I receive an e-mail from David Mays that summarizes books he's read. He's reading The New Faces of Christianity by Philip Jenkins. Jenkins is the author of The Next Christendom, which sold enough copies to be taken seriously enough that "Atlantic Monthly" made it the subject of a cover story.

I consider myself an "evangelical", which means I believe in the "fundamentals". The inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, His substitutionary death, burial and bodily resurrection and His imminent Second Coming. I hold that these five fundamentals are necessary. Period. Not 25 or 555 - just five fundamentals. When I first started identifying myself that way, I liked to think of it as "a thinking man's fundamentalism." Its fundamentalism, but with a social conscience and a sense of humor. I've been part of a terrific ministry to AIDs patients where we saw God do miracles just because a couple of His children decided to believe. I not only have a conscience, I love to laugh.... If evangelicalism put the fun in fundamentalism and the 'hip' in discipleship, that kind of balance is (IMHO) what I liked about identifying myself as an evangelical.

You can imagine what I felt, then, when I read the quote from Jenkins' book which I'm pasting in below. It got me thinking about the term "evangelical""

   Fundamentalism "was originally a description of a particular approach to reading Christian
   scriptures, but has now become a catch-all description for ultraconservative intolerance. 
   Used thus, the term becomes purely pejorative and, often, subjective.  The term 'fundamentalism'
   expands to cover anyone who treats a religion as something that should shape one's daily
   life, provided that leads to conclusions that the speaker does not like.  If your reading of
   the Bible inspires you to help the poor, that is passionate religious commitment.  If it leads
   you to denounce homosexuality, you are a fundamentalist.  In the modern U.S. context,
   the term 'evangelical' is well on the way to acquiring such connotations, as a label for
   intolerant (white) social conservatives."

I hate labels, but maybe its time to come up with a new one.

What do you think?