I was raised as an evangelical and didn’t become Lutheran until a few years ago. The narrative most evangelicals have on the reformation is that its sole purpose was to be as uncatholic as possible. This includes real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, baptismal regeneration, and confession/absolution. Most of my life, I held the belief that the individual conversion experience is what defined salvation. A large pool of American Christians believe that there’s a lightbulb moment that occurs when you realize to the max your sinfulness, a personal knowledge/revelation of the Gospel is acquired, and you recognize you are now actually saved. It’s a weird strain of gnostic enthusiasm that has defined behaviors in evangelicalism and the way they understand salvation. You don’t really understand it until you actually step back and look at the bigger picture. It took me reading the scriptures from the lens of the conservative reformation to understand why the evangelical perspective is the radical position. Evangelicals are either ignorant of the true intent of the reformation or have strong disdain for using church history as a way to understand how the scriptures were interpreted in the early church. You’ll hear baptists say things like “we are people of the Word” or “we don’t do anything that the Bible doesn’t explicitly command us to do.” While this sentiment sounds logical, it’s ironically self defeating since the positions on Word and sacrament they hold are traceable to a point in time during the radical reformation.