WASHINGTON - Kimberly Williams acknowledges that she may not be what many people think of when they hear the phrase “evangelical Christian.”
In fact, Williams herself isn’t sure she embraces the label these days, even though she leads worship at the District Church in Washington, D.C., which by any definition is evangelical in belief.
“I’m still wrestling with it,” she says, worried the phrase has become too politicized and misunderstood. “As a woman and as a person of color, it’s just hard,” says Williams, an African-American.
That’s a growing sentiment within church-going evangelical circles in the U.S., especially among the expanding number of evangelicals who are nonwhite.
Almost 1-in-3 American evangelicals are not white, according to a 2017 study by the Public Religion Research Institute. And though many evangelicals of color embrace a conservative theology, their political beliefs are more varied than is commonly portrayed in the media.
As the 2018 midterm elections approach, the schisms suggest evangelical Christians, who make up a quarter of the population, may not be as solidly supportive of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as many suspect.
To hear Trump talk, he makes it sound as if he has the support of nearly every single evangelical in America.
“I love the evangelicals,” Trump told Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, in an interview last July. “They came out in massive numbers. And on top of that, I got 83 percent.”
A year later, Trump claimed that 84 percent of evangelicals had voted for him in 2016.
What Trump appears to be referencing are that suggested more than 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for him for president.
But that figure only includes white evangelicals, not evangelicals as a whole.
“America is this bubble where we still act like evangelicals are just white evangelicals, and they’re not,” says Jim Wallis, who heads Sojourners, a Washington, D.C.-based evangelical group focused on social justice issues.
“Evangelicals of color voted overwhelmingly against Donald Trump, while white evangelicals voted in a vast majority for him,” says Wallis. “There’s a real racial gap.”
The political divide is so drastic that many polling organizations, including Pew Research Center, don’t even attempt to measure generic evangelical political opinion without considering race.
“White and nonwhite evangelicals are at opposite ends of the political spectrum,” says Anna Schiller of Pew. “Analyses that explore the link between religions and partisanship without taking race into account would obscure far more than they would illuminate.”
When asked about their partisan leanings, Pew found two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants lean toward or identify with the Republican Party. For nonwhite evangelicals that figure was reversed, with 63 percent preferring the Democratic Party.
Another complication: there is no commonly agreed upon definition for the word “evangelical.”
The concept is so nebulous that historian George Marsden famously concluded that an evangelical is “anyone who likes Billy Graham,” the late evangelist.
Of course, evangelicals share certain features. They are almost all protestant. They usually believe in a personal conversion experience, think of the Bible as God’s literal words, and have some propensity to share their faith.
But most polls don’t ask about beliefs; instead, they go by whether someone self-identifies as evangelical -- a tactic that some say produces misleading results.
If polls asked how often someone attends church, for instance, the data would totally change, posits Aaron Graham, lead pastor at the District Church in Washington.
Graham, whose church avoids either a conservative or liberal label, makes a distinction between the political and religious meaning of the word “evangelical.”
In a political sense, the word is often used to describe anyone who is "from the South, conservative, and white," he says.
The District Church, which represents 60 different nationalities, shows the complexity of the issue.
“I would venture to say that most people in our congregation would embrace being evangelical theologically but not politically in the way it’s understood today,” he says.
In other words: polls are likely skewed because some people who aren't practicing evangelicals will tell pollsters they are, while many devout evangelicals won't even publicly embrace the label.