Was George W. Bush Good or Bad for Evangelical Christianity's Image?

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

Responding to the question of whether George W. Bush was the most faith-based president in modern times, reader Darcy Grant says that Bush actually alerted many Americans to the dangers of a conservative evangelical worldview:

The sad thing is that George W. Bush's behavior in the White House did in fact represent the conservative evangelical form of Christianity in the United States, a form of Christianity that views the Bible as the inerrant, inspired, and infallible "Word of God." Although we (and others) paid a high price for it (and will continue to pay a high price for years to come), there is one good thing that came from the atrocities committed by the Bush administration: George W. Bush's behavior in the White House demonstrated very powerfully, for many Americans, the gross, practical outcome of a strictly conservative evangelical perspective.

I've seen conflicting reports about whether the political involvement of evangelical Christians, including the election of Bush and many of the causes he promoted, has helped or hurt Christianity's cause. On the one hand, Barna Group President David Kinnaman writes in his recent book UnChristian that Christianity—and evangelicals in particular—have a growing image problem. Time's David van Biema summarizes Kinnaman's research:

It used to be, says David Kinnaman, that Christianity was both big and beloved in the U.S.—even among its non-adherents. Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman's organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, "That was then."

Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians) aged 16 to 29, found that 38% had a "bad impression" of present-day Christianity. "It's not a pretty picture" the authors write. Barna's clientele is made up primarily of evangelical groups.

. . . Not only has the decline in non-Christians' regard for Christianity been severe, but Barna results also show a rapid increase in the number of people describing themselves as non-Christian. One reason may be that the study used a stricter definition of "Christian" that applied to only 73% of Americans. Still, Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non-Christians is growing with each succeeding generation . . . .

On the other hand, the recent American Religion Identification Survey shows that evangelical Christianity is one of the few religious traditions that are growing in the United States:

Most of the growth in the Christian population occurred among those who would identify only as "Christian," "Evangelical/Born Again," or "non-denominational Christian." The last of these, associated with the growth of megachurches, has increased from less than 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to over 8 million today. These groups grew from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 8.5 percent in 2001 to 11.8 percent in 2008. Significantly, 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants now also identify themselves as evangelical or born again.

How to square these two trends? It's the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches that are bleeding members, while evangelical and evangelically tinged nondenominational Christianity grows. As those movements expand and increase their political clout, non-Christians—including those who were formerly mainline Protestants or Catholics—develop more negative views about them. More demographic evidence that the culture wars are escalating.

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