Evangelicals Worried Trump, Moore Have Hurt Their Brand

Many evangelicals fear that President Donald Trump and Roy Moore have so tainted the brand that they're abandoning the word entirely, including two grandchildren of Billy Graham, The Washington Post reported.

Few epitomized "evangelical" more than Rev. Graham, but many now feel the events of the past year have politicized it to the point of becoming a dirty word, the Post reports.

"The term has come to represent white Republicans and … sometimes close-mindedness and superiority," Jerushah Armfield, a granddaughter of Franklin's, told the Post.

"Evangelical" has devolved from its literal biblical meaning of spreading the Gospel to a demographic stat of who supported and voted for Trump in 2016 or Moore in his Senate bid these past few months.

"The term feels irreversibly tainted, and those of us who don't align with the currently understood description are distancing ourselves to preserve our consciences," Jen Hatmaker, a Texas-based author told the Post.

But then what? ask evangelicals. How do they now describe their faith and beliefs without fear of being unfairly lumped in with a politicized term?

"What word do you put in its place? There's no adequate or obviously adequate word to do that," Fuller Theological Seminary president Mark Labberton told the Post.

"I'm 'an orthodox Christian who cares deeply about being a follower of Jesus and wants to live with an open posture of engagement with culture.' That's not as tidy as simply saying, 'evangelical,'" Labberton told the Post.

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