Finished reading: Who Is an Evangelical?: The History of a Movement in Crisis by Thomas S. Kidd 📚

A short, useful overview of the evangelical movement in America. Kidd does an admirable job trying to salvage the term as (fundamentally) a theological designation rather than a marker of partisan politics. For my part, I find the theological emphases of the movement to be rather flimsy and not especially compelling. Kidd suggests three core aspects of evangelical identity: being born again, the primacy of the Bible, and an emphasis on “experiencing” the presence of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Given the provenance of these teachings and the present crisis of identity within evangelicalism, it certainly forces one to consider what is actually worth conserving about this decidedly American movement.