An Evangelical with a Conscience?

(This post was originally written for Presbyterian Action's General Assembly blog.)

Thursday morning at General Assembly, various elected positions were filled for entities such as the Permanent Judicial Commission and the board of the Presbyterian Foundation. Each position had a nominee proposed by the General Assembly Nominating Committee (GANC).

For some positions, there was also a nominee made from the floor, and for those positions, each nominee (both the floor nominee and the GANC nominee) was presented in a three-minute speech by a person familiar with the candidate.

One person describing a nominee chosen by the GANC said that the nominee liked to describe himself as "an evangelical with a conscience." Undoubtedly this was meant to be seen by the voting audience as a positive quality, but it is in fact a slur, though veiled, against evangelicals.

I am a linguist. Linguists know that some terms in language are "unmarked,” and others are "marked." The unmarked terms, the ones without anything overt added to them, are considered basic and normal and definitional. The marked terms are considered unusual and remarkable.

For example, "president" is an unmarked term, and "lady president" is marked, because the word "lady" has been added to it. Therefore, due to the linguistic structure in "lady president,” it is implied that the normal, basic president is a man, but it is unusual to find a president that is a woman. This is why the women's movement has worked so hard to remove from our language the type of distinction such as "president" versus "lady president.”

Similarly, the term "evangelical" alone is unmarked. Therefore a phrase such as "evangelical with a conscience" is marked, because the phrase "with a conscience" has been added to it. By finding the marked term "evangelical with a conscience" a significant way to describe the candidate, the speaker was implying that the normal, basic, definitional evangelical is one without a conscience, because the unusual type of evangelical is an evangelical with a conscience.

I don't know if many people picked this up or not. Probably the speaker didn't even realize that evangelicals had just been insulted. If so, this may be because the speaker's prejudice against evangelicals is so ingrained that the speaker unconsciously assumed that everyone agrees that there is a lack of conscience in evangelicals.

The conscience that the speaker implied that evangelicals lack is most likely a social-witness conscience. In fact, however, a recent study has shown that evangelical churches give more money and participate in more actual social-witness programs (as opposed to doing social-witness political lobbying) than progressive churches do. The idea of a lack of conscience for evangelicals is not only insulting and prejudiced, it is based on incorrect information. Sadly, this shows up in everyday conversations and news stories all too often, and, as I saw Thursday morning, even in our church assemblies.