How Distinctive are Evangelicals, really?
'Embattled and Thriving' in 2025.
There’s this book that came out way back in 1998 that has a title that has to rank up there in my favorite ones of all time, “American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving.” It’s by Christian Smith and Michael Emerson. They did a tremendous amount of work to generate the methodological scaffolding of the book including doing in-depth interviews with dozens of evangelical Christians along with some solid survey analysis. The thesis of the book is that evangelicalism has benefitted from how it’s positioned itself in the broader culture of the United States. They call it “subcultural identity theory” and it’s worth explaining.
Smith and Emerson contend that the real success of the evangelical movement in this country is how it’s managed to learn from the mistakes of both fundamentalism and mainline Protestant Christianity. The widely held narrative around fundamentalists is that they felt very ostracized due to the perception of conservative Christianity in the wake of the Scopes Monkey Trial. The dominant stance of this movement became - “let’s cloister ourselves over here in this corner of society. We will work on our own personal piety and devotion and the rest of the world can (quite literally) go to Hell.”
A Sixty Year History of White Evangelicals and Politics
If you ask the chattering class who pay attention to the intersection of religion and politics to name one statistic about voting patterns, I can guess with a high degree of certainty which one that they will recall:
The mainline failed because it tried to be too much like the world. Sure those churches still spoke about things like repentance and sin sometimes. But really they became more and more like country clubs with every passing year. And if it’s just the country club with a bit of religion, isn’t it just easier to skip the Jesus part and just head right to the golf course? For those who want to read more about this, I would strongly recommend this wonderful piece by N.J. Demerath III from 1995.
So evangelicals struck a middle path. They did not make the mistake of turning inward completely, nor did they capitulate to the larger culture either. Instead, they still managed to interact with the world just enough while maintaining their cultural distinctiveness on things like sexuality, abortion, divorce, etc. This led to two really important sociological outcomes.
Evangelicals engaged with the world on a regular basis which still afforded them the ability to try and bring new converts into the fold. I mean, can you really call yourself evangelicals if you don’t actually evangelize? So, they still kept some lines of communication open with the larger culture.
This engagement with the world also helped strengthen intergroup ties. By bumping up against the culture on a regular basis it reminded evangelicals why they were so different from the world around them. They would see people around them drinking, smoking, and ‘sinning’ in various ways and made them realize how they had to stand firm against all the temptations that could easily sway them away from the fold.
In other words, they constantly felt a sense of embattlement against the larger culture and that was the engine that led to their subculture thriving.
More than twenty-five years after this book was published there’s a lot of survey data that’s been collected that point to the overall distinctiveness of evangelicalism. As the United States has become much more secular, evangelicals have gone in the opposite direction. Let me show you.
This is the share of evangelicals who report attending religious services nearly every week or more. I can trace this data back a full five decades using the General Social Survey.
In 1972, only about 42% of evangelicals reported weekly church attendance. And, honestly that number stayed pretty steady around 45% for the next two decades. However, it began to creep up by the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. By 2004, it was clearly above 50% and it just kept running up from there. In the most recent data collected in 2022, 55% of American evangelicals attended church nearly every week or more. That’s a twelve point increase since 1972. Remember - in the general population weekly attendance has dropped from 40% in the 1970s to 25% today. Is religious attendance declining? Depends how you define your terms.
What about a belief? The GSS has often included a question about how a respondent viewed the Bible. They are given three options: it should be taken literally, word for word; it’s inspired by God but shouldn’t be taken literally or it’s a book of fables and stories written by men. I calculated the share of evangelicals who took the literalist view of the Bible. This is what I get.
Again, the slope of the line is not incredibly steep, but it’s absolutely moving in the upward direction. In 1995, about 55% of evangelicals took a literalist stance. By the early 2010s that had inched up about five points and in the most recent data collected in 2022, the share of evangelicals who believe that the Bible should be taken literally is 62% - an all-time high. Evangelicals are more evangelical today than at any point in the last fifty years. It’s not a religious group that has been infiltrated by moderates.
You can also see that when looking at a question about belief in God or a Higher Power.
Folks are given six response options to choose from when asked about their belief in God ranging from “God doesn’t exist” to “I know God exists and I have no doubt about it.” This graph is incredibly boring in that there is no slope to this line at all - in either direction. In 1988, about 80% of evangelicals believed in God without a doubt. In 2022, the trend line evens out to slightly above 80%. It’s not substantively changed at all. Again - the larger culture is secularizing while evangelicals are maintaining their devotion, if not increasing it slightly.
But let me try and encapsulate what I just showed you in one single graph. This is putting those three measures together into one metric. This is calculating the share who: attend church nearly every week or more, believe that the Bible is literally true and believe in God without any doubts.
Given the prior analysis, it should come as little surprise that the line for evangelicals is high and continuing to move upwards over the 35 years. In 1988, about 30% of evangelicals met all three criteria. In the 2022 data that was about 36%. But there were years in the time series where it was 40%+. The blue line represents the other Christian traditions - the mainline, the Black Church, and Roman Catholics. Very few met all three criteria. In 1988, it was just above 10%. In the 2022 results it was almost completely unchanged at 13%.
But I want to point out the gap between these two lines over time. In the 1988 data, the statistical difference between evangelicals and the rest of Christianity was slightly less than twenty percentage points. In the 2022 data, that had widened significantly to about 27 percentage points. Again - evangelicals have thrived because they are so distinct from the larger Christian culture around them.
However, one has to wonder if this is going to continue being the case? I mean, maybe young evangelicals are going to hear the siren song of the culture and begin to compromise on these belief and behavior metrics, right? The GSS refutes that idea pretty strongly.
For the oldest Christians, there’s a clear gap between the piety of evangelicals and those in non-evangelical Christian traditions. About 44% of retired evangelicals attend religious services nearly every week, believe in a literal Bible and have no doubt about the existence of God. Among other Christians in this same age, it’s only 19%. That’s a total gap of 25 percentage points. The gap is even larger when looking at those 50-64 years old - 32 points difference.
Liberals Have Won the Culture War
Anyone remember Pat Buchanan? He was a far-right conservative who ran an insurgent campaign against George H.W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 1992. When Bush announced his desire to run for a second term, it was assumed that he would have no real challenger in his own party. But Buchanan was a bomb thrower and excoriated Bush for being too moder…
But what about the younger set of Christians? The first thing I want to point out is that overall piety is down significantly for both groups. Only about a third of younger evangelicals meet these three criteria - which is about 12 points lower than their older counterparts. But younger non-evangelical Christians score incredibly low on these metrics, too. So, the end result is that the distinctiveness between evangelicals and non-evangelicals is still large - 25 points among those between the ages of 18 and 35.
In other words, evangelicals are a distinct subculture. That was true thirty years ago and it’s even more accurate today. While the larger culture has shifted its opinions on things like marijuana legalization and same-sex marriage - evangelicalism has still managed to largely resist these cultural winds. Even among young evangelicals who are growing up in an incredibly non-religious world, their piety stands far apart from their peers.
They have managed to maintain that ‘us vs them’ mentality which leads to that sense of embattlement. And that sense of being a persecuted minority has been a fuel on the fire of their continued cultural relevance in a rapidly secularizing world.
Code for this post can be found here.
Fascinating breakdown, Ryan—what strikes me most is how evangelicalism’s distinctiveness isn’t just preserved in spite of secularization but because of it. The embattlement narrative doesn’t just survive cultural change; it metabolizes it into fuel. There’s something potent—and also deeply dangerous—about a movement that thrives through contrast rather than coherence.
At what point does “cultural distinction” become a performance of opposition rather than a pursuit of truth? When belief becomes a posture of resistance rather than relationship or inquiry, is it still belief—or is it identity defense dressed in theological clothes?
Thanks for laying out the data so clearly. It opens the door to deeper questions about what kind of scaffolding actually supports faith—and what just props up tribal belonging.
Ryan I wonder how this would interact with your running thesis that politics and not religion is the guiding principle for people today.
Because, to be honest it's hard to believe these stats. As an evangelical I've seen over and over again over the last decade (both on the ground and from evangelical leaders) the steady secularization of evangelicalism, from a transcendent mission to becoming caught in the immanent frame. It hasn't shown itself in "official" beliefs per say, but in a change in ethics and in mission.
I have 10 years worth of examples (collected for a Master's thesis), and so maybe I am guilty of confirmation bias or focusing too hard in one place, but evangelicalism from the inside looks to be deeply compromised.