What the Definition Cannot Carry

The quadrilateral is a description of emphases, and emphases are held in different proportions by people who would refuse each other communion, so the definition is necessarily capacious. That is the substance of the criticism made of it. Historians of American religion have argued that it describes British evangelicalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries better than the American movement of the twentieth, and that it omits the features that most distinguish the latter: its institutional networks, its parachurch agencies, its media, and by the late twentieth century its political alignment.

In American usage the word evangelical now does duty as a social and political identity that survey respondents claim or disclaim for reasons having little to do with crucicentrism, which is a real problem for any definition resting on doctrinal emphasis alone. Others have pressed the opposite objection: that four marks stated at this level of generality would also admit a good deal of nineteenth century liberal Protestantism and much of the Catholic charismatic renewal, and therefore cut nothing away. Bebbington's own claim was modest, that these four were the enduring features of a movement he was describing historically, and he did not offer them as a boundary for deciding who is in. The atlas records the quadrilateral because it is what the movement and its historians actually use, and records that it is a description rather than a creed, because treating it as a creed produces false statements about a very large number of people.