By RAY WADDLE

Every day now it is possible to meet Christians too embarrassed to call themselves Christian.

I encountered some the other day at church.

“Call me a follower of Christ -- anything -- but not Christian," one Christian woman said. She put air quotes around “Christian.” The two others nodded grievously.

They are not ashamed of being Christian. They just cannot use the word anymore. To them, the word is tarnished, radioactive. To them, it is synonymous with Republican sneering, Bible bullying and white-bread defenses of white American routine, circa 1955.

“Christian” is today the public possession of one slice of Christianity only, evangelical Protestants. They are organized and committed. They are a self-conscious national demographic with a consistent world view -- a love for Christ Jesus, a yearning for public righteousness, respect for a traditional Bible hermeneutic. They have grown in confidence. They get the big press coverage. Other Christians look on with puzzled frustration.

There is something odd about this.

Statistically, evangelical Protestants are a minority even among Christians. Other Americans Christians outnumber them.

Membership in the National Association of Evangelicals is 30 million. Some estimate the broader evangelical head count is bigger -- 50-80 million. But other Christian groups abound. Roman Catholic membership, for instance, is more than 60 million. The liberal-minded “mainline” National Council of Churches, a mostly Protestant coalition, claims another 50 million members.

These numbers can get fuzzy. Not all mainline Protestants are liberal or moderate. Many of them are conservative. And not all evangelicals are conservative. Some are freestyle believers who might vote Democrat next time around.

But a picture emerges. As never before, evangelical Protestants own the label Christian, even though they are outnumbered by other churchgoers. Why don’t the others take back the title? What happened?

What happened is the non-evangelicals lost a Thirty Years War of spiritual marketing, a war over the Christian brand name and the Bible too.

It happened gradually. In the 70s, “Christian music” surfaced as the willing soundtrack for a bold new market-oriented evangelical faith. Its message was Bible-based and energetic. People took notice. In the 80s, the Moral Majority happily stepped into the public square to equate political conservatism with Christianity. In the 90s, the Christian Coalition deepened the public impression. All the while, theologically conservative Bible colleges came to be called Christian schools. No one complained.

This Christian makeover was reinforced every Sunday across America with the rise of nondenominational megachurches. Christian is now the preferred identity of millions who attend these non-aligned (but Protestant) congregations, which reject historic identities like Methodist or Presbyterian or Church of Christ. They’re just “Christian,” as if they have no connection to the long history of church evolution and disputation.

The mainliners, progressives and liberals hardly knew what hit them. They had led the way after World War II -- the religion of the establishment in the 50s, then the religion of progressive political reform in the 60s. They took risks. They dared to face America’s traumatic social changes and failings -- Vietnam, racial segregation. They honored the nation’s emerging diversity. But they generated dissent in their own ranks and lost their unity as a result.

Sometime in the 70s, they stopped quoting the Bible in public. Perhaps liberals lost confidence in the old authority of Scripture -- or forgot how to use the Bible to challenge fundamentalism itself.

This abdication was costly. Scripture is full of passages that embarrass political conservatism. Page after page, it says God cares about the underdog and the weak. It warns against national arrogance and folly. Jesus blesses the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, the poor in society. Pray in secret, he said. Today, judging from the media, the Bible is largely associated with a theology of suburban isolation, spiritual warfare and tax cuts.

The Christians I meet who forsake “Christian” are caught in a cruel irony: Their Christian faith motivates them to action and give them a self-self-identity. But it’s not their style to get in your face. They don’t have a taste for smackdowns. They’re ambivalent about power. They’d rather do neighborhood good works than talk about culture war. They’d rather read the Sermon on the Mount than the Book of Revelation.

Sociologist Nancy Ammerman calls them “Golden Rule” Christians, believers who prefer action over doctrinal purity. They stand for values they associate with Jesus -- kindness, fairness, caregiving, trust in providence -- traditional values that are fading fast in a culture of celebrity, competition and casinos.

In the 24/7 media world, a permanent culture war grinds on, a noisy scrimmage of symbols. “Prayer in schools” and “God Bless America” are symbols, weapons. The word Christian has become a presumptuous, pompous weapon of the political right.

The Christians who reject “Christian” ought to get over their shyness and rejoin the national conversation. And bring their Bibles. They’ll be cheered and intrigued by what they find there in the Prophets, the Psalms, the words of the Galilean. They’ll discover something else too: The word “Christian” does not appear in any of the four Gospels at all.