Asking about people's views of the Bible in a single survey question has become the prevailing way to understand the mass public's religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the standard survey items raise questions about what is being measured. The questions used to measure one's views of the Bible are often double-barreled and leave considerable room for interpretation. In this paper, we assess the measurement error in the standard three-category question from the American National Election Study (ANES) by developing new items to gauge what it might mean to a respondent to select one of the three options in the standard Bible question. Using original data from two online surveys, we demonstrate that there is substantial measurement error in the standard ANES item. Analyses also show that our new items predict responses to the standard ANES item and are potent predictors of political attitudes—often performing better than the widely used three-category question.

Trump's unwavering support among white evangelicals seems a contradiction considering his seeming irreligiosity and well publicized moral transgressions. This contradiction raises an interesting question concerning whether Trump represents something of a unique case when it comes to white evangelical evaluations of elite religiosity, or whether his support among the group indicative of a new era of evangelical support for candidates that does not assess religiosity as it used to. Drawing on contemporary debates from the religious psychology and Christian nationalism scholarship, I use data from Wave 61 of the American Trends Panel (ATP) to test whether white evangelicals who encounter threats to their religious identities are more likely to view that God played some role in Trump's election. Overall, I find that white evangelicals consider themselves minorities as a result of their beliefs. Most importantly, these beliefs condition white evangelical beliefs about God's role in Trump's election. Specifically, I find that increases in threat perceptions lead to an increase in the probability of a white evangelical believing that Trump's election was part of God's plan. These findings provide a new vantage point for understanding why so many white evangelicals view Trump's election as a divine outcome despite the fact they are indifferent to his irreligiosity.

Within the one Church, the Church of England holds together in tension two distinctive streams, one rooted in the Catholic tradition (shaping Anglo-Catholic clergy) and one rooted in the Reformed tradition (shaping Evangelical clergy). Comparing the responses of 263 Anglo-Catholic clergy with the responses of 140 Evangelical clergy (all engaged in full-time stipendiary parish ministry) to the Coronavirus, Church & You Survey, the present analyses tested the thesis that these two groups would read the Church of England’s response to the Covid-19 crisis differently. The data demonstrated that, although Anglo-Catholic clergy were as willing as Evangelical clergy to embrace the digital age to assist with pastoral care, they were significantly less enthusiastic about the provision of online worship, about the closure of churches, and about the notion of virtual rather than geographical communities. The centrality of sacred space (parish church) and local place (parish system) remain more important in the Catholic tradition than in the Reformed tradition. As a consequence, Anglo-Catholic clergy have felt more disadvantaged and marginalized by the Church of England’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.

Today, Christianity is often described as a ‘worldview’, especially among Reformed evangelicals in the USA. In this article I return to the 1890 lectures where Scottish theologian James Orr adapted the concept of Weltanschauung for Christian purposes. Although it was coined by Immanuel Kant in 1790, and primarily used in subsequent decades to theorise cultural difference and evaluate aesthetic expression, Orr nevertheless claims that the idea of a worldview is ‘as old as the dawn of reflection’ and thus appropriate to articulating Christianity. I examine Orr's engagement with the Kantian and emerging historicist context, paying particular attention to his epistemological and aesthetic citations and showing how Orr both adopts and departs from the characteristic features of the Kantian subject. I conclude by assessing the philosophical and theological costs of this project that, among other things, positions Christianity for perpetual culture war within secular societies similarly shaped by the post-Kantian subject.

How does social identity shape Protestant attitudes about guns in the United States? Numerous studies show that religion shapes attitudes about guns, but the role of Protestantism in forming those attitudes is undertheorized and undertested. We draw from the extensive literature on religion-as-identity and the burgeoning literature of gun-ownership-as-identity to test the theory about the role of Protestant religion in cultivating a gun identity. We argue that for many Protestants, gun ownership has taken on the characteristics of a distinctive social identity, but that there are clear differences between different types of Protestants—notably, evangelicals and mainliners—that render the expansive category of “Protestant” largely irrelevant as an explanatory variable. While that finding might seem straightforward to scholars of religion and politics, the broad categorical approach—that is, treating “Protestant” as explanatory—has proven surprisingly durable in studies of gun ownership and attitudes about gun control. The analysis uses a recent Pew survey with batteries of questions about gun identity, gun policy, and religion. While this research note does not fully test why this relationship between Protestantism and gun identity exists, we do show that the relationship not only exists but also affects gun policy attitudes.

This essay argues that Barth's christological ecclesiology is worthy of consideration as a resource to fund a more robust and distinctly theological evangelical free church ecclesiology. Specifically, Barth's articulation of the church as witness, combined with his emphases on the gathering, upbuilding and sending of the church, all resonate with a distinctly free church vantage point. Additionally, I argue that Barth's theological interpretation of Matthew 18:20 (a verse of great significance for the free church tradition) further reveals his compatibility with free church ecclesiology. I conclude that while the traditional problems associated with evangelical reception of Barth need to be addressed and his doctrine of the church as grounded in Christ (and thus election) critically assessed, Barth does end up offering a resource that can inform the development of a theologically robust evangelical free church ecclesiology.

This article places missionary education squarely at the centre of any consideration of European expansion in the modern era. It focuses more specifically on the place of local teachers in Bolivia and their relationship with one evangelical Protestant mission, the Bolivian Indian Mission, which originated in New Zealand in the early 1900s. It takes a non-metropole and a “multi-sited” approach to missions and education. It argues that what we know about Bolivian teachers was mediated through the missionary voice and that these teachers negotiated their lives within a particular missionary space, in which there operated a number of intersecting influences from other sites within the wider imperial or Western network. It aims to both reclaim the identities of Bolivian teachers (focusing on teachers’ identity and function) and to reflect critically on intrinsic methodological and conceptual issues (emphasizing the nature of sources, missionary discourse, the resulting status of Bolivian teachers, and Bolivian agency).

Recent academic use of the word “evangelical” in American history has been surprisingly static. Drawing upon scholars of “evangelicalism,” historians have been tied to an “essentialist,” or doctrinal, definition of evangelicalism that stretches unbroken from the early eighteenth century to the present. Such ahistorical readings, however, obscure a far more interesting and complex reality. This essay argues that from the Protestant Reformation through the early twentieth century, to be “evangelical” was most often a Protestant-inflected way of being in the world, which at times could have multiple, changing, and contested doctrinal associations. It was a flexible and dynamic idiom, intended to communicate a relative biblical authenticity by those who wielded it. In particular, this essay seeks to recover three overlooked dimensions of the use of the word “evangelical”: first, the firmly Protestant and even anti-Catholic implication of the term that spanned the history of Protestantism from the 1520s to the twentieth century; second, the relative authenticity, “true-Christian” usage, which contained within it a strong “primitivist” impulse with reference to New Testament Christianity; and third, the contested nature of the word, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “evangelical” identity supposedly started to become more recognizable.

This article describes the fluidity of evangelical gender ideology during the 1970s and posits that belief in male headship became one of the distinct marks of evangelical identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, the Christian Right led a campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that the ERA was the means by which feminists were seeking to destroy the family. It became politically expedient for evangelicals to assert their support for male headship over and against a feminist paradigm of the family. In the 1990s and 2000s, as evangelicals had begun to feel less animosity towards feminism and had actually absorbed many feminist assumptions, the Christian Right's campaign against gay marriage gave evangelicals a new reason to cling to the ideology of male headship. The campaigns against the ERA and gay marriage have made evangelicals aware of the very real presence of different models of family in American society. This awareness has enhanced commitment to the headship model of marriage.

Historians Betty DeBerg and Margaret Bendroth have done much to point historians to the way in which gender ideology has been important to evangelical identity over the last century. By analyzing anti-ERA and anti-gay marriage evangelical literature, this article argues that gender ideology was integral to the formation of evangelical identity during the last third of the twentieth century. Thus, the article seeks to extend the argument of DeBerg and Bendroth into the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and to present gender ideology as a key feature in defining twentieth-century American evangelicalism.

Though forged in the fires of the early nineteenth-century evangelical revivals, Primitive Baptists became the most significant opponents of the burgeoning antebellum evangelical movement. The Primitives were Calvinists who despised missionaries, Sunday schools, Bible tract societies, and the other accoutrements of evangelical Protestantism. This article contends that a feeling of uncertainty dominated Primitive Baptists' lives, catalyzed their movement's rise, and fueled their strident opposition to the theological and organizational changes shaping churches across the country. For Primitive Baptists, it was their questioning–especially their experience of persistent doubt–that set them apart from evangelicals. The uncertainty that colored Primitive Baptist selfhood motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. It propelled them toward a community of like-minded souls, and it stirred those souls to action as a more ardent brand of evangelical Protestantism crowded church pews. It is in the Primitives' uncertain selves–not in their theology or their socio-economic condition–that we find the most compelling explanation of their movement's unlikely rise.

Attitude toward Christian mission agencies was investigated in a sample of 827 Anglican clergy ordained in the UK from 2002 to 2006. The Scale of Attitude Toward Mission Agencies (SATMA) consisted of six items related to the work that agencies do, and whether clergy wished to engage with this work. It had a high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.80). After controlling for theological liberalism or conservatism, attitudes were most positive among evangelicals and least positive among Anglo-Catholics. Both liberal and conservative Anglo-Catholic clergy showed less positive attitudes toward mission agencies than did other clergy.

Theological, historical and sociological factors help explain the evangelical turn in contemporary Catholicism. Theological factors considered here are an emphasis on evangelization as something of the Church's very nature and not just an activity that it does. This sits well with an ecclesiology that stresses the Church as a communion of disciples of Jesus. Three historical factors are raised all of which result in a more evangelical expression of Catholicism. These are a greater tension between the culture of the Church and wider culture. A renewed emphasis on conversion with a Christological focus and a greater emphasis on scripture in the life of the church. In sociological terms, a more evangelical Catholicism is evident in the movement away from a socialization model of religious affiliation to one which emphasizes choice, the religious consumer and a range of options. In this environment the Church must put more emphasis on evangelical proclamation as a way of pastoral outreach. A more evangelical Catholicism is seen as a general principle without being closed to other types of expression.