Evangelicalism: Part 1

5 reasons It's Not Protestant

Introduction

When I was an Evangelical, we considered ourselves Protestant. My best friend and I once dressed up as the Reformers for Halloween—complete with a monk’s robe and a cardboard 95 Theses—because October 31st wasn’t just Halloween. It was Reformation Day. Most Evangelical churches still mark the occasion. They speak proudly of Luther and Calvin, invoke the “Five Solas,” and treat the Protestant Reformation as a moral and theological reset—rescuing Christianity from corruption and restoring the true Gospel.

But this framing—Catholic vs. Protestant—is deceptively simple. It ignores the entire Eastern Church, of course. But more subtly, it flattens a much deeper divide within Protestantism itself. Because under the Protestant umbrella, there are really two traditions: the historic churches that directly descend from the Reformers—Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians—and the modern Evangelical movement, which includes most Baptist, Evangelical Free, Calvary Chapel, and Non-Denominational churches (especially the ones with a coffee shop in the lobby).

The differences aren’t just aesthetic. Evangelical churches reject infant baptism, deny sacramental grace, and view the Church not as a visible institution, but as an invisible body of born-again individuals.

The result is that, despite claiming to be “Protestant,” Evangelicals often regard their older Mainline counterparts as theologically suspect—or, more crudely, as “Catholic Lite.”

This article doesn’t seek to make enemies. As the first part of my Evangelicalism series, it isn’t an argument for Catholicism. It’s a call for honesty. Because while Catholics and Mainline Protestants may still disagree, they share a theological framework that the Evangelical world has completely abandoned. If the Reformers were alive today, they would not recognize Evangelicalism as Protestant.

That doesn’t mean Evangelicals aren’t saved, or that their faith in Christ isn’t real.

I spent most of my Christian life in Evangelical circles, and I know firsthand the love of God and hunger for truth that exist there. This isn’t a critique of sincerity. It’s a correction of label. The Evangelical movement has no historical continuity with the Reformation. And the term “Protestant,” in its true sense, no longer applies.

These are five reasons why Evangelicalism should not be considered Protestant.

1. Evangelicalism Rejects Church History

When I was Evangelical, very little of Church history was ever discussed. If a theological question came up, we turned to the Bible. And if we needed help interpreting it, we turned to men like R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, or maybe C.S. Lewis. For most Evangelicals, doctrine is framed entirely in terms of who interprets the Bible best. The question is never, “What has the Church always believed?” It’s “Which teacher explains the text correctly?”

But that raises a sobering question: if every doctrine must be proven from scratch—if theology begins and ends with private exegesis—then what happens to the Church’s memory? What happens to all those who came before?

The silence is telling. No one in my community quoted Ignatius or Irenaeus. No one read the Cappadocians or appealed to Nicaea. At best, the early Church was treated as a blurry prologue—something that happened before the Bible was finished. And once the Bible was finished, everything else became optional. The creeds, the councils, the continuity of apostolic teaching—they were never refuted. They were simply ignored.

But here’s the irony: Evangelicals still affirm the Trinity, the canon of Scripture, the two natures of Christ. They still believe in doctrines that were hammered out through centuries of controversy, prayer, and council. Nearly everything Evangelicals believe was handed down through the very history they never study.

And the Reformers knew this. Luther didn’t appeal to his own genius—he leaned on Augustine. Calvin filled his Institutes with appeals to the Church Fathers, claiming they supported him more than Rome. These men didn’t quote the Fathers to look intellectual. They did it because they understood something Evangelicalism has forgotten: Theology is not invented. It is received.

That’s what makes this rupture so profound. Evangelicalism didn’t just break from Rome—it broke from history. It inherited doctrines forged by the Church, and then severed itself from the Church’s memory. This is why Evangelicalism feels so unstable: it retains the conclusions, but discards the process. It accepts the fruits of tradition while rejecting the tree.

And this is where we must begin. Because the next four reasons will show why that break occurred. The loss of history wasn’t an accident. It was the first symptom of something deeper: a collapse of sacrament, covenant, and ecclesial identity.

2. Evangelicalism Has No Sacramental Theology

If Evangelicals distrust Church history, they distrust sacraments even more.

Baptism is treated as a symbol. Communion is a memorial. Grace is something that happens invisibly—through faith alone, without any physical signs. Most Evangelicals would never say this directly, but the instinct is clear: if you need a ritual to receive grace, you’ve probably misunderstood the Gospel.

And that’s not just how they view Catholics. It’s how they view anyone who believes sacraments actually do something. Mainline Protestants who baptize infants are accused of empty religion. Orthodox Christians are seen as mystical and confused. Even Lutherans are treated with suspicion for saying that Christ is present in the Eucharist. It’s not that Evangelicals are trying to be divisive. It’s that their entire worldview leaves no room for sacraments at all.

But that raises the question: how did this happen?

In most Evangelical circles, sacraments aren’t just confusing—they’re suspicious. They seem to imply that grace can be earned, or that salvation requires human effort. To say that baptism regenerates, or that the Eucharist feeds the soul, sounds like a denial of faith alone. And so the sacraments are flattened. They’re no longer gifts. They’re misunderstandings.

But this is where the irony becomes sharpest. Because it was the Reformers who defended the sacraments most fiercely. Luther held to the Real Presence in the Eucharist—not because he denied sola fide, but because he believed grace had to reach the body. Calvin wrote that baptism truly conferred grace—not because it replaced faith, but because it expressed it. Even Zwingli, for all his caution, still believed the sacraments were necessary to the life of the Church. None of them saw sacramental theology as a threat to the Gospel. They saw it as part of it.

Because the sacraments aren’t works. They are the work of God.

That’s what Evangelicalism has lost. In trying to protect grace, it has removed the very means by which grace is given. Sacraments are not rituals we perform to earn salvation. They are signs Christ instituted to communicate it. They are not a challenge to sola fide. They are its extension. Baptism isn’t how we prove our faith. It’s how we receive the promise. The Eucharist isn’t a symbolic meal. It’s how Christ feeds His people.

The early Church never separated grace from sacrament. And the Reformers didn’t either. But modern Evangelicalism has. And the result is a Gospel that no longer touches the body.

3. Evangelicalism Revives Anabaptism

At first glance, baptism might seem like a secondary issue.

Many Evangelicals would say they simply don’t see infant baptism in the Bible. It’s a matter of being faithful to Scripture, not of rejecting tradition. And if someone does believe in baptizing babies—well, that’s their view. It’s not a deal-breaker.

But this is where the rupture begins to show. Because this isn’t just a doctrinal disagreement. It’s the result of something deeper. Once you lose Church memory—once you lose sacramental theology—you’re left with no tools to understand what baptism actually is. And when that happens, you don’t just drift into a different interpretation. You adopt a structure that the Church has already faced—and already rejected.

That’s what makes modern Evangelicalism so strange. Without realizing it, it has reassembled one of the earliest theological mistakes of the Reformation era: Anabaptism.

The Anabaptists were a radical movement that broke from both Catholicism and the Magisterial Reformers. They didn’t just reject infant baptism—they rejected the idea that the Church could include anyone who hadn’t made a conscious, adult profession of faith. Baptism, for them, wasn’t about grace or covenant. It was a symbolic announcement that you were already saved. The Church, in their view, wasn’t a family you were born into. It was a club for the convinced.

And the Reformers saw this as a threat to the Gospel.

Luther called Anabaptism “a new works-based righteousness.” Calvin warned that denying baptism to infants was denying God’s initiative in salvation. Even Zwingli—who moved furthest from Catholic sacramentalism—insisted that infant baptism was essential to covenantal continuity. For all their disagreements, the Reformers stood together here: the Anabaptist view wasn’t a variation. It was a theological rupture.

Which brings us to the deeper irony. Nearly all Evangelicals today hold to the same practical vision. Infant baptism is dismissed as unbiblical. The Church is treated as a voluntary association. Baptism is no longer a sacrament of grace—it’s a personal milestone of faith. And because the surrounding theology has been lost, that position feels not only plausible, but inevitable.

But that’s the problem. Evangelicalism didn’t arrive here through study. It arrived here through forgetting. Without history, without sacrament, the Church’s understanding of baptism doesn’t just shift—it dissolves. The form looks biblical. The rhetoric sounds faithful. But the structure is something else entirely.

Evangelicalism didn’t recover the early Church. It revived Anabaptism. Not deliberately—but by default.

4. Evangelicalism Teaches Dispensationalism

Evangelicalism didn’t just lose sacrament. It lost continuity.

For most of Christian history—Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformed alike—the story of salvation was understood as a single, unfolding covenant. From creation to Christ, God was forming one people, one household, one Church. Each covenant built on the last, revealing new layers of grace—but never discarding what came before. Baptism fulfilled circumcision. The Eucharist fulfilled Passover. The Church didn’t replace Israel. It received her vocation.

But once the Church lost sacrament—and with it, covenantal theology—something subtle but seismic began to shift. Without the Church’s memory to guide interpretation, the Bible was left to stand alone. And without any structure to hold it together, a new pattern emerged: the text had to be rebuilt from scratch. Interpretation became invention.

Introduced in the 1800s, Dispensationalism divided salvation history into disconnected stages or “dispensations.” God’s plan was no longer one continuous thread, but a series of episodes—each with its own rules, people, and promises. Rather than seeing the Church as the fulfillment of God’s covenantal work, Dispensationalism treated it as a temporary era—a kind of spiritual intermission between Old Testament Israel and a future, more literal fulfillment.

Out of this fragmentation, Evangelicalism emerged.

It was not a denomination. It was not a reformation. It was the cultural offspring of revivalist Christianity—born from altar calls, credobaptism, emotional preaching, and a new way of reading Scripture. Most Evangelicals today wouldn’t recognize the label “Dispensationalism.” But they’ve inherited its instincts. The result is a theology built on sequence rather than structure—one that treats Scripture like a timeline rather than a tapestry.

It is this framework that makes so many Evangelical conclusions feel foreign to both Catholics and historic Protestants: because the story they are telling is not the same.

And it matters that this theology is new.

Dispensationalism didn’t come from the Church Fathers, or the Reformers, or even the early creeds. It came from the 19th century—during the Second Great Awakening, a time marked by emotional revivals, spontaneous preaching, and a longing for spiritual certainty. It was in that atmosphere that John Nelson Darby, disillusioned with his Anglican faith, proposed a new map for reading Scripture. And in time, that map replaced the memory of the Church.

If the revival of Anabaptism was ironic, this was devastating. Because what Dispensationalism offered wasn’t a return to something old. It was the construction of something entirely new.

5. Evangelicalism is a Novel Heresy

This is not an accusation. It’s a description.

Heresy doesn’t always begin with rejection. It begins with subtraction. Remove the sacraments. Remove the covenant. Remove the visible Church. Keep the language of grace, but disconnect it from how grace is given. Keep the Bible, but sever it from the community that preserved and canonized it. Keep the idea of faith—but redefine it as a private experience, unbound from liturgy, continuity, or form.

What you’re left with is not a reformation. It’s something else entirely.

Evangelicalism didn’t descend from the Reformers. It broke from them. Slowly. Unintentionally. But thoroughly. It retains their vocabulary, but not their framework. It preaches salvation—but cannot recognize sacramental Christians as saved. It calls itself Protestant—but shares almost none of Protestantism’s structure, memory, or theological logic.

That’s what makes this fracture so deep.

Because Evangelicals DO believe in the Church. But they define it as an invisible body—a spiritual network of true believers scattered across denominations. In theory, this sounds inclusive. But in practice, it leads to suspicion. Evangelicals may say they are part of a broader Protestant tradition, but few of them believe that Catholics, Anglicans, or even Lutherans preach the Gospel. Anyone with sacramental theology is viewed, at best, as confused—and at worst, as not saved.

This is the irony no one wants to name: Evangelicalism excludes the very Christians it claims to stand beside. And not because it studied them—but because it never received them at all.

That’s why modern researchers often separate Evangelicals from mainline Protestants entirely. And they’re right to. Because these aren’t just stylistic differences. They’re ecclesial ones. A Presbyterian and a Catholic may disagree about authority—but they both baptize infants, preach sacramental grace, and believe the Church is a visible body. Evangelicals do none of these things. Not because they read the Bible more carefully—but because they’ve forgotten what the Church actually believed.

And that forgetting has consequences.

Without sacrament, grace becomes psychological. Without covenant, baptism becomes self-expression. Without a visible Church, there can be no visible unity. And without unity, theology becomes branding. Pastors become platforms. Doctrine becomes marketable. And the Church recedes—not just from doctrine, but from the world. What remains is a subculture: a network of franchises, livestreams, purity rules, and spiritual instincts—with no theological map to hold it together.

Evangelicalism didn’t just break from Rome. It broke from Protestantism. It broke from history. And it broke from the very communities it still claims to represent.

It’s not a denomination. It’s not Protestant. It’s an umbrella of millions of Credo-Baptist, Dispensational churches that reject any form on institutional structure.

Conclusion

I don’t share any of this to provoke. I share it because I once wore the costume too.

I believed I was part of the Reformation. I honored Luther and Calvin. I quoted the solas. I told myself I was standing on the shoulders of giants. But the more I studied the Reformers—what they believed, how they worshipped, how they saw the Church—the more I realized that what I called “Protestantism” had become something else entirely.

And that realization didn’t make me angry. It made me ache.

Because Evangelicals don’t see themselves as inventing something new. They see themselves as defending something old. They cherish Scripture. They love Jesus. They want to be faithful. But somewhere along the way, the scaffolding that held the faith together—the Church, the sacraments, the covenantal story—was quietly removed. What remained was still passionate. Still sincere. But unmoored.

This is what makes the conversation so hard. When we talk about Catholic versus Protestant, we think we know the lines. But what if those lines have shifted? What if the real divide is no longer between the Papists and the Reformists—but between those who remember the Church as a visible, sacramental body…and those who no longer do?

This is Part One of my Evangelicalism series. In Part Two, we’ll turn from theology to culture—examining how Evangelicalism, in losing its ecclesial framework, built not just a new church, but a self-contained bubble that receded from the secular world.