A recent NY Times article serves (in my view) as excellent evidence that our kids won’t be able to write-off reasonable, intelligent, and compassionate Christians as oddballs any more. If you know me, you know that it’s hard for me to let people make wide-arching statements about Christians or Christianity without me chiming in and saying “Hey, I don’t think any of that stuff and we’re not all crazy.”

I truly believe that soon “Fuck Christians” won’t be the easy scapegoat for reasonable people looking to vet their understandable anger at homophobic, war-mongering, anti-science nutcases who ignorantly associate themselves with a homeless middle-eastern man that kept company with scoundrels, violent revolutionaries, and prostitutes.

Here’s a notable exert from the NY Times:

There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

I’d also like to mention that if atheists, agnostics, humanists, and naturalists really want to eradicate the influence of the Dobsons and Hams of the world, they should start being a little more particular about how they word their rants and where they direct their frustration. Making over-arching statements about Christ, the Bible, and Christianity does serve to agitate the intended audience. That being said, it also alienates potentially powerful allies such as pro-intellectual, pro-social justice, and pro-science Christians who want the madness to end just as badly as they do.