This patient and insightful piece by Miles Smith IV has me thinking about how useful it would be if capital-E “Evangelical” as a noun-descriptor of an entire eclectic body of American Christians should never have been adopted as a mass sociological term in the last century. Instead:

1. Liberal Mainline
2. Conservative Protestants
3. Non-denom Evangelicals
4. Charismatic Pentecostals
5. Radical Originalists

How much more useful would our discourse be if we disaggregated social, political, ethnic, economic, regional, and doctrinal differences by these categories?