[eropple]

I guess I gotta wave my "descriptive not prescriptive" flag a bit. =) You are, technically, correct. Hermes Conrad aside, technically correct is not the best kind of correct--"apologist" has nearly universally negative connotations in, well, modern English, here, now. It is used almost exclusively to characterize a position that the user of the word views as negative. And people who don't fall into that generality often are using the word in "defiance" of that generality, which kind of makes you wonder why, when words are used to communicate. It's also worth noting that at least some dictionaries characterize "apologist" as a defender of something controversial, which is a nod towards the real-world use of the term if you read into what they mean by controversial a bit.

The world isn't an SAT test. Context always always always matters. (And, for extra context-matters, if you are now compelled, at the end of this post, to ask what a "Standard Aptitude Test test" is, I invite you to take a good long look at your life and ask yourself why you want to be That Guy because nobody likes That Guy.)

[iopq]

Christian writers are called "apologists" and it's not a negative connotation, it's just what they do

[eropple]

Sure. But the use of "apologist" in a Christian context is, today in 2015, much more niche than, say, calling the news organ of a particular political stripe "liberal apologia"; it would be rare to see the New York Times use that phrase except in irony but much more common for conservative sources to do so, because it's commonly understood to be more negative than neutral.

It's much the same as getting mad when somebody uses "hacker" to mean something other than "train and/or computer nerd". You don't get to lay a prescriptive claim to truth.