The Evangelical Quadrilateral

Every other entry of this kind in the atlas can point to a document: a confession, a council, a papal constitution, a synodical decree. Evangelicalism has none, because it is a movement across churches rather than a church, with no synod that could adopt a confession and no membership that could be bound by one. The definition in general use was therefore supplied by a historian describing the movement from outside it.

David Bebbington, writing Evangelicalism in Modern Britain in 1989, identified four persistent marks: conversionism, the conviction that a life must be changed and that the change can be spoken of; biblicism, a particular regard for the Bible as the authority to which appeal is made; crucicentrism, a concentration of doctrine and devotion on the atoning death of Christ rather than on the incarnation or the church; and activism, the expectation that belief issues in preaching, mission and social effort. The four marks were taken up with unusual speed, by evangelical institutions and their critics alike, and they now function as the movement's working self-description, which is a curious fate for an outsider's analytic tool. Their value is that they identify something real. An evangelical Anglican, an evangelical Baptist and an evangelical Pentecostal disagree about baptism, bishops and the gifts of the Spirit while recognizing one another immediately by these four emphases, and the recognition is what makes the transdenominational institutions of the movement possible.

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.