Maybe we can work out some sort of exchange program with The Corner. They can loan us an agnostic and we can send over an evangelical.

To be fair, I suspect there are a number of evangelicals that write for that blog who just don’t identify themselves as evangelical on there (Mark Hemingway or Maggie Gallagher, perhaps?). NR has always tilted Catholic—as has First Things which is often mistaken for a “Roman Catholic journal”—so its not surprising that their most vocal religious folks (Ramesh Ponnuru, Kathryn Lopez) would be from that side of the Tiber.

John Mark does has a point, though, about the ratio of professed evangelicals to professed atheists being oddly disproportionate. That is curious.

The discussion on the question “What is an evangelical? has been both fascinating and illuminating. The brilliance of the responses doesn’t surprise me (after all, I picked these folks) but I am surprised by how much I—as a lifelong, unapologeticly self-defined evangelical—am getting out of the exchange. It’s reminded me of how fruitful it can be to simply define terms that we are all too familiar with.

I really resonate with Fred Sanders’point that “when I see the word [evangelical], I see the good news in it, the evangel. And I want to raise my hand and identify myself with that movement which has the guts to name itself after that good word.”

Since you can’t really talk about what it means to be an evangelical without understanding the root—evangel (gospel)—perhaps we should also ask, “What is the gospel?”

Rather than provide an answer myself I’ll defer to our own Russel Moore:

What does it mean to be evangelical?

A term that applies to between fifteen and forty million Americans should be rather obvious. Yet few words are so commonly used while being so poorly defined. To many people the word evangelical evokes images of the “Religious Right”, of people who read the Left Behind novels, go to megachurches, and vote for Republicans. While to other people—mainly Christians who ultra-conservative theologically— the label is used as a derogatory term for believers who take an insufficiently stringent view of scripture and accept other forms of “liberal” belief.

While the term has a limited range of application, referring to specific traits, churches, convictions, and practices within Christianity, its denotation is so plastic that it makes it almost impossible to succinctly define. It originates from the Greek word evangelion, meaning “the good news,” or, more commonly, the “gospel.” In the New Testament, the word is used in reference to the “good news” of the victory of God’s salvation. In American circles, though, the terms is expanded to generally apply in three different senses:

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