“The only time I heard from Christians themselves was in the political realm. Two issues defined them — abortion and gay marriage — leading secular folks like me to believe that Christians wake up thinking only about babies in the womb and gay people at the altar.  That perception changed when I moved to a place filled with Christians — Oxford, Miss. Eventually I became one myself.”

A little while ago, I had written two pieces (here and here) making the case for defining evangelicalism according to its theological distinctives and not its (pervasively but not exhaustively) shared convictions on social issues. Evangelical positions on abortion and gay marriage, I said, are positions that most evangelicals deduce from our core principles. But they are not the core principles themselves, and some evangelicals (who are genuinely evangelical theologically) do not arrive by deduction at the same positions. That is, and I say this as a social conservative: you can be evangelical theologically and not conservative on social issues.

All well and good, says Fred Clark, proprietor of the popular “slacktivist” blog. ”I agree with Tim” that evangelical should be defined theologically, he wrote, “although I’m afraid that — in practice — most Americans evangelicals do not.” Indeed, “culture-war definitions of ‘evangelical’ seem to be ascendant.”

For the general public, as well as for “media and academia,” evangelicalism is no longer primarily identified with people like Billy Graham, J.I. Packer, John Stott or N.T. Wright or with institutions like Christianity Today and the National Association of Evangelicals. Those people and institutions were long ago eclipsed by people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, David Barton, Tim & Beverly LaHaye, Bryan Fischer and Cindy Jacobs.

Are those folks really “evangelicals”? Some would not be if we were to appeal to a primarily theological definition, but they all claim affinity with the term and because their culture-warrior bona fides are unquestionable, no one ever challenges their claim to it the way that such challenges are routinely directed toward people like Jay Bakker or Brian McLaren.

When people like Robertson, Perkins, Barton, Fischer, LaHaye and Jacobs become the most prominent standard-bearers of evangelicalism then we can’t complain that anyone is “exaggerating its vices.”

There’s one point here I want to affirm strongly. Fred notes that American evangelicals tend to patrol their borders with liberalism much more fiercely than we patrol our borders with fundamentalism or hyper-conservatism. We spend a lot more time criticizing a Brian McLaren on the Left, and charting the boundary markers there, than we do differentiating ourselves from a Bryan Fischer on the right.

On the one hand, there are reasons for this. First, our progressive brethren do a fine job all by themselves criticizing those on the extreme right of evangelicalism. But more seriously, I think if we’re honest with ourselves we evangelicals can confess that we believe moving Leftward is more dangerous (theologically and soteriologically) than moving Rightward. Leftward leads to the abandonment of biblical authority and of the resurrection and divinity of Christ (which we regard as critical for salvation), while Rightward leads to a hardening anti-intellectualism, hyper-legalism and an increasingly militant opposition to all things human. Move too far to the Left and you’re no longer really a Christian. Move too far to the Right and you’re just a nut-job, but a saved nut-job. That seems to be the assumption.

While there may be some truth to the assumption, criticizing those on our Left but not on our Right is a practice we should reject. There are just as many theological problems on the extreme right as there are on the extreme left, and conservative evangelical extremists do damage to our cause just as much as Muslim extremists do damage to the cause of Islam. It’s harder for us to see it from within our communities, but it’s true. We hate to criticize the Bryan Fischers because it will call down the wrath of many who are “on our side” of the dividing line on social issues, but the importance of maintaining friendly relations amongst co-belligerents on the social issues cannot outweigh the importance of speaking the truth about theological error and social sin.

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