When is an evangelist not an evangelist?
28th July 2009
The guys at Get Religion kick some ass and take some names.
I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”
This is a variation on an old argument that sounds something like this: “This is what I think the word means, so that’s what it means.” There’s a variation on this theme that journalists often use that weaves in a kind of postmodern twist: “Words change. Everyone knows what that word means right now when the great community of mainstream journalists use it that way. Thus, that’s what the word means.” This is a popular argument on the left when using the aforementioned “fundamentalist.” On the right, there are some folks who like to toss around the “cult” word.