Payne, William P.2019-09-252019-09-252016-07-192003http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/155051"In discussions with theologically conservative African American Christians, I discovered that the term "evangelical" has a negative association for many of them. They associated the word with a politically conservative agenda and mentioned school prayer, school vouchers, pro-Israel policy, the death penalty, and other political platform issues that are coupled with American evangelicalism as reasons for their antipathy. In the same conversations, some white evangelicals stressed the historical and theological components of the term and focused on those meanings to define the word and themselves. In this article, I describe American evangelicalism in terms of social movement dynamics and offer an alternative word to describe theologically conservative Protestants"engWith permission of the license/copyright holderSocial MovementModern American EvangelicalismProtestantstheologically conservativePolitical ethicsReligious ethicsChristian denominationsGlobal Church History and World ChristianityContemporaryArticle