If you really want to stick it to conservative evangelicals, please stop replicating their rhetorical strategy. Throughout this essay--starting with the title--the author promotes this false equation: evangelicals = Christians = religious people.

In fact, of course, evangelicals comprise only some Christians, and Christians comprise only some of the world's religious people.

For more than a century, evangelicals have claimed with medieval audacity that they represent the one true version of the faith. They have attempted to monopolize the term "Christian" and deny the term to members of other denominations, whom they generally regard as unsaved, hellbound, not Christian. This absurd rhetorical strategy has proven remarkably successful: now many non-evangelicals lazily equate the term "Christian" with right-wing religious white nationalists.

When we use accurate terminology, we reveal evangelicals for what they are: just one of many versions of Christianity. We pay appropriate respect to mainline denominations and Black evangelicals, whose theology and politics diverge considerably from those of the evangelical religious white.

It's difficult but still worthwhile to converse with everyone, irrespective of their religious beliefs. If we shun people who hold views we reject, we consign them to company that will likely only reinforce unfortunate beliefs. We deny the shunned and ourselves opportunities to grow & learn. It is, arguably, a religious duty: "Come now, & let us reason together" (Isaiah 1:18), translated more accurately & provocatively in NRSV: "Come now, let us argue it out."