There are differences between Christian evangelicals, conservative evangelicals, and "born-again" Christians, even though the mainstream media in the US often use the terms interchangeably.
One new distinction between types of evangelical Christians in the US may be whether or not an evangelical is a "Barna Evangelicals." The Barna Group is a Christian organization "offering statistics, resources, seminars and custom research on current cultural and spiritual trends."
"What is a Barna Evangelical?" The dKos user rdbaker43 looks into the answer here. The short answer: Barna Evangelicals are those defined as evangelicals by Barna based on the respondents' answers to "nine belief questions." Barna Evangelicals are a subset of American evangelicals, perhaps 18,000,000 adult Americans out of the 72,000,000 adult Americans who self-identify as evangelical.
Whether or not you're a person of faith (rdbaker43 is not), rdbaker43's diary is worth at least a perusal since the term "Barna Evangelical" may very well become more common, at least among those who follow trends of faith and politics in the U.S. as many Religious Right Watch readers do.
(Note: At the time the of writing this post, Barna's homepage was showing a "Coming Soon - Please check back soon" message.)
i just figured there were 2 kinds: those who convert, and those who are "Barna" that way :)
Posted by: susan 28 | April 01, 2009 at 01:24 PM