Evangelical affectiveness (and that’s not a typo!)

It wasn’t long after deciding on the above title that I wondered if it would be assumed to contain a ‘typo’ and that I actually meant to write ‘evangelical effectiveness’.

Certainly, there is no lack of evangelical writing on effective leadership. For example, when you search Amazon.com using the phrase ‘evangelical effective’, you will see 35 books listed in the results. In contrast, the phrase ‘evangelical affective’ only yields a single result.

Now, some might attribute that difference solely to the fact that, in modern parlance, ‘effective’ is far more prevalent than ‘affective’. Yet, when you search for both those words in the handy Google Books N-gram Viewer (which charts word frequencies in sources that were written between 1500 and 2019), you will find that the difference in usage is nowhere near as pronounced as some might imagine.