What is an "Evangelical" and How Many Are There

The Barna Group is headed by an evangelical but does legitimate polling. It is different than other polling groups in that it does not merely ask questions like, "Do you believe in God?" It pokes more deeply into people's inner lives. Recently it found the inner lives are not reflected in being a member of one kind of a church or another. By its definition of "evangelical" Barna found there are fewer than previously thought. 

I did not wade through the fine points of what Barna found as "evangelical." I know from commenters a lot of people spend their lives debating who is and who is not an evangelical. What I think is that the role of religion in people's lives is overstated by general polling questions like, "Do you believe in God" or "Do you pray and how often." Are people thinking about "God" and "prayer" 80% of the time or 008% of the time. And, what exactly do they consider "God" and "Prayer?"

The role of religion, specifically Christianity, is overestimated at every turn, so it seems to me. Just now I'm reading an exhaustively detailed book about how Alexander Hamilton maneuvered money and votes in the House and Senate to make the Federal Government superior to the 13 colony/states. There was resistance at every turn. If you listen to religious pundits, they will say all the goings on during those late years of the 1700's were about "establishing a Christian Nation." According to official records and surviving letters where prominent players discussed what was on their minds and what they feared the entire effort establishing the U. S. Government was making money. Alexander Hamilton himself is mostly portrayed as a tireless advocate of democracy. Nothing Hamilton did really indicates he was interested in Christianity, though he used it to get votes for ratification of the Constitution. According to the historian I'm reading, Hamilton was deeply loyal to the faction trying to get rich by setting up the U.S. Federal Government and its taxation powers. His circle of buddies planned to get their hands on lots of that tax money.

That the Barna group found "evangelicals" a smaller and less influential than commonly believed is a good first step in putting "Christian values" in their proper perspective. There now and have been many different "Christian values." For 400 years slavery was a good "Christian value." The sooner we take gay marriage and abortion off the list of concerns to evangelicals and fundamentalists and make them what they are, political views, the sooner we can stop kicking around women and minorities.