The term 'evangelical' has been used as an umbrella term for the explosive trend in the past few decades of christianity, of a religion focused specifically on a singular conversion moment in a persons' life, on prosyletizing and sharing the faith, on jesus to the exclusion of other biblical figures, on biblical literalism and theological fundamentalism, cultural conservatism, more decentralized inter-church organizational structures, etc etc. This term used to be widely used by 'evagelicals' themselves, but in the past few years its being supplanted by other terms like 'bible-believing'.
The term 'evangelical', in earlier times than this, has had other meanings in christianity and described a number of doctrines and congregations, many in ways similar to today's evangelicals, but in others distinct. Many of the larger old-fashioned churches in the US today are the descendants of this earlier 'evangelical', hence the confusing situation of the Methodists and Lutherans being titular 'evangelicals' but as a whole actually being the non-evangelical 'mainline' churches today.
This is further confused by the fact that a growing minority of belivers in mainline churches like the lutherans and methodists espouse a version of christianity far more 'evangelical' than their sect as a whole--- so the evangelical, yet non-evangelical, lutherans have a great deal of 'evangelicals' in their ranks. Make sense? Yeah, me neither. I'd like to take a sociological class on contemporary american christian church organization.
Earlier mentioned was the political breakdown between white and non-white evangelical believers. It is true that white evangelicals in the US are by a far sight the most conservative and right-wing bloc in the country. But while they might support many of the institutional edifices of white supremacy and contain in their ranks many open racists (esp in traditional SBC congregations in the south), I think before talking about how racist they were people should go to an average urban megachurch--- they are amazing, breathtakingly multiracial. The bastion of republican evangelical ohio reaction is a particular megachurch in columbus, which is about 40% african-american.
These mega-churches, and afro-american evangelical churches, constitute just about the entirety of republicans inroads in the black community, which has still been small and collapsed hard core after katrina (but if anyone knows what the fuck is up with nas I'd love to hear). On the other hand, among voting latinos, evangelical latinos (who are the explosive trend in the community) are not only largely socially conservative but overwhelmingly support republicans (altho the repub anti-immigrant hysteria of this last election and the grassroots response against it shook that up a little).
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> > But that doesn't really address the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
> > America or other denominations that are culturally mainline,
> > politically moderate, and theologically evangelical, like the United
> > Methodist Church, which resulted from a merger between the Methodist
> > Church and the Evangelical United Brethren.
>
> Maybe not, but tendencies are rarely 100% of anything. Self-
> identification may matter - do the United Methodists, for example,
> identify as Methodist or evangelical?