Ed Kilgore, who is always worth listening to, made a post in here the other day about how “perverse” it is that Mel Gibson has marketed his film to evangelicals, who supposedly have no special interest in the crucifixion. Andrew Sullivan eagerly picked up and reproduced the point. The idea that evangelicals shouldn’t naturally be that interested in the crucifixion struck me as kind of counterintuitive. I was poking around for some research on today’s column, and ran across this lecture by Mark Noll, a Wheaton college professor who is an expert on evangelicals. Here is what he says about the matter:<BR.

“One of the most effective efforts to summarize those [evangelical] convictions and attitudes has been made by David Bebbington who has identified four key ingredients of evangelicalism:

*conversion, or “the belief that lives need to be changed”;

*the Bible, or the “belief that all spiritual truth is to be

found in its pages”;

*activism, or the dedication of all believers, including laypeople, to lives of service for God, especially as manifest in evangelism (spreading the good news) and mission (taking the gospel to other societies);

*crucicentrism, or the conviction that Christ’s death was the crucial matter in providing reconciliation between a holy God and sinful humans.”

That evangelicals would be drawn to Gibson’s film , then, seems quite natural, not perverse.