One of my biggest problems with modern Christianity is the chest-thumping brand of “street-corner evangelism” that has hijacked my religion.

I had the pleasure of speaking briefly Monday with Keith Darrell, one such evangelist. He told me that he works with “The Whitefield Fellowship,” which in reality is a website he owns and operates and boasts only three blog posts from last September.

The name comes from George Whitefield, a prominent evangelist in the Great Awakening and a man who preached in all of the American colonies.

Darrell said his mission was the same: Though he lives in Brooklyn, his mission is to drive throughout the country preaching. His website elaborates that college campuses are the new “Athens,’ insofar that ideas are exchanged on the street corners and intellectuals debate the cosmos.

But in practice, discussions of religion become shouting matches, and any chance there might have been for evangelists like Darrell to cause people to stop and think is lost in the crossfire.

A friend of mine who saw him speaking said Darrell also made a few anti-Semitic remarks during his speech.

If true, it’s a little ironic, given the biggest issue I have with him and his ilk: invocation of the Old Testament laws such as those found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

Those laws do not apply anymore. Christianity and Judaism do not advocate stoning people for any reason. And, as far as I’m concerned, the nullified applications include the Ten Commandments.

I’m not saying the Ten Commandments are useless — objectively good truths lie in them, such as “do not kill” — but Christians’ justification is no longer words etched into stone tablets. Christ himself sums it up when explaining the greatest commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind … love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Ten Commandments still apply insofar as those two ideas do.

To that end, theologians such as Stephen Notman categorize the Ten Commandments into the first four — which examine the vertical relationship of God and man — and the last six, which cover the horizontal relationship of man to humanity.

Consider this also: The fourth commandment states that we must keep the sabbath. When the heck is that? And how do we keep it? By refusing to work? I’d argue that nobody really “keeps the sabbath.”

I reject the idea that Christians must follow only some of the Ten Commandments, as if the one about the sabbath doesn’t really apply.

Either we follow them, or we don’t, and I don’t believe we do.

I speak from firsthand experience. From sixth grade until halfway through my junior year in high school I went to a private Baptist school.

The intolerance I saw there disturbed me as a youth.

I felt as though God’s love applied only to “us,” the Christians who threw ourselves at him as our pastors dictated, supposedly from the Bible. If you were, for example, a homosexual, you would only be loved if you repented and became one of them and followed what they wanted you to do.

Almost as if they were the gatekeepers of God’s love.

And yet, God somehow musters the decency to wait to judge us until our lives are over. Is it so much to ask that Christians extend the same courtesy to the rest of God’s children?

Talk about the Bible, God’s love and all that other stuff as much as you like, but really, who has a place telling somebody else they’ll burn in Hell forever?

There’s simply no defense against being a bigot and hiding behind the Old Testament. Christ condemned it when a woman accused of adultery was brought before him. His response was laconic: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Mr. Darrell, the last thing students at Iowa State need are your assurances that they’ll be crispy on the outside and weeping on the inside for the rest of forever.