Evangelical vs. Fundamentalist (a response to Robin’s post)

I have intended to create a blog post on this topic for a while now because I think we atheists tend to use these terms interchangeably, and they are not quite interchangeable. Many fundamentalists would not want to be called an evangelical, and vice versa. But the reality is that the terms fundamentalist, evangelical and mainline Christianity rest on a continuum, with many people and churches on blurry lines between these terms. My parents were self-identified fundamentalists throughout my childhood, and then switched to a more evangelical church when I was a teenager. This post is only my first-person observations of these groups. I am not familiar with “every jot and tittle” of every point of every denomination’s doctrine. Feel free to post angry comments about how I am wrong about what some sect believes. <sarcasm>

The big issues in this debate are the inerrancy of the bible and cultural conservatism. If you were to set the broad spectrum of Christianity on a right-to-left scale, “fundamentalists” would be on the far right and “mainline” churches (United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, Presbyterian USA, etc.) would be on the far left. Evangelicals sit on the middle ground between these two extremes. Continue reading…

California Moves to Block Texas Politico-Religious Textbook Alterations

In a follow-up to a story covered some time ago on the podcast, Sen. Leland Yee D-San Francisco has introduced a bill into the California state government to block the controversial changes introduced by Texas a few months ago; Texas notably, due to its size and well-funded public education say, has a great deal of clot when it comes to demanding standards of the national textbook publishers, who themselves save money by selling the same book to multiple states despite varying educational standards.

While this is all good business to the textbook industry, it doesn’t much help the states that don’t agree with Texas’ changes, chief among them the erroneous statement that the American Founding Fathers were largely guided by Christian notions, and that the 1980s saw a conservative resurgence which greatly improved the nation.

The bill would require that the California Board of Education review the textbooks specifically for the changes introduced by Texas, to deem them worthy or not for California students. The article quotes the bill has saying that the Texas changes are specifically “a sharp departure from widely accepted historical teachings” and are “a threat to the apolitical nature of public school governance and academic content standards in California.”