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Growing up as an evangelical Christian, Jonathan Dudley was taught that faith was defined by the total rejection of abortion, homosexuality, evolution, and environmentalism. But once he had begun studying biology and ethics, his views began to change and he soon realized that what he had been told about the Bible – and those four big issues – may have been misconstrued. Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics assesses the scientific and cultural factors leading evangelicals to certain stances on each issue, shows where they went wrong, and critically challenges the scriptural, ethical, and biological arguments issued by those leaders today.
In Broken Words, Dudley applies the Bible and biology to challenge the fixed political dogmas of the religious right. Evangelicals are confronted for the first time from within their ranks on the extent to which faith has been corrupted by conservative politics, cultural prejudice and naive anti-intellectualism. A re-ordering of American Christianity is underway – and this book is an essential part of the conversation.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 5, 2011 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307720795
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307720795
- File size: 2097 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 15, 2011
Dudleys is a familiar story. Raised a conservative evangelical Christian, he learned that abortion is murder; homosexuality, sin; evolution, nonsense; and environmentalism, a farce. But from childhood, he doubted, and when he went to Calvin College to study biology, he discovered that scholarly evangelical opinion on the big four issues differed markedly from popular evangelical culture (i.e., the religious Right). Acquiring a masters in religion before starting medical school, he prepared very well to write this critique of popular evangelicalisms stances on the big four. In chapters on each, he shows not so much that the popular evangelical stances are wrong as that they are neither the only ones in Christian theology nor historically well established. Moreover, the framework of knowledge, assumptions, and culture within which popular evangelicals interpret scripture and science isnt the same as those of scholarly conservative or liberal evangelicals. Dudley clearly feels discussion, reasoning, and reconciliation rather than intransigence and rigid partisanship ought to be characteristic of popular evangelicals. Excellent argumentation, by no means only, though especially, for evangelicals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)
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