For the last decade or so, American evangelicals have been a punching bag. Condescending think pieces in The Atlantic and the New York Times and best-selling books such as “Jesus and John Wayne” have all converged on the same narrative: a movement of rich, white, power-hungry hypocrites for whom politics comes first and faith is an afterthought — or worse, just a disguise. The question Bonnie Kristian’s “In Defense of Evangelicalism” asks is a simple one nobody else is asking: Is any of that actually true?
Kristian, an editor at Christianity Today who grew up inside evangelicalism, wrote the book after watching her faith tradition summed up into a single data point — the percentage of white evangelicals who voted for President Donald Trump. Then, we were held collectively responsible for everything he did next.
In the aftermath of 2016, she notes, non-Trump-supporting Christians and secular critics alike were quick to charge evangelicals with “total corruption” and “individual responsibility for every evil Trump commits.” It became fashionable to treat some 80 million Americans as a monolith — like indefensible, immoral hypocrites.
The trouble starts, Kristian argues, with the word itself. “Evangelical” has been stretched so far past its religious meaning that it barely functions as what it once was. In the book, she highlights the fact that many people who actually identify as evangelical are black, and roughly 90% live outside the United States. These are inconvenient facts for pundits who’ve redefined the term to mean nothing more than “white Republican.”
Pollsters, pundits, and critics, Kristian notes, compound the problem by “accepting self-identification of people who aren’t evangelicals as evangelicals.” For example, Gallup found that many people — particularly white Americans — who don’t hold evangelical beliefs or attend church regularly nonetheless tell pollsters they’re evangelical. This could be a direct result of pollsters politicizing the term.
The same critics will discount “the self-understanding of those who are evangelical, and particularly those whose evangelicalism is typical of the movement.”
Kristian spotlights several self-described evangelicals in the book — people in ministry who did vote for Trump, but often for lack of a better option on the issues they cared about most.
If you ask actual churchgoing evangelicals what their faith means to them, she reports, they don’t mention Donald Trump. They talk about Jesus. But critics rarely speak to those folks.
The book is particularly effective in its willingness to name specific critics. Kristian doesn’t just complain about “the media,” but she opens the most popular books on this topic and checks their weaknesses.
Authors such as Kristin Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr, she argues, build sweeping indictments of evangelical patriarchy and “militant masculinity” but ignore that most evangelicals today are actually egalitarian on gender roles. That data point alone undercuts an important portion of their arguments before they even begin.
And Kristian calls the authors out where they reveal their own sensationalism. She notes that Du Mez herself concedes, some 300 pages into her own book (“Jesus and John Wayne”), that the patriarchal militarism she’s describing does not “define the whole of American evangelicalism.”
Critics like Du Mez often take the fringe and present it as the center. For example, an attention-seeking figure such as Doug Wilson is treated as representative of evangelicalism precisely because he’s an outlier. But a genuinely mainstream, racially reconciling movement such as the uber-popular Promise Keepers gatherings, for example, often goes unmentioned.
Kristian is blunt in her response to the anti-evangelicalism propaganda: “It’s impossible to go to an evangelical church on a Sunday morning and come away honestly convinced that faith is irrelevant there.”
She writes that “evangelicalism makes sense only if folks really believe it — and for all our flaws, we do.”
The book’s most important section may be its handling of the “Christian nationalism” charge — the accusation that evangelicals want to “legislate their morality” onto everyone else. As Kristian points out, evangelicals — like every other perceivable demographic out there — of course want their values reflected in public life. This is simply what political participation looks like.
“Everyone involved in American politics is, at some level, doing the same thing,” she writes, “seeking power to advance the moral and political vision they believe is good and prudent.”
The double standard, she says, is obvious: Activist groups of every stripe lobby for their worldview, but only when evangelicals do it does the press reach for words like “dominion” and “theocracy.” As she puts it, the label is really just “a handy shorthand” — something scary-sounding, headline-ready, and largely empty when you probe a little deeper.
At no point does Kristian claim that evangelicalism is beyond criticism. Her goal is “not to exempt it from fair scrutiny,” but to clear away “specious and spurious attacks so we can conserve what is valuable and make room for real repair.”
That distinction really sums up the entire book. Real critique is welcome, but caricature is not. It’s important in 2026, given that a recent Pew survey cited in the book found that evangelicals are viewed more negatively than any other major religious group in America.
“In Defense of Evangelicalism” won’t end that hostility overnight, but anyone who reads it honestly will find the old stereotypes a lot harder to believe.
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Ericka Andersen is the author of “Freely Sober: Rethinking Alcohol Through the Lens of Faith” (InterVarsity Press, 2026).
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