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Like many of you, I’d just as soon replace the word, “evangelical” with something else.  Not because it isn’t a perfectly fine word, but for the response it evokes, thanks to the culture war tactics of so many American evangelicals in the last thirty years.  But the fact is, labels are difficult to shed, and the labeled are not consulted about their moniker preferences. (My parents didn’t seek my permission to name me and “Christians” were so named by the people of Antioch who were not believers.)  And I wonder if the hand of God isn’t behind this label’s stickiness.  Like God himself may be holding it in place on us until we understand what it means.
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I was changed by an old book many years ago: On the Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards, a leader in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, spoke of the need to have the “affections”–the emotional, affective, feeling regions awakened.  He described the hard heart of Ezekiel’s prophecy as an unfeeling, inert, unresponsive heart.  And he had a very physical understanding of the affections, using words like humours, fluids, and the like to refer to them.  The bodily effects of feeling: weeping, tears, a stirring in the pit of the stomach, flushing of the face, warmth.
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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a man whose name has been much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe.

My friend, Carl Safina, an ocean conservationist and author of the acclaimed Song for the Blue Ocean told me that his two heroes are Charles Darwin and Jesus; Darwin for revealing the unity of all living things, and Jesus for teaching us to love our enemies. Would that my fellow believers understood as well the rule of Jesus, a rule which demands that we bother to understand each other.
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Evangelical, what’s in a name?  It’s funny how you get these names.  I don’t recall signing up to be an evangelical.  It just happened.  Well, not quite.  I was a Jesus freak.  But  you can’t escape history, especially not with a religion whose founder was God coming into history and wearing it like a tool apron.  Who would want to take off what he put on? So you find yourself or that community of people that you’re part of, I don’t know, slowing down just long enough to let history catch up with you.
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