Rod and Mark Shea have good posts on P.Z. Myers, whose spiritual insanity I had not been inclined to discuss earlier, since it seems that notoriety and attention are what atheist “propagandists of the act” seem to crave most of all.  However, there was something in both posts that I noticed that I thought deserved a few words of comment.  This concerns the use of the word evangelical in describing militant, aggressive atheists of Myers’ sort.   

Shea:

C.S. Lewis describes the curious evangelical itch [bold mine-DL] that rankles in the shriveled soul of the God-hater in his Great Divorce.

I know what Rod, Shea (and Lewis) mean, and I don’t want to be pedantic, but it struck me that crediting atheists with an “evangelical” impulse misrepresents what compels them and it also unintentionally bestows on their message a value that Christians do not believe it possesses.  This is not news to either of them or most anyone else, but since something evangelical properly pertains to good news and specifically to the Good News of the Gospel, it is not really fitting to attribute an evangelical impulse to proselytes of godlessness.  We often refer to proselytism of various kinds, both ideological and religious, as evangelism, and today we may refer to episodes from marketing and politics as “spreading the Gospel of such-and-such,” but I think we would find it strange to use the word evangelical to describe Wahhabi proselytes. 

With a nod to Dostoevsky, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that there is something especially demonic in this particularly aggressive sort of atheism.  If what Myers has done (or claimed to have done) is evil, as Shea rightly notes, his desire to spread word of his evil-doing would have to be called ponerangelism.