Evangelical Bashing

One of the reasons I really like Nicholas Kristof is his willingness to commend Evangelicals for the relief work they do in the developing world. Some of Kristof's liberal NYT readers have more difficulty in this regard. Here is a sampling from the comments to Kristof's post, "A Huggable Evangelical":

• Comment 18: "Are there any greater hypocrites then the evangelical christians in America? I’ve never seen a group so aggressively insist on following the tenets of the Bible and then in turn so universally ignore them."
• Comment 19: "Too bad that the vitriolic believers in the evangelical churches have blinders on their mind. They would rather flock to the bombastic greedy power-hungry cheaters who talk a good talk but live corrupted lives."
• Comment 22: "I will be more than happy to interact and work with evangelical Christians who really are Christians, not deranged barbarians with an old book and a lot of paranoid delusions. Maybe the NAE described above really does consist of the former."
• Thankfully, comment 6 is not representative.
  

A typical conservative Evangelical response, I imagine, would be to attribute these comments to the persecution Christians inevitably experience. After all, "We should expect to be hated by the world for our allegiance to Christ."

Fine. Just make sure that that hatred is because of your allegiance to Christ. Sadly, Evangelicals today--unlike their ancient forebears--are more well-known for their strident views on a few so-called "social conservative" issues than for their care for the poor and socially marginalized.