The .Plan

My favorite religion beat reporter preaches it:

FALSANI: Well, I’m an evangelical.

DOOR: What does that mean?

FALSANI: Not what everybody thinks it means. It took me a long time to be able to say “I am an evangelical” out loud again. I’m trying to reclaim it by saying it.

DOOR: …like Jim Wallis..

FALSANI: There are a growing number of us. I’m mortified and horrified that when someone says “evangelical” to folks in my newsroom — who are very good people — the first thing they think of is some kind of venomous statement made by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Chuck Colson. How did they become the faces of the best message ever about radical love? How did we get there? That’s a sin. There should be unrest about that, not about how we want to civilly define marriage, for Pete’s sake. Sometimes it’s hard for me to write about evangelicalism because I’m very hard on us.