Evangelical: One word, various shades of meaning. Thus, the confusion on who are the real evangelicals and what their real numbers are.
This confusion has become clearer in this year's U.S. presidential election as rival candidates claim the support of various evangelical groups.
Part of the confusion is due to the lack of a common English definition for the term, according to Charisma News.
Because of the word's muddled definition, the number of people belonging to this particular subset of Christianity also varies.
One study says there are roughly 62 million evangelicals, while another puts the number closer to 100 million.
Wheaton College described the confusion as follows:
"Given the imprecision involved in defining exactly what—or who—an evangelical is, it is no surprise that it is extremely difficult to establish a precise estimate of their exact numbers in the United States.
"With so many different evangelical denominations, thousands upon thousands of independent evangelical churches, evangelical constituencies of varying sizes within historically evangelical 'mainline' Protestant denominations—and even inside non-evangelical denominations—there is no single entity that can possibly serve as a representative gatekeeper (or census-taker) for the movement."
Gallup, the research-based, global performance-management consulting company, acknowledges that the term "evangelical" is vague.
"About 8 in 10 Americans at least nominally adhere to a Christian faith of one sort or another. The term evangelicals refers to a subset of this enormous group—a segment of Christians who by various definitions take their religion very seriously and also believe that the religious calling means that one should take action within the environment in which one lives. The most obvious such aspect of the environment is politics, and thus there has been an explosion of interest in the effect of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party on the political realm in recent years," a Gallup statement says.
The polling firm says at times it used a procedure consisting of three questions asking respondents if they have had a born-again experience committing themselves to Jesus Christ, if they have tried to encourage someone to believe in Jesus Christ, and if they believe the Bible is the actual word of God.
Twenty-two percent of Americans agree with all three questions, according to a Gallup Poll conducted in May 2005.
The word "evangelical" actually comes from the Greek word euangelion, which simply means "gospel" or "good news." As such, an evangelical is simply someone who believes in the Good News—that Jesus Christ died on the cross to pay for our sins so that we might be saved from eternal damnation through our faith in Him and His saving grace alone.
Based from this definition, an evangelist is one who shares the Good News with others.
