In 2008, James Wellman, a historian at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, published Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest. Wellman skillfully laid out how the very nature of Evangelical Protestant Christianity, especially in the Northwest, was antagonistic toward liberal Protestantism. Liberals prioritized inclusiveness, Wellman argued, while Evangelicals saw human life as a metaphysical struggle between good and evil. What makes Wellman’s analysis so compelling is that his description of Evangelical Protestants in the Pacific Northwest places them squarely on the side of political liberalism. Northwestern Evangelicals are, in Wellman’s analysis, devoted to laissez-faire economics and democratic political advocacy. Liberal Protestants, Wellman claims, were suspicious of Evangelicals’ commitment both to capitalism and to working through democracy to effect political change; both were long-codified marks of classical liberalism. If Wellman is to be believed, Evangelical Protestants’ conservative theology made them more devoted to the postwar liberal order, while liberal Protestants were suspicious and even antagonistic.

Evangelicals’ relationship with political liberalism has become a subject of significant debate in the Trump era. Evangelical, in 2026, codes for pollsters are essentially any Protestant or Protestant adjacent group outside the historic mainline denominations, but the historical definition focuses on Baptists, Methodists, and most Presbyterians. Classical liberalism is somewhat easier to define: the set of economic and political philosophies that prioritize expansive individual freedom and socio-cultural toleration in the body politic. In the last decade, Evangelicals have been portrayed as potential opponents of the political liberal order. This charge seems difficult to substantiate, if James Wellman is to be believed. D. James Kennedy, a politically active Presbyterian minister prominent in Evangelical circles and hardly a social or theological liberal, nonetheless preached sermons lauding Classical liberal values like capitalism and individual freedoms. But other prominent Presbyterians, often identified with Evangelicals, undoubtedly questioned the foundations of the liberal order long before 2016. In the 1820s, urban Evangelicals like Ezra Stiles Ely pined for forms of illiberal theocracy that might somehow be consistent with the disestablished religious order of the United States. In the Gilded Age, Princeton professor A. A. Hodge took up Ely’s mantle. Woodrow Wilson, surprisingly conservative in his soteriology, loathed the liberal order protected by post–Civil War Republicans. Carl F. H. Henry lambasted the fundamentalist movement for being wedded to an individualist economy of salvation that had no real concern for the common good. Theonomists like R. J. Rushdoony spurned American liberalism. Even more moderate Presbyterians in the Evangelical socio-political coalition were skeptical of major aspects of the liberal order. In his 2008 The Reason for God, Timothy Keller articulated what he believed were weaknesses of capitalist society and individualism. The 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern demanded that Evangelicals reframe their faith toward a more communal conceptualization of justice.

All this prompts a few questions.

1. If Evangelical Protestants widely accept the narrative that Evangelicalism is a historical development of the fundamentalist movement, when has the Evangelical intellectual class ever been committed political liberals, particularly regarding laissez-faire capitalism and an aggressive commitment to what might be called an Americanized form of Christian democracy?
2. If Evangelicals—the intelligentsia and the laity—have not been historically committed to political liberalism, why do so many writers express surprise that they embraced populism in the last decade?
3. Is the aforementioned surprise expressed by commentators prompted by shock that Evangelicals are adopting populist or Trumpist politics, or merely that Evangelicals actually have their own political views that are neither derivative of the mainline nor synonymous with quietist fundamentalism?
4. Is it possible that Presbyterians have never been committed liberals in the same way groups like Southern Baptists have been at times, and that the syncretic label “Evangelical” obscures significant political-theological differences within a coalition that external observers wrongly see as a unified socio-religious group?

My hunch is that all four questions lead to truths about the relationship between Evangelicals and liberalism. But limiting analysis of Evangelicals and liberalism chronologically to the postwar consensus, the Moral Majority, or even the Trump era fundamentally constrains our understanding of how Evangelical Protestants have engaged political liberalism since the formation of the American republic in 1789. Baptist political scientist Hunter Baker, in a review essay of two works addressing Christian post-liberalism, noted that the perceived breakdown of the liberal order in the twenty-first century has led to the overarching question of “whether liberalism can reach any kind of equilibrium or whether it is inherently unstable and near exhaustion as a governing philosophy. As a consequence, conservatives and Christians have found themselves in earnest debate over liberalism.” Baker is certainly right that conservative Evangelical Protestants have, since 2016, found themselves in an earnest debate over liberalism. But the–perhaps unintended–inference that this debate is new, is overstated. Since 1789, American Evangelicals have consistently found themselves engaged in debates over liberalism. Which leads to the final question: is it possible that political liberalism is, and always has been, adiaphora in Evangelical Protestant political theology?