I guess you can tell by my omission that I grew up pretty low church myself (Methodist. But now I’m an atheistic scoffer who somehow got hired at not just one but two Catholic universities, and who’s writing a book about a Protestant girl who became a very devout Catholic and a professed nun.)

Go figure.

Am I getting warmer?

Elliot, I think it’s clear that Boneroo was a very troubled person, and that mental illness plus his access to firearms were the main contributing factors to his murder of Brian Mahon. My post here was just speculation on what the evangelical hijacking of the word “Christian” may also have done to Boneroo’s thinking. If there are more media reports that shed light on his religious delusions, then I’ll share them and comment on them here.

I think it might be useful to compare this to the way that whiteness and masculinity often become “unmarked” categories when we’re invoking group identities. The cliche example as a history professor is the students who always ask why there are so many women and black people in my history survey; if they wanted that, they’d have taken women’s history or Af Am history. (And yes, I’ve gotten these comments before. Nor are professors are immune to this, either. I still remember telling my dissertation director that Chapter 6 of the diss was going to include a long section about Quaker marriage practices. He said that he didn’t see how this was relevant because the project wasn’t “about Quakers and their women.” So I responded, “But Mike, many of these Quakers *are* women.”)

To return to the earlier point: if you have to push people to explain what they mean by the word “Christian” (and find out they don’t really mean the term in the broadest sense), then you’re already playing the game where norms have been defined and described so as to exclude a great many people.

However, I think I have a better idea now why these sects are called “evangelical.” The majority of devoted missionaries are invisible to our culture, for they try to convert people in far-away parts of the world. On the other hand, members of evangelical sects are encouraged to talk about their faith with their neighbors and associates–the members of our own culture. (In this way, they are more similar to the early evangelists in the New Testament, who preached to the pagans around them.) In reality, I think most evangelicals and “evangelist ministers” spend most of their time talking about their faith to others who share similar belief. Maybe this wasn’t true during the Great Awakenings, when there were fewer entertainment options, and even relatively irreligious people might go to hear Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield. So the “evangelical” Christians get credit for a) talking about their faith a lot, even if it’s not actually evangelistic, since they are talking to people who already share similar beliefs; b) trying to convert people from our own culture, which is a more visible activity than converting people overseas; and c) belonging to a tradition that was more actively missionary than it is now.