Erasing the mainline
I haven't read Marcia Pally's new book yet. I'll admit it's hard for me to get past the title, The New Evangelicals. A couple years ago I would have just mocked it for echoing the most overreported religion-beat trend story of 2005-06, a time when every moderate-to-heavy cable news viewer managed to memorize Jim Wallis's talking points without trying to. But by now, being tired of the OMG-progressive-evangelicals narrative itself seems like a tired cliche.
So it's hard to imagine Pally (and Eerdmans) putting something out that sticks to the usual fare of anecdotal news flashes: I found some evangelicals who don't hate gay people! Or science! I suspect this is instead a rather substantive investigation into the subject, and I plan to take a look.
I won't, however, be looking to Pally for help in coming up with a list of designations for varieties of left-leaning American Christians. Here's what she offers in a New York Times opinion piece:
