synthesizes the criticisms of the once-consensus historiography of American evangelical Protestantism and proposes a new approach that can better account for and respond to the substance of those criticisms.”
The blandly academic title of Sutton’s article — “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right” — didn’t fully convey how contentious his proposed redefinition was going to be. The core of his proposal was this:
I argue that post–World War II evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics. Contemporary evangelicalism is the direct descendant of early twentieth-century fundamentalism, North and South. Both movements are distinct from Antebellum forms of Christianity. There is no multi-century evangelical throughline.
The first half of that paragraph is obviously contentious, but outsiders may not fully recognize how the last two sentences also constitute “fightin’ words.” The “consensus” of the “consensus historians,” after all, centered the DSM-style description of the “Bebbington Quadrilateral,” a proposal first articulated in a book presenting a history of British evangelicalism “from the 1730s to the 1980s.” Sutton’s blunt conclusion — “There is no multi-century evangelical throughline” — gave me flashbacks to the Great Phillis Wheatley Flamewar of 2018, a rancorous argument that got nowhere for its participants largely because of their incompatible assumptions regarding the shape and meaning of variously imagined “multi-century evangelical throughline[s]”
Angry, shouting-past-one-another conversations like that one sometimes spilled onto the pages of the Anxious Bench, the wonderful group blog from a rotating roster of historians on Patheos’ “evangelical” channel. Experience with such prickly debates may have been part of why Jake Randolph chose to step back to reframe the response to Sutton’s piece in more general terms. Back in 2024, Randolph wrote:
This is the classic “Lumper v. Splitter” debate, right? Sutton is certainly arguing as a splitter. I tend to be a splitter in my own academic storytelling. Religious movements are much more idiosyncratic and culturally circumscribed than they tend to admit, in my opinion. …
I think this “classic ‘Lumper v. Splitter’ debate” is an illuminating framework for the ongoing “evangelical definition wars.” But while I’d lump that argument in with other examples of “Lumper v. Splitter,” I’d also argue that it is distinctly split from them.
We can see examples of the lumper/splitter argument applied to all sorts of categories in many different disciplines — history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, religious studies, art history, etc. Some scholars are intent on emphasizing all the things that Monet and Manet have in common while other scholars are just as intent on emphasizing the many ways in which they are different. Academic debates like that can get plenty heated but they are still, ultimately, academic.
The arguments between lumpers and splitters in the evangelical definition wars are never purely academic because they closely parallel the perpetual lumper/splitter dynamic that constitutes evangelicalism.
This is where I think it may be helpful to talk again about Amy Grant.
As a teenager, Grant wrote a song for her evangelical church youth group and recorded a demo with her Sunday school teacher. That song, “Mountain Top,” was about worship and evangelism and that demo landed her a record contract with Word Records, a white evangelical record label in Nashville that markets music by and for white evangelical Christians. And in 1977 she released her self-titled first album, which was filled with what white evangelicals back then liked to call “explicitly Christian lyrics.”
That was followed by My Father’s Eyes in 1979 — still a year before George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, the earliest of the big books that would shape what later became the “consensus history” describing and defining this thing called “evangelicalism.”
After the lovely 1981 album Never Alone, Amy Grant released the blockbuster Age to Age in 1982 — the album that established her as the Queen of CCM. David Bebbington hadn’t yet begun formulating the “quadrilateral” he would introduce in his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain seven years later, so back in 1982 nobody would have known what you were talking about if you tried either lumping or splitting the category of “evangelicals” according to biblicism, conversionism, etc. But if you’d said, “You know, those Christians who are all singing Amy Grant’s ‘El Shaddai,'” then everyone would’ve known exactly who and what group you were talking about.
In 1982, Marsden hadn’t yet (I don’t think) offered his half-joking definition of an evangelical as “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” But that joke — and the truth of it — would have worked just as well in 1982 if he’d said an evangelical is anyone who likes Amy Grant.
My point here is that in the age of Age to Age, Amy Grant absolutely, unequivocally belonged in the category of “evangelical.” In 1982, any attempt to define the category in a way that failed to include her in it would have been wrong. And any attempt then to define the category in a way that sought to exclude her from it would have been wrong. Trying to define the category by doctrine, theology, or practice would have meant discussing the kind of doctrine, theology, and practice described in her songs. Any attempt to make a cultural or subcultural definition would have had to acknowledge that she was an iconic part of that culture.
And yet, even in 1982, the gatekeepers of white evangelicalism were already seeking to exclude her from that community. Evangelicals loved her and that love was not controlled by the gatekeepers, so it had to be brought under their control.
Which leads us on straight ahead to Amy’s next three albums — Straight Ahead (1984), Unguarded (1985), and Lead Me On (1988). These were all hugely popular with her evangelical audience — every one was at least a gold album.* But her increasing success and popularity also brought increasing scrutiny from those gatekeepers.
And the gatekeepers are always, always, always splitters.
That’s their role. They catechize and test and probe, requiring perpetual, daily reaffirmation of one’s membership within the tribe. They define who belongs by constantly seeking out and expunging whoever it is they say does not belong.
Quite often this is routine — say the things, affirm the affirmations. We all knew to do this, and how to do this, reflexively and as a matter of course and without requiring any extra effort or inconvenience. And it was no problem, because we all believed the things we needed to be heard saying and affirming, again and again. It might be a little frustrating, occasionally, that we’d be asked or required to affirm again this afternoon the thing we’d already clearly affirmed this morning, but it was usually no big deal.
No big deal, that is, unless or until you find yourself under particular scrutiny from the gatekeepers. That increased the intensity of their monitoring in a way that meant the standard affirmations and recitations were no longer sufficient.
By the time we evangelicals were all listening to Unguarded, Amy could no longer afford to be unguarded. She was under a microscope from splitters intent on finding some pretense for splitting her off as no-longer or not-really “evangelical.” The gatekeepers of the category she once exemplified were trying to find a way to evict her from her own spiritual home.
Now, when that is your context, there is nothing abstract or academic or impersonal about “the classic ‘Lumper v. Splitter’ debate.” You have a stake in this — an intensely personal stake involving what you regard as the Most Important Thing. When that is your context, the splitters aren’t just one side of an abstract debate, they are the people who are trying to tell you that you are not you — that you are not who you know yourself to be.
And when you spend years dealing with those gate-keeping splitters, pushing back against them every day, it can be so exhausting and infuriating that you will have little patience even for the arguments of the abstract academic splitters because their efforts seem to parallel those of the gatekeeping jackwagons constantly harassing you.
This is the lens through which many, perhaps most, of the academics involved in the “evangelical definition wars” are bound to view any proposed definition that seems to come down on the “splitter” side. It is unavoidably — and properly — personal for them.
So when somebody like Matthew Avery Sutton comes along and says “evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics” it can feel for them exactly the way it has felt for them over the past several decades when the gatekeeping goons said to them — repeatedly and regularly — “You are a fake Christian and your story of being born again and transformed by your religious experience must be a lie and you must hate Jesus and the Bible because what it really means to be an evangelical is to be like us — to be part of a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement seeking power to transform American culture through conservative politics.”
It’s very hard not to perceive any “splitter” perspective as a personal attack because it is one. It’s not only that, and it’s not intended as that, but if the definition splits you apart from who you know yourself to be, then it is always going to land as a personal attack. I understand that. See, for example, my response to one splitter’s argument intent on redefining the category of “evangelical” in a way intended to declare my own faith illegitimate: “Dear Thomas Kidd: Bite Me.”
That was in response to a lazy, poorly thought-out “academic”argument that was indistinguishable from the work of any gatekeeping hatchet-job attempting to shore up power and control by “farewelling” dissenters. But when it comes to the lumper v. splitter debate in this topic, even a rigorous, well-conceived argument for the splitter side tends to sound more than a little bit like the work of those gatekeepers.
Richard Cizik was a devout, church-going evangelical. He was a born-again Christian who knew the books of the Bible and John 3:16.** He worked for decades for the National Association of Evangelicals as a kind and effective representative of its member evangelical churches and denominations. He scored a perfect 4-for-4 on the “Bebbington Quadrilateral.”
And yet Rich Cizik was abruptly fired because the gatekeepers of white evangelicalism learned that he had once voted for Barack Obama. This, they said, proved that evangelicals could not trust him because he was not really evangelical. He lost his job and his career and his health insurance, and his whole life was turned upside down. The gatekeepers relished pointing that out as a warning to everyone else working at any evangelical association or institution: We don’t care about your personal testimony or your personal faith and devotion. That doesn’t matter. Vote the way we insist you must vote, or you could be next.***
The Cizik-ing of Rich Cizik seems like evidence in support of Sutton’s thesis in “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right.” Cizik was fired and punished and expelled from evangelicalism precisely because he did not support the white/patriarchal/nationalist political movement that Sutton says defines the boundaries of evangelicalism.
But where does that leave us? Doesn’t saying “Sutton is right about evangelicalism” entail also saying “Those cynically power-mad gatekeeping assholes are right about evangelicalism”?
Is there any way to agree with Sutton that “post–World War II evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics” without also therefore having to agree with every nasty Tweet from the likes of some toe-jam mouth-breather like Owen Strachan proclaiming that Rachel Held Evans had no business talking to Real, True Evangelical Christians?
I think there is. Because, after all, we’ve only gotten as far as Lead Me On, remember. And a lot has changed since 1988, for Amy Grant and for the rest of white evangelicalism. The gatekeeping splitters have, perhaps, not leavened the whole lump.
For now let’s just stop for a minute, because baby, baby, there’s more to discuss here.
* This was back in the days when charts and sales were still somewhat guesswork determined by surveys. Those not entirely precise methods in the mid-1980s found that Amy Grant and Garth Brooks seemed to be fairly popular despite the limited appeal of their respective genres. A few years later the industry switched to an actual, more precise measurement of sales based on what was actually scanned at checkout counters. The initial response to this change was, roughly, “Holy cow — Amy Grant and Garth Brooks are huge megastars!”
** Kudos to everyone who recognizes this as an Amy Grant lyric. That song does not really apply to Rich. I saw the Bible he carried with him at work every day and it was not the big-gest King James you’ve ever seen.
*** We should note that Matthew Avery Sutton is employed by the University of Washington and not, say, Wheaton College. He can afford to argue for the “splitter” side of this debate without worrying about that possibly meaning his kids won’t be able to go to the doctor. If you’re an academic working for an evangelical institution and your every public comment and class syllabus is being closely monitored by scalp-collecting gatekeepers, the “lumper” side of that debate has a greater personal appeal. I’m not suggesting that this shapes or determines the perspectives argued by any of these folks. But it is a thing worth remembering.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In