"In this book “evangelical” refers not to Protestants in general but to those Protestant who, beginning more than three hundred years ago, strongly emphasized the redeeming work of Christ, personally appropriated, and who stressed spreading the good news of that message, whether to those with only a nominal attachment to Christianity or to those who had never heard the Christian gospel. The British historian David Bebbington developed a fourfold definition for his own study of evangelicals in the British Isles; it has become a very useful touchstone for discussing other groups in the world that are linked to British evangelicalism or that possess characteristics resembling the groups Bebbington describes. For Bebbington, there are four key ingredients of evangelical religion: *conversion: evangelicals are people who stress the need for a definite turning away from self and sin in order to find God in Jesus Christ; the Bible: evangelicals may respect church traditions in varying degrees and may use schooling, reason, and science to assist in explaining Christianity, but the ultimate authority for all matters of faith and religious practice is the Christian Scriptures; *activism: evangelicals have historically been moved to action-to works of charity, sometimes to works of social reform, but above all to the work of spreading the message of salvation in Christ-because of their own experience of God; *the cross: evangelicals also have consistently stressed as the heart of Christian faith the death of Christ on the cross and then the resurrection of Christ as a triumphant seal for what was accomplished in that death (Evangelicals have regularly emphasized the substitutionary character of this atonement between God and sinful humans whereby Christ receives the punishment due to human sins and God gives spiritual life to those who stand “in Christ”)."