I think that a kinder, gentler evangelical is an oxymoron anymore, at least in the US. Most of the liberal Christians I have met -- and this is truer, the more liberal they are -- hold their faith very loosely and are quite open-minded and accepting, sometimes even of atheism (generally, shy of actually allowing you to official belong to their group). Are they delusional? I don't think that's a fair assessment. They don't literally believe most (or often, any) of the creedal doctrines, they see them as metaphors and traditions that focus people's thinking in good directions. Accepted and interpreted and prioritized in that way, Christianity is a decent source of community, and of good works. It's still too crufty and kum-by-yah for my taste, but I have a lot of common cause with it.

The fundamentalists constitute roughly 20% of Christianity and 80% of the problems it causes. The main thing the other 80% of Christianity is guilty of, is not calling out fundamentalism sufficiently, but rather, treating it like the crazy uncle in the basement. They should unambiguously repudiate it.

@mordant you make some good points. However, some more open minded Christians I have known do this "dance" between it being metaphors and being the truth, as if it can be both. I think over time there has been a pattern of more "reasonable" Christians believing the Bible until science has disproved parts of it, then those parts magically become metaphors. Also, as Closeted pointed out above, they have to cherry pick from the Bible and disregard the more brutal parts.

@Rudy1962 Totally agree. "Dance" is a good metaphor. Also, I've known some of them to be just as up in my face as any fundamentalist over one red-line issue, the existence of god. They'll let me define god as a genial, senile kindly uncle or an impersonal Force if I want, but his existence is still non-negotiable to some people. He is the one entity who cannot be metaphorical, though he can be vaguely defined and described. So yeah, there is still equivocation, evasion, cherry picking and goal post moving, just less of it ... often a lot less. And yes ... the inconvenient violence, brutality, sadism and patriarchy and the failure to lead on moral issues like slavery, has to be ignored even more so by liberals than by fundies.

Still ... I am usually not the embodiment of Satan to them, and they tend to have similar social goals to me, so there's that.

Some are drowning in cognitive dissonance.