I was talking to my brother yesterday about our father. He was a Southern Baptist minister, and believed strongly in the Southern Baptist dogma: no consumption of alcoholic beverages, no dancing, no profanity (or even mild substitute profanity, such as "darn"), and abhorrence of divorce. Since those of you who know me personally realize that that's four strikes against me, I have to state for the record that my father loved me as deeply as a father can love a son. That's his photo at the bottom of the right sidebar, by the way.

At any rate, I was commiserating with my brother that so many liberals regard us with such disdain, because we're, you know, evangelicals. To many, evangelical is synonymous with fundamentalist, which is synonymous with ignorant, bigoted, toothless rednecks.

Guys, I'm here to tell you, you are sooooo wrong.

I know I'm going out on a limb here for many liberals, but please try to think back to any lessons you might have had regarding the application of logic. Just because Joe is both A and B doesn't mean that A = B. Similarly, just because rabid fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are evangelicals doesn't mean that all evangelicals (or even most evangelicals) are fundamentalist (if you use those two yayhoos as exemplars of fundamentalism). A perfect case in point is Angel, who is as ardent a liberal as you can find anywhere, but is equally ardently an evangelical Christian.

What makes someone an evangelical? Belief that salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ's sacrifice on the cross, dying for our sins. Reliance on preaching over ritual. Salvation through regeneration (being born again — incidentally, I regard the term "born-again Christian" as redundant. If you aren't born again in Christ, you aren't a Christian), resulting in a spiritually transformed personal life. Notice that this description doesn't contain any of the facets normally associated with being a fundamentalist Christian.

My brother expressed his belief that the term "fundamentalist" has been so overused that it's now meaningless: fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Muslims, whatever. He feels that there must be better terms to describe these people who so twist their faith to justify their immoral actions. And we agreed that "fundamentalist" certainly doesn't describe our father.

He offered a different term that he had picked up from one of our father's colleagues: a traditionalist. Yeah, that fits. Dad was a traditionalist, but that doesn't mean he never grew and changed.

As an example, I grew up hearing my father on many occasions state that he would never perform a wedding ceremony for anyone who was divorced, unless they were remarrying the person they divorced. For this reason, I never approached my father to officiate at my second or third wedding.

My brother (who is on his fourth marriage — in our cases, the apple appears to have fallen pretty far from the tree, at least in this area) took a different tack. When he was setting up plans for his second wedding, he told Dad that he was planning to ask a friend of the family (who was both an ordained minister and a Justice of the Peace) to officiate, since he didn't want to put Dad in the position of choosing between his faith and his family, seeing as how Dad didn't believe in remarriage after divorce.

Dad replied, "I believe that approach has caused more harm than good." So he has performed all four of my brother's weddings. And I'd be willing to bet (oops, there's another one that Dad was against!) that he performed many other weddings for people who had been divorced.

I offer up these personal experiences to illustrate the differences between evangelicals and fundamentalists. And traditionalists, too. Too many liberals don't have sufficient contact with evangelical (and traditionalist) Christians, which is the basis for their misunderstanding as well as their fear of many Christians.

The fire-and-brimstone preachers, the haters of homosexuals, the morality police, these are not typical evangelical Christians. These are the exceptions, the outliers, who grab attention based purely on the volume of their voices.

Christians are compassionate beings, as a whole. We love you no matter who you are, or what you've done. Which is not to say we don't get angry with folks sometimes, but as any spouse can tell you, you can feel love and anger toward someone at the same time. But this portrayal of evangelical Christians as intolerant fascists by many on the Left is just so inaccurate.