Abstract
Broken Words grabs the reader's attention from the very first sentence: "I learned a few things growing up as an evangelical Christian: that abortion is murder; homosexuality, sin; evolution, nonsense; and environmentalism, a farce." With this brief outline of his book, Jonathan Dudley starts a path through rethinking the "Big Four" ideas that may serve as the best characterization of evangelicals to the larger society. He takes on each in turn, and effectively ties together these four topics by showing that for each, a "simple reading" of scripture is actually an evolved history of interpretation: for each, the modern dogma reflects reactions against social, theological, and political issues separate from the issue itself; and for each, there is an element of rejecting science as a reliable way of understanding the world.