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First Things
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:
A Symposium
Copyright
(c) 1995 First Things 51 (March 1995) 35-41
Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans)
is an important book on an important topic. To note its appearance and
assess its argument we asked four knowledgeable observers of the evangelical
world for their views on the subject and the book. - The Editors
Contributors:
Grant Wacker
Someone has quipped that an evangelical can be defined as someone who
says to a liberal, "I'll call you a Christian if you'll call me a
scholar." Though Wheaton College historian Mark Noll knows all the
one- liners about evangelicals, this one does not make his book. Evangelicals'
anti-intellectualism is no laughing matter. "The scandal of the evangelical
mind," he laments, "is that there is not much of an evangelical
mind." Since the movement's birth in the transatlantic revivals of
the early eighteenth century, it has brought millions to deep and lasting
Christian faith. Even today, polls tell us, a solid majority of the folk
who regularly attend and participate in the life of local churches are
evangelical in belief and behavior. But in the process, Noll argues, they
have paid a terrible price, for they have "abandoned the universities,
the arts, and other realms of 'high' culture."
By "mind" Noll does not mean theology or biblical studies
per se, where, all things considered, evangelicals have done quite well.
His target, rather, is evangelicals' failure seriously to confront the
"whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political
science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry
and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social
theory and the arts."
The problem, in short, is evangelicals' appalling parochialism, their
unwillingness to break out of the vast but all-too-comfortable ghetto of
evangelical churches and colleges and publishing networks and engage an
intellectual world long ago captured by Marx and Darwin and Freud.
Noll's work is a jeremiad, profound in implication but simple in form.
The tragedy of evangelicals' poor scholarship, he argues, is that it grew
from negligence, and the roots of that negligence go way back. In his view
evangelical thought is best understood as a tissue of unexamined assumptions
arising from early nineteenth century American values. Those values included
revivalism, separation of church and state, political republicanism, social
democracy, economic free enterprise, philosophical realism, and patriotic
nationalism. Evangelical thinking suffered additional damage from the "disaster
of fundamentalism." In its holiness/pentecostal form, fundamentalism
encouraged morbid inwardness; in its dispensationalist form, it fostered
wooden literalism and an unhealthy preoccupation with predicting the future.
According to Noll, these influences have left modern evangelicals pathetically
ill-equipped to confront the world of contemporary learning. They substitute
activism for study, populism for the wisdom of the centuries, pragmatism
for time-tested orthodoxy. Assuming themselves to be purely objective,
disinterested readers of the biblical text, they display little concern
for the staggering problems of hermeneutics. Bereft of self-criticism or
subtlety, they show only grudging willingness to grapple with complexity
and doubt. Evangelicals' world is a Manichean one of absolutes, affording
little sense that the line between good and evil runs not between groups
but (in Solzhenitsyn's terms) through every individual soul.
Things did not have to turn out this way. Medieval monastics, the Reformers,
the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards himself had determined to bring every
aspect of life under the guidance of Christian thinking. Noll even finds
the efforts of certain late-nineteenth-century giants like Charles Hodge
and Augustus Strong compelling because of their determined effort to embrace
the knowable world within Christian categories. If evangelicals had listened
more to them, if they had been willing to draw upon the riches of other
traditions like the Dutch Reformed, the Lutheran, and the Orthodox, if
they had been humble enough to take a few cues from their counterparts
in the British Isles, the story might have developed quite differently.
But it did not because evangelicals followed the path of least resistance.
Hard words, to be sure, but they are the words of a "wounded lover,"
as Noll calls himself, the words of an evangelical insider calling other
insiders to humility in the face of a great heritage squandered. Though
the book is concisely and elegantly written, it reflects awesome erudition.
The footnotes stand out as a treasure in themselves, not stacked up like
index cards in a shoebox but judiciously brought forth as needed. Still
more importantly, Noll shows, very much as H. Richard Niebuhr did in The
Kingdom of God in America, how to be passionately committed to a cause
without sacrificing fairness (laying one's own assumptions out on the table)
or publicness (remembering that all bits of evidence and lines of argument
must be open to the scrutiny of insiders and outsiders alike).
Not surprisingly Noll (like all good historians) stirs up more questions
than he answers. Some readers will feel that he errs by being too charitable
toward the secular academic world. If George Marsden, Bradley Longfield,
and other historians are right about the growing hegemony of secular assumptions
in the modern research university, it may be difficult for orthodox voices
of any kind to be heard since they are excluded from the conversation to
begin with. Yet Noll seems not to think so, or at least he seems to think
that evangelicals do well first to focus upon their own shortcomings rather
than outsiders' prejudices.
A more troubling question is whether any religious person can
expect to gain a hearing in the surging diversity of the modern academy.
The only way for evangelicals and Jews and Muslims and the mass of academics
who do not care very much about any faith to get along is to agree on certain
rules of exchange, and those rules usually mean not talking about the issues
that lie deepest in their hearts. The plain fact is that the pluralism
of modern university culture makes the language of strong commitment difficult
to sustain on a day to day basis. Teaching about a Maimonides or a Barth
is one thing; actually working with them in a faculty meeting may be quite
another.
Finally, it is not clear that evangelicals do in fact need to establish
a Christian view of everything. To be sure, it is important to know that
Christians in general and evangelicals in particular can engage the highest
and most demanding forms of intellectual work, but it is doubtful that
the adjective "evangelical" makes much difference when we are
talking about the work that most scholars, especially those in the natural
sciences, undertake most of the time. Even for Noll, an historian of religion,
most of what he does (and he does a lot) can be assessed by technical protocols
of historical scholarship that are pretty much applicable to everyone in
the profession.
However we answer these questions, the largest one remains: Do resources
for renewal lie within the evangelical tradition? Yes, Noll believes, but
they can be salvaged only with strenuous effort. Noll thus urges evangelicals
to historicize themselves, to see how their favored modes of reaction are
conditioned by time and place. He calls them to develop a sense of irony,
to see, in words historian Peter Brown used in a different context, that
the first and final enemy of the Christian intellectual is the "patina
of the obvious." It was said of Jonathan Edwards that he "smelt
of the lamp"; Noll reminds Edwards' latter day heirs that there is
no substitute for long grueling hours in the library, the study, the laboratory.
And in an age obsessed with narrative, when everyone seems to think that
his own story is as valid as anyone else's, Noll effectively says No, there
really is a normative conversation out there, a conversation defined by
the reality-shaping institutions of our society, and it is high time for
evangelicals to enter into it.
Thus this sermon, like all true jeremiads, ends on a note of hope.
Noll urges these reforms upon evangelicals, not because they will afford
them more power and prestige, but solely for the glory of God. "The
search for a Christian mind is not, in the end," he tells us, "a
search for mind but a search for God." Evangelicals purport to speak
biblical truth, but in fact sold their soul to American culture long ago.
The lips are Esau's but the voice is Jacob's. So for Noll evangelicals
must become bilingual. They must continue to address the world with the
life- giving words of faith that they know so well. At the same time, they
must learn to translate those words into the language of the public academic
sphere.
The great and pleasant irony of this book is that as long as the evangelical
subculture is able to turn out a mind as learned and as Christian as Mark
Noll's, its future promises to be a lot brighter than he supposes.
Grant Wacker is Associate Professor of
American Religious History at Duke Divinity School.
Keith Pavlischek
Largely because Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
is a crie de coeur, and indeed "an epistle from a wounded lover,"
I suspect it is more likely to get a hearing among evangelicals than David
Wells' more combative No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical
Theology and his more recent God in the Wasteland: The Reality of
Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. But I think we would do well to
read these evangelical authors together, for their diagnosis of the sorry
state of evangelical scholarship-or, more accurately, their analysis of
why American evangelicals have such a hard time nurturing the habits of
mind required to produce quality scholarship-complement each other.
How bad do Noll and Wells think things are? After dismissing evidence
for a resurgence in Christian scholarship as "accidents of personal
history," Noll observes that even when the evangelical heritage is
not actually a deterrent to "God-honoring thought," one finds
little encouragement for the life of the mind in evangelical Protestantism.
The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is no evangelical mind.
Wells, a professor of Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell, a major evangelical
seminary, is no less pessimistic. He reports that in recent years he has
watched "with growing disbelief as the evangelical church has cheerfully
plunged into astounding theological illiteracy," a phenomenon his
recent books have tried to explain.
While Noll and Wells agree that contemporary evangelical Protestantism
does not encourage the habits and dispositions necessary to sustain the
life of the mind, they locate the source of the problem somewhat differently.
This difference seems to turn in large measure on their understanding of
the relationship between contemporary evangelicals and their evangelical
heritage, especially fundamentalism.
Noll admits that fundamentalism preserved essential aspects of orthodox
Christianity, but argues that the lingering effects of certain "theological
innovations" central to the fundamentalist movement, particularly
dispensationalism, Pentecostalism, and holiness spirituality, continue
to wreak havoc on the evangelical community. His chapter on the "The
Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism" can be summed up by his quotation
from Nathan Hatch:
Let me suggest somewhat whimsically that the heritage of fundamentalism
was to Christian learning for evangelicals like Chairman Mao's Cultural
Revolution [was] for the Chinese. Both divorced a generation from mainline
academia, thus making reintegration [into larger worlds of learning] a
difficult, if not bewildering task.
Toward the end of this chapter Noll anticipates a plausible objection
to his story: "Surely we are flogging a dead horse by being so preoccupied
with beliefs and practices from the early twentieth century that must now
exert only a residual effect on the evangelical community." While
Noll admits, for instance, that "the specific theological propositions
of dispensationalism probably do not have quite the importance across the
evangelical spectrum that they once did," he insists that "fundamentalist
intellectual habits . . . have been more resilient than fundamentalism
itself." It is not so much the specific tenets of dispensational,
holiness, and Pentecostal theologies that are at issue for a more general
consideration of the intellect, but rather "the patterns of thinking
encouraged by these theologies."
In sum, Noll thinks fundamentalism was such a complete intellectual
disaster that contemporary evangelicals' contribution to the life of the
mind will remain scandalous until they go beyond it. What sporadic intellectual
activity evangelicals do display points to their only intellectual
hope:
Where evangelicals sift fundamentalist theology and spirituality to
retain traditional Christian orthodoxy, where they are able to benefit
from other Christian traditions, and where they make use of learning from
the world more generally, then thinking for the glory of God has taken
place.
The main points of Noll's criticism of fundamentalism are indisputable.
But perhaps the current sad state of affairs is due less to a fundamentalist
hangover than to even more disturbing new trends within evangelicalism
itself, trends with a more tenuous link to a fundamentalist past than suggested
by Noll.
Here Wells proposes that evangelicals have leapt from the fundamentalist
frying pan into the fire of modernity. Wells suggests that modern evangelicals
are not up to the task of sifting the fundamentalist chaff from the orthodox
Protestant wheat largely because they no longer have the theological resources
to do so.
Being evangelical has come to mean simply that one has had a certain
kind of religious experience that gives color to the private aspects of
daily life but in which few identifiable theological elements can be discerned
or, as it turns out, are necessary. Evangelical faith is pursued as a matter
of internal fascination but abandoned as a matter of external and public
relevance. . . .
For contemporary Evangelicals, "to believe that God can work dramatically
within the narrow fissure of internal experience" is sufficient.
They have lost interest . . . in what the doctrines of creation, common
grace, and providence once meant for Christian believers, and even in those
doctrines that articulate Christ's death, such as justification, redemption,
propitiation, and reconciliation.
I don't know whether Noll would take issue with all this, but Wells'
criticism is distinct from Noll's because he understands this evangelical
"turn inward" toward the self to be of more recent origin, distinguishable
from fundamentalism in important respects.
This turn toward the self is also a strategic retreat from the world,
says Wells, no less than that of the fundamentalists of the 1920s, '30s,
and '40s. At least then fundamentalists knew that they were "cognitive
aliens within the culture" and thus "used doctrine to define
their own cultural boundaries. Doctrine served to seal in believers and
seal out unbelievers. As a result, their commitment to the formal and material
principles of Protestantism was unyielding." But in one crucial respect
contemporary evangelicals are even worse off than the fundamentalists.
The new turn inward to the "self"
is not the kind of retreat that the fundamentalists engineered, preserving
their view of the world by separating themselves from the unbelieving world
outside. It is the retreat into internal privacy, into a world that need
never come to terms with the unbelieving world outside. The evangelical
form of separation is as real as was that of the fundamentalists; it is
simply not as effective, and it is much more damaging to the Protestantism
of which they are heirs.
"Evangelicals, no less than liberals before them whom they have
berated," declares Wells, "have now abandoned doctrine in favor
of 'life,'" a "life" defined by inward "experience"
emptied of cognitive content.
Noll accounts for the scandal of the evangelical mind by seeing it
as a defective attachment to its fundamentalist history. For Wells, the
scandal of the evangelical mind stems more from what it has in common with
the very modernism and liberalism evangelicals' fundamentalist parents
and grandparents rejected.
Without a sharp, cogent, differentiating identity, evangelicals, no
less than liberals before them, are simply absorbed into the conventions
of the modern world in which they live. It is no mystery, therefore, why
they are failing to outthink their cognitive opponents. The reason is that
they are not that different from these opponents, and the motivation to
outthink them is no longer compelling.
Who's right? I suspect they both are. A large part of evangelical Protestantism
continues to be burdened by the legacy of fundamentalism. And a large part
has been given over to the worst aspects of a uniquely modern brand of
subjectivistic pietism that makes cognitive engagement irrelevant and a
recovery of a vibrant Protestant orthodoxy next to impossible. This should
not be surprising given that "evangelical Protestantism" is such
a wide and diverse phenomenon in the first place. But if this is indeed
the case, then the scandal of the evangelical mind is greater than either
Wells or Noll suggests individually. And that's pretty scandalous.
Keith Pavlischek is the Director of Crossroads,
an educational ministry of Evangelicals for Social Action, and the author
of John Courtney Murray and the Dilemma of Religious Toleration.
J. Daryl Charles
In the early to mid 1970s, during the aftermath of the "Jesus Movement,"
a popular evangelical apologist was fond of provoking his audience: "If
Jesus is the answer, what is the question?" Over two decades later,
though the cultural climate has changed, that provocation remains every
bit as relevant. Indeed, what questions should evangelicals be asking?
A similar concern surfaced in a recent lunch discussion among friends.
Someone probed further. "Where are all the evangelical thinkers?"
Disturbed at the paucity of names that came to mind, the group was left
to concede that, more often than not, influential Catholic thinkers-whether
philosophers, ethicists, or social critics-had played a greater role in
stimulating each person's intellectual development.
Protestant evangelicals would do well to ponder those unsettling questions.
What is the nature of the question we should be asking in light of the
Church's cultural mandate? And where are the evangelical thinkers of our
day? It is such questions that constitute the burden of Mark Noll's book,
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Prof. Noll knows whereof he speaks. Having taught for many years at
a leading institution associated with the Christian College Coalition,
he is able to document with force and clarity the cultural, theological,
and institutional factors that have contributed to the evangelical skandalon.
The Coalition itself, numbering close to ninety Christian liberal arts
colleges of varying denominational affiliation, is to some extent a microcosm
of the intellectual vacuity that plagues evangelicalism. Two extremes-the
tendency toward isolated pietism on the one side, a tendency toward infatuation
with social issues and cultural "relevance" on the other-manifest
themselves in varying degrees at most Christian colleges.
To illustrate, many of the Coalition faculty earn their doctorates
at elite universities where little regard for faith, intellectual breadth,
and Christian worldview is to be found. Consequently, one of the hallmarks
of Coalition faculty members, upon "returning" to the Christian
college environment to teach, is not the aspiration to cultivate intellectual
excellence for the glory of God so much as a deathly fear of being labelled
"fundamentalist." This, however, is not the antidote for the
sort of "anti-intellectualism" that Prof. Noll deftly critiques.
What is often lacking in the scandal called the "evangelical mind"
(something of an oxymoron to some) is the development of biblical worldview
thinking, i.e., thinking and learning holistically. It will not suffice
merely to "integrate faith and learning," as the catalogue of
virtually every Christian liberal arts college states. Such "integration"
in and of itself demonstrates the false dichotomy that already exists in
evangelical thinking, not only among academics but among most lay people
as well. If all things-things epistemological and metaphysical, things
material and physical-indeed cohere in Christ, then "integration,"
a well-intended evangelical response to the fragmentation of knowledge
that characterizes the modern university, should give way to the notion
of epistemological unity or uniformity. In contrast to "integration,"
which carries the connotation of mixing, blending, or kneading, "uniformity"
would give evidence that evangelicals have begun to perceive the reality
of theology as "the queen of the sciences," as John Henry
Newman noted 140 years ago. Newman, it should be remembered, was chiding
Protestant educational institutions for their wholesale abandonment of
theological foundations and consequent disciplinary fragmentation.
In addition to remedying evangelical fragmen tation, such unified thinking
would also force evangelicals to draw the inseparable link between orthodoxy
and orthopraxy. Scandal invites us, and rightly so, to "think
more Christianly," but what does this entail? While it encourages
serious evangelical reflection on matters philosophical, scientific, and
political, as Prof. Noll points out, it also bridges the common gap between
belief and behavior, doctrine and ethics-an omission in the book that deserves
some comment. It matters little that evangelicals develop the "life
of the mind" when the ethical life leaves much to be desired. Evidence
of this "ethical" scandal, even among evangelical academics,
is omnipresent.
For example, a renowned professor of Christian ethics at an elite midwestern
university is caught in sexual impropriety involving students. Although
his denomination censures him, he goes on teaching Christian ethics without
missing a stride. A noted evangelical thinker and critic of American evangelical
subculture separates from his wife, falling prey to the very tendency he
has so eloquently decried over the years. A highly respected evangelical
teacher divorces his wife of over three decades on the grounds of incompatibility,
and his "ministry" continues unabated. An evangelical professor
of sociology, worked up to a near froth over what he views as intractable
evangelical "homophobia," remains blissfully unable to comprehend
the Church's historical teaching on human sexuality. A robust intellect,
unharnessed by an equally robust Christian ethos, can only produce a different
(though equally odious) strain of the "evangelical scandal."
The utter necessity and extraordinary merits of Prof. Noll's book notwithstanding,
Scandal contains, from a Protestant evangelical standpoint, one
conspicuous omission. The one evangelical thinker over the last thirty
years who, perhaps ahead of his time, described the evangelical "disaster"
in forthright and unequivocal terms goes essentially unnoticed by the author.
One sentence and one brief footnote on p. 223 are deemed sufficient to
sum up the cumulative
influence of Francis Schaeffer, who founded L'Abri Fellowship in 1955,
emphasized the importance of "substantial Christianity," and,
along the way, managed to write over thirty books on Christian worldview,
the church, and culture. Despite occasional criticisms of methodological
unsophistication, the very minimum that deserves to be said is that this
was an evangelical thinker who at least asked the right question: How shall
we then live? "The evangelist and popular apologist Francis Schaeffer,"
notes Prof. Noll in passing, "also urged . . . more careful attention
to the theological meaning of general cultural developments." One
wishes that Prof. Noll, an historian, had resisted the rather breathtaking
use of understatement at this point. After all, it was Schaeffer who kept
probing the scandal of the "evangelical mind" by raising the
question that largely fell on deaf ears: "If Jesus is the answer,
then what is the question?"
J. Daryl Charles is Resident Scholar at
the Wilberforce Forum in Reston, Virginia.
Robert Wuthnow
Mark Noll's assertion that there is no evangelical mind requires us
to think hard about the evidence. A close reading of his book suggests
that five kinds of evidence are particularly worthy of consideration. Four
of them can, in my view, be dealt with rather easily; the fifth gets at
the heart of the contemporary scandal.
1. There is no respectable Christian periodical comparable to the New
York Review of Books. In one sense, this is a trivial concern. Would
physics, chemistry, psychology, or literature be much worse off without
the New York Review of Books? Of course not. In another sense, it
is an odd concern. Would the New York Review of Books be as good
if it published articles reflecting only one philosophical perspective?
I doubt it. But in another sense, Noll's concern is well taken. His lament
is for the lack of a distinct evangelical voice capable of shaping public
discourse in an intellectually respectable way. And he is right in pointing
at the failure of evangelicals themselves, rather than blaming the secular
media for excluding Christians.
But I am not convinced that this gap, in itself, amounts to a serious
breach in Christian scholarship. On the one hand, the influence of periodicals
such as the New York Review of Books is easy to overestimate. On
the other hand, Christian scholars regularly contribute to journals such
as the Reformed Journal/Perspectives, Cross-Currents, Soundings,
Christianity Today, Christian Century, and First Things,
and their books are often reviewed in the New York Times, New
Republic, Newsweek, and elsewhere. At this writing, some effort
is being devoted to founding a journal of literary opinion that would bring
Christian perspectives to bear on important intellectual issues. Were such
an effort successful, there are plenty of scholars to contribute articles
and plenty of savvy publishers, interested journalists, and prominent media
people to keep it going.
2. There is no Christian university. Maybe not. Jerry Falwell's Liberty
University, the Southern Baptist Convention's recent efforts to rein in
its system of colleges and universities, or rapidly expanding graduate
programs and professional schools at Wheaton College, Calvin, Gordon, and
elsewhere do not fit Noll's criteria of a great university. But what if
evangelicals had a university comparable, say, to Notre Dame or Brandeis?
They would probably feel better, but I doubt that history would look more
favorably on them. The very logic of the modern university is to bring
diverse intellectual perspectives together. We have no University of Feminism,
yet feminism is part of every university. Biology, Marxism, Judaism, and
Christianity are all approached better at the graduate level within an
integrated setting than in isolated, marginalized settings.
Most of the interest in a Christian university has been rekindled in
recent years by scholars who teach at evangelical colleges. Many would
like to see stronger support for research, writing, and teaching at an
advanced level. But this is already happening in limited but significant
ways, even in the absence of a Christian university. Christian colleges
have improved immensely in the past two decades, especially when judged
against the decline in many public institutions of higher education. First-rate
scholars who combine dedicated teaching with rigorous intellectual work
are increasingly common in these colleges. Much more needs to be done.
But foundation support is being found for sabbatical leaves and special
projects, internet links are creating closer relationships among scholars
on separate campuses and in secular universities, students are taking advantage
of exchange programs, and many administrators are working hard to improve
the academic standards of their institutions.
Mark Noll decries the waste and duplication of effort that has resulted
from the denominational history of Christian colleges. The great German
graduate universities founded in the nineteenth century, however, flourished
because of similar competition among the German states. Competition was
also the secret of American higher education. Christian colleges function
within a dynamic market that fosters such competition. Some of these colleges
have closed their doors, others have developed special relations with their
communities, a few have risen to positions of intellectual leadership.
3. Christian scholars are no longer the leading contributors to their
respective disciplines. Mark Noll points to leading intellectual figures
of the eighteenth century, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield,
and John Wesley, and asks, can anyone now identify an evangelical who commands
prominence in physics, literature, sociology, or history? Implicitly, there
is also a contemporary comparison: despite their numbers, evangelicals
have not produced as many leading intellectuals as Jews or Catholics.
I have trouble with this argument in both its historical and contemporary
aspects. One would be hard put to argue that evangelical Christians were
the dominant contributors to intellectual developments in the eighteenth
century, especially if Europe's influence were included. And at present,
the truth has much more to do with whether leading scholars display their
evangelical credentials in public than with whether they are actually evangelical
Christians. In virtually all disciplines, devout Christians have made substantial
contributions-so much so, in fact, that contemporary critiques often focus
on the implicit Christian assumptions underlying those disciplines. But
Christians can also "pass" more easily than scholars from subcultures
identified by surnames or by racial and ethnic characteristics. If there
is a scandal, it has less to do with who is actually contributing to the
life of the mind, and more to do with how those contributions are framed.
4. Scholars are unwilling to address their subject matter seriously
within a Christian framework. This criticism comes closer to the heart
of the matter, but is easy to misconstrue. Noll himself, I believe, is
ambivalent about what exactly is missing. On the one hand, he argues that
evangelical Christians should be addressing their disciplines from a distinct
Christian framework that privileges Christian assumptions about human nature,
God, Christ, redemption, and eschatology. On the other hand, he seems to
be suggesting that the best scholarship is done by people who simply take
the created order seriously enough to study it with as much care as anyone
else. I am more in sympathy with the second view than with the first. In
a time of growing pluralism in academic circles, it is easier for self-proclaimed
Christians to advance their special perspectives, just as it is for gays,
Marxists, feminists, or any other group. To be sure, some settings may
be less conducive to Christian perspectives than to these other perspectives.
But solid Christian theology, Christian literature, and studies featuring
the integrity of evangelical and even fundamentalist communities have all
become more common in recent years. The harder task is to take one's subject
matter seriously enough to understand it from many different perspectives.
For if that is the goal, then good Christian scholarship may be virtually
indistinguishable from scholarship done by anyone else. In my own discipline
of sociology, for instance, studies of impoverished families, community
service, personal morality, health reform, sexuality, and values have all
flourished in recent years-much of it is compatible with a Christian worldview,
and yet little of it flaunts that perspective.
I think Noll provides the best advice in the concluding paragraph of
his book, suggesting that the Christian endeavor is ultimately not a search
for the mind but a search for God. That quest is rightly going to run afoul
of popular labels, even labels as worthy as evangelicalism. Truly searching
for God requires having faith that God is sufficiently great to be evident
in more ways than we may imagine and sufficiently mysterious to remain
only partly disclosed in all intellectual endeavors.
5. American evangelicalism is an intellectual embarrassment. Noll complains
that seventy-five million evangelicals-who attend church far more often
than other Americans-ought to be doing better at supporting intellectual
work; instead, they have succumbed to a cultural style of activism, populism,
pragmatism, and utilitarianism. Among other things, this means that intellectuals
who may be evangelical by disposition or background are frequently embarrassed
to identify themselves as such. It also means that evangelicals get a bad
press from secular intellectuals. And it means that evangelical churches
do little to raise money for top- notch Christian academic endeavors, such
as colleges or journals, and that bright young people are often discouraged
from pursuing academic careers.
Noll does not depict evangelicals as a righteous remnant, disdainful
of intellectual work because it runs counter to their faith. Rather, he
suggests that evangelicals are thoroughly a product of American culture.
In fact, I would go further: American evangelicalism is the quintessential
adaptation to a society dominated by the marketplace and consumerism. It
is such a late-twentieth-century phenomenon that most evangelicals would
hardly recognize themselves in Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield. To
be sure, evangelicals are generally devout, church-going Christians who
take the Bible seriously and try to live in obedience to their Lord. But
study after study shows that they seldom understand the Bible very well,
know little about theology, buy heavily into the therapeutic culture of
feel-good-ism, and are caught up in a cycle of overspending and consumption
like everyone else. In my view, this is the real scandal of American evangelicalism.
Robert Wuthnow is the Gerhard R. Andlinger
Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for the Study of
American Religion at Princeton University. His most recent book is God
and Mammon in America (Free Press).
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