On Studying Evangelicalism

On Studying Evangelicalism
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By one of Gallup's definition (see "Further Restrictions on Self-Definitional Criteria") , Black Americans cannot be evangelical. Catholics cannot be evangelical.

Why?

For two contradictory reasons:

Black Americans can't be evangelical because Gallup sees themselves conducting research "for the purposes of analysis involving political variables." Thus, "the presence of blacks in the sample of evangelicals can be confusing. A large percentage of blacks have historically identified with the Democratic Party. Thus, for most analytical purposes, including blacks as part of the sample of evangelicals confounds the analysis, particularly when one discusses the relationship between being evangelical and certain political stances."

The above wording would lead us to conclude that Gallup views the religious world through a strictly political lens. Right?

Well, then we find that that Catholics aren't included in the definition because, "for analytical purposes, Catholics are historically different enough from members of traditionally non-Catholic, Protestant denominations to warrant their exclusion from an evangelical definition. Hence the usual decision to exclude Catholics from the 'evangelical category.'"

Now we've switched lenses; we don't exclude Catholics for any American political reasons (at least that seems to be the gist here), we don't include them for historical (read: internal religious) reasons.

If we were going to exclude Catholics and blacks from "evangelical," we'd have to be consistent: we'd have to either point out that Catholics are, by and large, democrat (ergo, non-evangelical like the blacks) or that blacks are historically religious counterparts to evangelicals (ergo, non-evangelicals like the Catholics).

Anyway, the main point is that Gallup's methodology ends up defining major parts of "evangelicals" instead of doing what it says it would do by analyzing the emergent commonalities of those who say they are "born again" or evangelical.