'When I use a word it means what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less'. So said Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Caroll's Alice Through The Looking Glass. These days the word 'evangelical' seems to be used in that kind of Humpty Dumpty way. Evangelicalism as a concept is increasingly flexible.
Some therefore wonder whether it should be disbanded altogether. If groups with very diverse theological convictions, and some with very few theological convictions, all feel they can gather under the banner of 'evangelical' is the term in any sense still useful?
In America, the evangelical community is so large, so diverse, so disparate, that it's easy to wonder whether the word 'evangelical' means anything at all. Increasingly neo-orthodoxy by the back door (a latent universalism, a subjectivisation of the authority of Scripture, a tendency to squeeze all of Christian doctrine through a mesh of what is 'loving', with the notion of 'love' being secularly not biblical defined) is infiltrating evangelicalism. And even when genuinely orthodox evangelicalism here has become tarnished by being vigorously sold as a marketing product.
