Bob Smietana | Religion News Service | September 30, 2026
(RNS) — A group of prominent evangelical journalists is considering dropping the word “evangelical” from their name — saying the term has too much political baggage.
In early August, the board of the Evangelical Press Association, whose 300 members include publications like Christianity Today, Decision and the Christian Chronicle, recommended the group rebrand as the “Christian Communicators Network.”
“The recommendation recognizes that the word Evangelical increasingly carries political, cultural, and sociological meanings that often obscure its theological intent,” the EPA board wrote to members in recommending the change. “The word Christian, by contrast, is immediately understood around the world.”
EPA board members say the group’s theology will not change if members approve the change. Voting on the proposal closes on Oct. 7.
The move comes as other evangelicals have become more aggressive in defending the reputation of their movement — saying critics focus too much on politics and not enough on the good works of evangelicals.
Journalist Mark Kellner, an EPA member who has written for national publications like the Washington Times and NY Post, thinks the name change is unwise.
“I’m deeply concerned about this — and opposed for a number of reasons,” he said.
Kellner, who said he was speaking for himself, not the publications he writes for, said the word evangelical has clear theological meaning. A former news editor for Adventist Review magazine, Kellner said he left the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where he was both a member and employee, because the church’s beliefs no longer matched his own.
He ended up attending an evangelical church, which he said was a better match for his beliefs. The process of making that switch took years, he said.
“The word evangelical and the beliefs of evangelicals are now very, very important to me,” he said.
Kellner thinks the EPA’s leadership has made a short-sighted decision, based on the current political moment, especially the evangelical movement’s association with President Trump.
Shame in the Name
But that moment will change, he said. Trump will leave office in two years — but evangelical churches will still be around long after that. “There is no reason for anyone to be ashamed of the name evangelical, which, in its original meaning, stands for the good news,” he said.
Mark Dreistadt, an EPA board adviser and president of Infinity Concepts, a Christian marketing firm, said the group has been facing shrinking membership and felt a new name might help the group attract new members.
“We looked at the name,” he said, “and we said, ‘Yes, we are evangelical, but evangelical has a lot of baggage.’ We know many people who will not use the term.”
He pointed to a 2024 study commissioned by the EPA board, which surveyed Protestants whose beliefs about Jesus, the Bible and evangelism match a list put together by the National Association of Evangelicals. Sixty-one percent said the term evangelical Christian describes them — but 39% said it did not.
The study also found that evangelicals worry their neighbors and the media have a negative view of the word “evangelical.”
Views of American Public
“Only 24% believe the American public holds a positive view of this description, while 49% feel Americans are neutral on the term, and 27% feel there are negative feelings toward the description,” according to the report.
Dreistadt said the group is not changing its theology — so members will have to affirm evangelical beliefs, even if they don’t use the name.
The EPA’s discomfort with the word “evangelical” stems in part from the word having both religious and political connotations. Evangelicals in the U.S. are both a distinctive religious group and a powerful voting bloc. And the two groups aren’t identical, as data from Pew Research Center shows.
For example, white evangelicals and Black Protestants, according to Pew, are both highly religious and share many of the same beliefs about God and the Bible — and both groups are likely to say yes when asked if they are born again or evangelical Christians.
But the two groups vote very differently, with white evangelicals being among the strongest supporters of the Republican Party, while Black Protestants are equally supportive of Democrats.
In surveys focused on religion, not politics, like the Pew Religious Landscape study, Pew does not do the same kind of ethnic or racial sorting. So groups like evangelicals and Catholics end up with more racial and political diversity.
In the 2024 Pew Religious Landscape study, evangelicals were still predominantly white (70%), while 12% were Hispanic, 7% were Black, 6% were multi-racial and 3% were Asian American. Seventy percent leaned Republican, 24% leaned Democratic and 6% were in the middle. Fifty-nine percent considered themselves conservative, 30% moderate and 7% liberal. Pew also found that evangelicals and Black Protestants are among the most highly religious Americans.
A July 2026 report from Pew found that 76% of white evangelicals said they preferred the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in their district, while 10% favored the Democratic candidate and 11% were not sure. Evangelicals overall were more bipartisan, with 60% favoring the Republican candidate, 23% favoring the Democratic candidate and 12% not sure, Pew told RNS in an email.
Greg Smith, senior associate director of research at Pew Research, said pollsters could look at groups like Protestants or Catholics overall when looking at political behavior — and that would yield different results than breaking them down by race. But that would muddy the waters when it comes to politics
“If you just look at Catholics as a whole and you don’t take race into account, that would obscure more than it reveals,” he said. “The same thing would be true for Protestants.”
Journalist and author Bonnie Kristian, deputy editor at Christianity Today magazine, argues that the change from evangelical to Christian will create more problems than it solves.
“It extends an invitation that’s not actually being offered,” she said. “They’re not becoming a generically Christian association. It’s still evangelical according to them in every meaningful sense, and so I think it’s kind of rude to suggest to our mainline and Catholic and Orthodox siblings in Christ that we are inviting them to be part of something if we’re not actually inviting that.”
She plans to vote against the change.
Kristian, author of “In Defense of Evangelicalism,” a new book that defends the reputation of evangelicals against its cultural critics, said there are some contexts where the term doesn’t fit. And if that’s the case, don’t use it.
But she still thinks the word evangelical is helpful.
“If we are trying to talk about this large group of generally low church and theologically conservative Protestants who are not Pentecostal and are not mainline, we need a word for those folks,” she said. “And this is the most useful one we have.”
Kristian said that being an evangelical is more than just voting in presidential elections. And the evangelicals in the pews, she said, don’t match the political critiques. She said readers have responded well to the book, because it addresses that tension.
“I’ve gotten a lot of really positive responses,” she said, “particularly from thoughtful evangelicals who are aware of the discourse around evangelicalism and have felt this tension within themselves between what they read in the headlines about evangelicals as this threat to American democracy and then what they see in their sanctuary Sunday morning and in their Bible study on Wednesday night.”
Kristian said there has been a vibe shift in the conversation about evangelicals, with some authors and pastors pushing against critics. She said some evangelicals have deconstructed their faith, and now it’s time to move on and rebuild — “hopefully with something that both honors the traditions and learns from the errors of the recent past that were fairly critiqued,” she said.