#40 – Mailbag#2: listeners’ responses to “Evangelicalism”

We did not anticipate two seemingly unrelated episodes would be so fertile, producing a mini-series of six episodes and a massive volume of listener feedback. In hindsight now, though, we can see the two are causally-related … each episode unleashed more feedback which gave us more material for yet another provocative episode, and the cycle continued. Now we want to digest what you the listeners had to say about it all. We combed through the comments and identified several complementary threads and many probing questions:

• were we being destructive toward the Christian community in general?
• were we being too hard on Evangelicals in particular (even persecuting them)?
• were we confusing Evangelicals with Fundamentalists?
• what are the problems with Evangelicalism?
• are we allowed to protect Evangelicalism’s reputation by unilaterally re-labeling the embarrassing elements in our community as Fundamentalists (aka, scapegoating)?
• have Evangelicals and Fundamentalists lost their distinctiveness?
• can we find a litmus test to distinguish Fundamentalists from Evangelicals?
• if we can’t revoke the “Evangelical” label from those embarrassing elements, can we come up with a new label for ourselves?
• what does it really mean to be an “Evangelical”?
• do Boyd and I need to re-name our podcast?

Our listeners (you!) gave us their thoughts on these questions (and we had a few rebuttals).

As always, tell us what you think.

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