“The trouble with this way of defining evangelical is that it creates both false positives and false negatives.”
The most recent State of Theology Survey, produced by Ligonier Ministries (founded by the late R. C. Sproul) and Lifeway Research (a division of Lifeway Christian Resources, an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention), was released in late September 2025. The first of these surveys, which have been done roughly every two years, was released in 2014. There is much to discuss about this survey. In this article I will focus on the issues it raises concerning how we define evangelicalism.
As in past surveys, evangelicals were defined by Lifeway Research as people who strongly agreed with all of the following four statements:
- The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
- It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
- Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
- Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.
Anyone who disagreed, was unsure, or even only “somewhat agreed” with any of these four statements is classified as not an evangelical by belief, according to this definition. The trouble with this way of defining evangelical is that it creates both false positives and false negatives.
On the one hand, most or all Jehovah’s Witnesses, Biblical Unitarians, and Oneness Pentecostals could strongly agree with at least three and likely all four statements. (Jehovah’s Witnesses would need to overlook their idiosyncratic claim that Jesus died on a simple upright stake instead of a cross, so some of them might very well respond “agree somewhat” to the third statement.) Yet these religions should not be classified as evangelical because they are radically restorationist, claiming that all traditional Christians, including evangelical Protestants, believe in a pagan concept of deity, namely, the doctrine of the Trinity.
I realize that there is no “official” or normative definition of the term evangelical, which has been used and (in my opinion) abused in the media and debated by scholars for about fifty years. The Survey’s definition is loosely based on the academic definition advanced by British historian David W. Bebbington. The Bebbington Quadrilateral, as it came to be known, identifies “biblicism” (viewing the Bible as supreme source of religious belief), “activism” (holding that effort is expected of believers), “crucicentrism” (a cross-centered faith), and “conversionism” (belief that people need personal conversion).[1] You can see that these four factors roughly correspond to the four statements that the Survey uses to define evangelicals by belief. Bebbington advanced his description in the context of distinguishing evangelicalism from other traditional forms of Christianity such as Catholicism and liberal Protestantism. It fails to distinguish evangelicals from heretical religions that originated with former evangelicals and that retain some of the ethos of evangelicalism while overtly repudiating it both theologically and institutionally.
Anyone in those anti-Trinitarian groups who strongly agreed with all four statements would be false positives, i.e., people wrongly counted as evangelicals. It doesn’t appear that a lot of people from those groups were so counted, because 97% of those classified by beliefs as evangelicals strongly agreed with a statement affirming the Trinity. Still, it would be better to define evangelicals—especially if beliefs are the criteria—to exclude anti-Trinitarians.
On the other hand, two of these statements—the second and fourth listed above—may generate large numbers of false negatives, i.e., exclude a fair number of people who should be counted as evangelicals. There must be a fair number of evangelicals who recognize the importance of evangelism but do not consider it very important that they personally be engaged in evangelism. They may be disabled or shut-ins, or extremely shy, or engaged in ministries that focus almost exclusively on helping people who are already Christians, or they might have any number of other reasons not to agree strongly with the statement. They also might just be immature. For that matter, all such Christians and many others might “somewhat agree” with the statement, with all sorts of possible qualifiers, and they would not be counted as evangelicals according to this definition.
The fourth statement may be even more problematic. Christians who resoundingly agree with the third statement about Christ’s death as the only sacrifice for sins (not just mine, but anyone’s) might have a variety of reasons to hesitate in agreeing fully or strongly with the statement that only those who trust in Christ alone as Savior will be saved. What about children who die in the womb or as small children? What about those who are mentally disabled? What about believers in the Old Testament period? These possible exceptions to the statement would be enough to cause many people who would otherwise be classified as evangelicals to stop short of enthusiastically agreeing with it. I myself would have some reservations and might end up saying that I “agree somewhat” with it. Does that mean I am not an evangelical? And there are other more controversial questions, such as whether people who have never heard the gospel have any possibility of being saved.[2]
The Survey also provides a classification of “evangelicals” based on church affiliation. This means that respondents who identified as members or participants in Assemblies of God, Churches of Christ, Evangelical Free Church, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Presbyterian Church in America, Southern Baptist, or similar churches were classified as evangelicals by “affiliation.” Between 56% and 75% of persons classified as evangelicals by affiliation agreed with the four statements used to define evangelicals by belief.
My intent here is not to argue for a supposedly perfect definition of evangelicalism to which everyone should agree. Rather, I’m mainly arguing that discussions about what “evangelicals” believe, including but not limited to those engaging with the State of Theology Survey, often fail to take into consideration the kinds of issues I’ve mentioned here.
NOTES
[1] David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). See also his later work, The Evangelical Quadrilateral, 2 vols. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021). Ligonier Ministries has two articles on its website presenting (and endorsing) the Bebbington Quadrilateral. See Stephen Nichols, “‘I’m an Evangelical’: Rescuing the Term,” Ligonier.org, Nov. 14, 2015; W. Robert Godfrey, “Bebbington’s Four Points of Evangelicalism,” Ligonier Updates, Aug. 29, 2020.
[2] These questions are explored in detail in Kenneth D. Boa and Robert M. Bowman Jr., Sense and Nonsense about Heaven and Hell (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007).