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Some evangelicals agree with you _ especially the younger ones. They're still confidently proclaiming their beliefs, but they're also trying to emphasize less politically polarizing issues by focusing on helping people with AIDS, trying to stop human trafficking and working to ease climate change. Still, other evangelicals have decided to even more fiercely wage the culture wars.

Great question. At this particular Kentucky church, the people I spoke with were wrestling with this. They said they realized that Christians who work in government, for example, such as Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, have a duty to follow the law. But they also feel there should be a conscience right to object. It’s not widely known, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of religious exemptions in government regulations and laws. But public support for those exemptions seems to be waning _ which is more evidence of declining evangelical clout.

Have you read Matthew Vines' ``God and the Gay Christian" ? He comes from a conservative Christian family and makes the argument that it's a misreading of the Bible to put gay marriage at the center of Christian life. He contends that it should not be a defining issue _ and he's won significant support for his outlook. However, most evangelicals still consider gay marriage a make-or-break issue. They disagree strongly when they hear Vines and others say you can be gay and in a relationship with someone of the same sex and still call yourself an evangelical. Surveys have found many younger evangelicals think like Vines, so some change is coming on this issue. We just don't know the scope of it yet.

That is one of the toughest questions facing religion reporters, academics and Christians themselves. The most extensive definition of an evangelical by people who conduct surveys can be found in the research of the Barna Group. Other surveys only ask people to say yes or no if they consider themselves an evangelical and leave it at that. Some Christians have actually stopped using the term to describe themselves, because they feel it's become synonymous in the public mind with partisanship or bigotry. Even religious leaders who use the term evangelical don't agree how to define it. In the Kentucky church I visited, they mostly don't use the term. They feel like it's a problematic label and only want to be known as Christians.

There are religious exemptions from the military draft, for people who want to wear a religious item (a headscarf, for example) at work, and for use of wine or a particular kind of drug for sacramental purposes. Here's an NPR story with more examples: http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172613472/who-gets-religious-exemptions-and-why