The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Preface (2022)

Thirty years have passed since I finished the research for The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind , and another fifteen since I concluded the serious reading that led to a follow-up study, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind . I had hoped that two books would be enough on this subject, even for someone who is still very much committed to the values of scholarship and who, if given a chance to spell out what he thinks the word means, is content to be known as an evangelical. Events of recent years, along with a nudge from the editors at Wm. B. Eerdmans, however, have convinced me that it would be useful saying something more for this new edition.

The afterword attempts an analytical account of the evangelical mind today. It first describes two real problems—whether the words evangelical and evangelicalism now mean anything specifically Christian, and whether the contemporary American intellectual environment has room for anything traditionally Christian. It then goes on to indicate that, serious problems notwithstanding, a great deal of first-order scholarship is being produced by individuals who still call themselves evangelicals or who in some sense can be viewed as evangelical fellow travelers.

In this preface, though, I want to explain why the evangelical mind sounds increasingly to me like an oxymoron. As set out in Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, I still believe that evangelical variations of classical Christianity contain rich resources for creative, outward-looking, self-confident, and open-minded intellectual life—and for intellectual life that is also humble, self-critical, and eager to recognize that all truth is God’s truth, as my late teacher and friend Arthur Holmes was fond of repeating.¹ These resources are in fact nurturing the intellectual labors of many individuals and organizations with meaningful evangelical connections, as the afterword spells out in some detail. Yet the bigger picture among the nation’s white evangelicals is quite different. As documented for many years by many scholars, journalists, pundits, reporters, and bloggers, when the American population is divided into constituencies defined by religion, white evangelicals invariably show up on the extreme end of whatever question is being asked.

These evangelicals have been least likely to seek vaccination against the coronavirus, least likely to believe that evolutionary science actually describes the development of species, and least likely to believe that the planet is really warming up because of human activity. White evangelicals are also most likely to repudiate the conclusion of impartial observers and claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They are most likely to regard their political opponents as hell-bent on destroying America. They are least likely to think that racial discrimination continues as a systemic American problem. And in response to a question that is usually formulated poorly, they are most likely to believe that Scripture should be interpreted literally.

In each of these spheres, white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greatest panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual. Yet for each, examples from the past, but also the present, indicate that an entirely different stance is possible. Even more pointedly, convictions foundational to Christianity can demonstrate that these attitudes betray the faith evangelicals claim to follow. At the present moment, however, widespread evangelical proclivities seem to be overwhelming the evangelical potential for constructive intellectual activity.

As a first instance, evangelical institutions of higher learning, which dominated national education deep into the nineteenth century and remain very much alive in different configurations today, challenge by their very existence dismissive attitudes toward intellectual expertise. The extraordinary breadth of support for such institutions from many quarters suggests that a deep well of evangelical respect exists for disciplined learning. The solid scholarship of professors at these institutions would seem to underscore the essential compatibility between evangelical convictions and responsible intellectual labor.

Yet in the recent past, the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source. There seems to be a special fascination for slipshod reasoning disseminated on Twitter. No half-baked conspiracy, however lacking in responsible verification, seems too much. Are the Christian colleges and universities failing? Or are they just spitting into a whirlwind?

On approaches to society, there have always been significant evangelical communities trying to reform social structures while appealing for personal conversion and remaining conservative in theology. African American believers do not usually call themselves evangelicals, but they overwhelmingly share the main evangelical characteristics and have unceasingly campaigned for broad reforms aimed at justice for all. A few originally white evangelical denominations, with the Salvation Army in the lead, have always combined aggressive social outreach with undeviating doctrinal fidelity. Yet many evangelicals today treat all progressive political or cultural ideas, not as proposals to discuss, but as vicious attacks on everything God-fearing and positive in American history.

On specific questions of race, many nineteenth-century campaigners for abolition and then black civil rights paired strong evangelical beliefs with a deep commitment to equal justice for all. Those campaigners included notable whites like Arthur Tappan and Lyman Tappan, who helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society, and notable black leaders like James W. C. Pennington early in the century and Francis Grimké later. That pairing, however, was never universal, since many white evangelicals—in the North as well as the South—believed that the Bible sanctioned the American system of black-only chattel enslavement. They were not impressed when fellow evangelicals pointed out that none of the slaves in Scripture were African. In the twentieth century, some white evangelicals joined blacks in campaigning for racial justice, but more accepted Jim Crow segregation. After World War II, white evangelicals accepted the push for black civil rights late and often reluctantly. Reluctance to acknowledge racial injustice in the nation’s past seems to have made it difficult to perceive it in the present.

Throughout American history, evangelicals of all stripes have stressed personal conversion, a personal relationship with Christ, and personal moral responsibility. That emphasis has produced much that is positive: initiative, self-discipline, restraint against self-indulgence, and great care in raising children. It has unfortunately also led many white evangelicals to the skewed conclusion that social evils are the result only of aggregated individual choices. Because most accept (even affirm) modern laws aiming at racial equity, they view systemic racism as only a fantasy promoted by irresponsible radicals. The intellectual problem has been that focusing so strongly on one dimension of social reality makes it almost impossible to recognize that other dimensions beyond the personal have also fueled contemporary injustice.

On Scripture, evangelical communities have always enjoyed painstaking intellectuals who carefully sift the wider realms of biblical scholarship to determine which elements might aid a clearer understanding of God’s Word and which might detract from it. Such ones, whose numbers have multiplied since the Second World War, most often contend that the Bible is entirely true. Usually, however, they also stress that the truths of Scripture lying on the surface concern God’s merciful love to guilty sinners. For the rest, they continually show the necessity of going deeper. To grasp the whole counsel of God, nothing in fact can replace advanced linguistic expertise, careful investigation of ancient Near Eastern cultures, some awareness of how others in far distant times and places have interpreted the text, and the intellectual give-and-take of scholarship at its best. With that kind of carefully honed expertise, the Bible’s riches really do unfold. But they unfold as a complex mix of factual history, ethical instruction, apocalyptic hyperbole, myth, poetry, preaching, and prophecy for which questions about literal or not literal are simply irrelevant.

Yet among evangelicals, charismatic preachers, innovative publicists, and media-savvy publishers with no academic or ecclesiastical credentials have enjoyed more influence than these faithful scholars. (The same holds for nonwhite evangelicals.) Because evangelicals have mostly followed such self-appointed guides for understanding and applying the Bible, they have often been excessively skeptical about the assured results of modern scholarship. But such skepticism has meant that claiming to live by sola Scriptura or promote a biblical worldview or follow the Bible literally easily becomes unthinking dogmatism about what the Bible is and what it teaches.

The compounding of evangelical and American values in approaching Scripture has encouraged an engaged laity; it has been lifeblood for countless local congregations; and it has inspired dedicated evangelism. It has led to acts of mercy organized for the relief of local needs and needs around the world. Yet this way of honoring Scripture has also prejudiced attitudes toward advanced learning, formal scholarship, and technical intellectual expertise. (Opinions about mechanical expertise have usually been much more positive.) The result too easily becomes the Bible against scholarship instead of the Bible clarified by scholarship.

On science, many studies have shown that, if evangelical ranks are full of skeptics willing to challenge respected research, they also include a great number with the opposite attitude. Many, that is, would agree with the unquestionably conservative Charles Hodge, who in 1863 responded when a fellow Presbyterian criticized him for paying respectful attention to the leading scientists of his day. Hodge emphasized the need for careful checking and rechecking of conclusions reached by researchers, but then he went on: The proposition that the Bible must be interpreted by science is all but self-evident. Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible, and we only interpret the Word of God by the Word of God when we interpret the Bible by science.²

Yet contemporary evangelicals regularly display great skepticism about what others consider the well-documented findings of modern science. Evangelical dedication to Scripture has led to special problems when new scientific conclusions challenge what plain people with plain reading consider the literal meaning of Scripture.

The recent pandemic well illustrates this conflicted relationship. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has explained how C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity turned his life around.³ He has also been one of the most responsible proponents of mask wearing and vaccination. Many evangelicals, however, have turned aside from such research-supported voices to heed advice from figures who have mastered social media, but nothing else.

On participation in public life and attitudes toward political opponents, the same Charles Hodge illustrated the kind of charity rare in his day and hard to imagine in our own. After coming to passionately support the Union cause in the Civil War, he paused for a discerning assessment of the white Christians who supported the South as fervently as he did the North: It is easy to say that we are right and they are wrong. This in the present case is, no doubt, in a great measure true…. [But] it is largely in both cases because every man, and every body of men, are more or less subject to the controlling influence of public opinion, and of the life of the community to which they belong.⁴ In other words, Hodge was saying that while everything might be political, politics was not everything. He was an evangelical following the foundational biblical practice of treating with respect even those whom he considered woefully misguided. They too were humans made in the image of God for whom Christ died.

As details in the following pages suggest, a historical account can explain the intellectual self-immolation of recent evangelical history. Especially in light of current events, it might seem only natural that contemporary evangelicals would flee from carefully considered, empirically ascertained, thoughtfully debated, and charitably held intellectual convictions. But just a little more historical digging, a broader awareness of present-day intellectual activity, and an understanding of general Christian principles show that the stereotype has never been more than partially true. Many studies, including some of my own, have documented that Charles Hodge was far from alone in combining evangelical commitments with responsible intellectual practice. But now, to be sure, that combination seems under unusual strain.

What to conclude? In the current American climate, there are reasons enough to regard evangelical intellectual life as a lost cause. In too many areas the e-word has become a barrier standing in the way of sharper, clearer thinking. But there remain many like myself who have received gifts of life from individuals and institutions emphasizing conversion, honoring the Scriptures above all other authorities, and proclaiming the death of Christ on the cross as the hope for humanity. It takes only a little effort to discover that I am not alone. Those evangelical gifts and sufficient evangelical exemplars explain why, although I am almost giving up on the evangelical mind, it is still only almost.

1. Arthur S. Holmes, All Truth Is God’s Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

2. Charles Hodge, The Bible in Science, New York Observer, Mar. 26, 1863, pp. 98–99.

3. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).

4. Charles Hodge, The General Assembly, Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 37 (July 1865): 506.

Preface (1994)

This book is an epistle from a wounded lover. As one who is in love with the life of the mind but who has also been drawn to faith in Christ through the love of evangelical Protestants, I find myself in a situation where wounding is commonplace. Although the thought has occurred to me regularly over the past two decades that, at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual, this epistle is not a letter of resignation from the evangelical movement. It intends rather to be a cri de coeur on behalf of the intellectual life by one who, for very personal reasons, still embraces the Christian faith in an evangelical form.

As one might expect from an evangelical on such a subject, this is not a thoroughly intellectual volume. It is rather a historical meditation in which sermonizing and the making of hypotheses vie with more ordinary exposition. It is meant to incite more than it is meant to inform. The notes are here to show where fuller academic treatments, a few of them by myself, may be found. Several of the chapters were first given as talks or lectures, although everything has been rewritten for this volume.

The book is dedicated with gratitude and respect to my colleagues at Wheaton College, where we together fight the fights and inflict, sometimes on each other, the wounds that are the subject of this book.

PART 1

The Scandal

1

The Contemporary Scandal

The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America, including great sacrifice in spreading the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, open-hearted generosity to the needy, heroic personal exertion on behalf of troubled individuals, and the unheralded sustenance of countless church and parachurch communities. Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.

Despite dynamic success at a popular level, modern American evangelicals have failed notably in sustaining serious intellectual life. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the gospel but have largely abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of high culture. Even in its more progressive and culturally upscale subgroups, evangelicalism has little intellectual muscle. Feeding the hungry, living simply, and banning the bomb are tasks at which different sorts of evangelicals willingly expend great energy, but these tasks do not by themselves assist intellectual vitality. Evangelicals sponsor dozens of theological seminaries, scores of colleges, hundreds of radio stations, and thousands of unbelievably diverse parachurch agencies—but not a single research university or a single periodical devoted to in-depth interaction with modern culture.¹

Evangelical inattention to intellectual life is a curiosity for several reasons. One of the self-defining convictions of modern evangelicalism has been its adherence to the Bible as the revealed Word of God. Most evangelicals also acknowledge that in the Scriptures God stands revealed plainly as the author of nature, as the sustainer of human institutions (family, work, and government), and as the source of harmony, creativity, and beauty. Yet it has been precisely these Bible-believers par excellence who have neglected sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts.

The historical situation is similarly curious. Modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind. Most of the original Protestant traditions (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican) either developed a vigorous intellectual life or worked out theological principles that could (and often did) sustain penetrating, and penetratingly Christian, intellectual endeavor. Closer to the American situation, the Puritans, the leaders of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakenings like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, and a worthy line of North American stalwarts in the nineteenth century—like the Methodist Francis Asbury, the Presbyterian Charles Hodge, the Congregationalist Moses Stuart, and the Canadian Presbyterian George Monro Grant, to mention only a few—all held that diligent, rigorous mental activity was a way to glorify God. None of them believed that intellectual activity was the only way to glorify God, or even the highest way, but they all believed in the life of the mind, and they believed in it because they were evangelical Christians. Unlike their spiritual ancestors, modern evangelicals have not pursued comprehensive thinking under God or sought a mind shaped to its furthest reaches by Christian perspectives.

We evangelicals are, rather, in the position once described by Harry Blamires for theological conservatives in Great Britain:

In contradistinction to the secular mind, no vital Christian mind plays fruitfully, as a coherent and recognizable influence, upon our social, political, or cultural life…. Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching questions of strictly personal conduct, we Christians in the modern world accept, for the purpose of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations. There is no Christian mind; there is no shared field of discourse in which we can move at ease as thinking Christians by trodden ways and past established landmarks…. Without denying the impact of important isolated utterances, one must admit that there is no packed contemporary field of discourse in which writers are reflecting christianly on the modern world and modern man.²

Blamire’s picture describes American evangelicals even better than it does traditional Christians in Britain. To be sure, something of a revival of intellectual activity has been taking place among evangelical Protestants since World War II. Yet it would be a delusion to conclude that evangelical thinking has progressed very far. Recent gains have been modest. The general impact of Christian thinking on the evangelicals of North America, much less on learned culture as a whole, is slight. Evangelicals of several types may be taking the first steps in doing what needs to be done to develop a Christian mind, or at least we have begun to talk about what would need to be done for such a mind to develop. But there is a long, long way to go.

DEFINITIONS

But now it is necessary to define more carefully the critical terms of the book, including America, the (life of the) mind, evangelical, and anti-intellectual.

America

Throughout the book, America will mostly mean the United States, even though the inclusion of Canada in the study of Christian developments in North America is an immensely rewarding effort. Occasional efforts will be made to include Canada in the pages that follow.³ But the structures and habits of evangelical thinking in Canada are just different enough from those in the United States to prohibit extensive treatment, even though that treatment would reveal helpful ways in which Canadian evangelicals have escaped some of the intellectual perils found in the United States and perhaps some ways in which Canadian evangelicals have had more difficulty than their counterparts in the United States at sustaining the life of the mind.⁴

The Life of the Mind

By the mind or the life of the mind, I am not thinking primarily of theology as such. As I will suggest below, I do feel that contemporary evangelical theologians labor under several unusual difficulties that greatly reduce the importance their work should have in the evangelical community. But the effort to articulate a theology that is faithful both to the evangelical tradition and to modern standards of academic discourse is not in itself the primary problem for the evangelical mind. In fact, with the contemporary work of evangelical theologians from several different subtraditions—including William Abraham, Donald Bloesch, Gabriel Fackre, Richard Mouw, Thomas Oden, J. I. Packer, Clark Pinnock, Ronald Sider, David Wells, and William Willimon—North American evangelicals enjoy a rich theological harvest. Much the same could be said about advanced work in biblical scholarship, although, as a general rule, evangelical Bible scholars do not extend their insights into wider areas of thought as regularly or as fruitfully as do the best evangelical theologians.⁵

By an evangelical life of the mind I mean more the effort to think like a Christian—to think within a specifically Christian framework—across 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. Academic disciplines provide modern categories for the life of the mind, but the point is not simply whether evangelicals can learn how to succeed in the modern academy. The much more important matter is what it means to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves. Failure to exercise the mind for Christ in these areas has become acute in the twentieth century. That failure is the scandal of the evangelical mind.

Evangelical

But what is an evangelical, and how might recent efforts to ascertain the scope of the North American evangelical constituency add to the urgency of this book?

Evangelicalism is not, and never has been, an -ism like other Christian isms—for example, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, or even Pentecostalism (where, despite many internal differences, the practice of sign gifts like tongues speaking provides a well-defined boundary). Rather, evangelicalism has always been made up of shifting movements, temporary alliances, and the lengthened shadows of individuals. All discussions of evangelicalism, therefore, are always both descriptions of the way things really are as well as efforts within our own minds to provide some order for a multifaceted, complex set of impulses and organizations.

The basic evangelical impulses, however, have been quite clear from the mid-eighteenth century, when leaders like George Whitefield, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Nicholas von Zinzendorf worked to revive churches in northern Europe and North America and so brought evangelicalism into existence. In one of the most useful general definitions of the phenomenon, the British historian David Bebbington has identified the key ingredients of evangelicalism as conversionism (an emphasis on the new birth as a life-changing religious experience), biblicism (a reliance on the Bible as ultimate religious authority), activism (a concern for sharing the faith), and crucicentrism (a focus on Christ’s redeeming work on the cross).⁶ But these evangelical impulses have never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, easily definable, well-coordinated, or clearly demarcated groups of Christians. Rather, the history of these evangelical impulses has always been marked by shifts in which groups, leaders, institutions, goals, concerns, opponents, and aspirations become more or less visible and more or less influential over time. Institutions that may emphasize evangelical distinctives at one point in time may not do so at another. Yet there have always been denominations, local congregations, and voluntary bodies that served as institutional manifestations of these impulses.⁷

One thing seems clear from several surveys by social scientists that are now being carried out with a sophistication unknown as recently as five years ago. For both the United States and Canada, evangelicals now constitute the largest and most active component of religious life in North America. For the United States, a recent national survey showed that over 30 percent of 4,001 respondents were attached to evangelical denominations, that is, to denominations that stress the need for a supernatural new birth, profess faith in the Bible as a revelation from God, encourage spreading the gospel through missions and personal evangelism, and emphasize the saving character of Jesus’ death and resurrection.⁸ Adherents to largely white, evangelical Protestant denominations by themselves make up a proportion of the population roughly the same size as the Roman Catholic constituency, but quite a bit larger than the total number of adherents to mainline Protestant denominations.

The same survey showed, moreover, that a much higher proportion of adherents to evangelical denominations practice their faith actively than do either Catholics or mainline Protestants. Based on queries concerning personal religious commitment, church attendance, prayer, belief in life after death, and other matters of faith and practice, the survey shows over 61 percent of the white evangelicals and over 63 percent of the black Protestants rank in the highest categories of religious activity, percentages far higher than for mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, the Orthodox, Jews, or nontraditional religions. Thus, not only is a very large proportion of the American population definably evangelical, but that proportion of the population is the nation’s most actively involved set of believers.

For Canada, a recent in-depth survey showed that individuals holding evangelical beliefs made up a larger proportion of the Canadian population than most pundits had thought. In an interesting variation on most surveys in the United States, this Canadian study enumerated Catholics and Protestants together. It found that 13 percent of the national population was active, committed, self-identified evangelicals (one-fourth of that number Catholics), while another 11 percent of the population (one-half of that number Catholics) held evangelical beliefs about the Bible, the person and work of Christ, the necessity for personal salvation, and the like but were only occasional participants in formal church life.⁹

The most intriguing result of such surveys for this book is that, on any given Sunday in the United States and Canada, a majority of those who attend church hold evangelical beliefs and follow norms of evangelical practice, yet in neither country do these great numbers of practicing evangelicals appear to play significant roles in the nation’s intellectual life. What a British Roman Catholic said at midcentury after looking back over more than one hundred years of rapid Catholic growth in Britain may be said equally about evangelicals in North America: On the one hand there is the enormous growth of the Church, and on the other its almost complete lack of influence.¹⁰

Anti-Intellectual

Is it simply that evangelicals are anti-intellectual? Maybe so, but the term itself is a problem. The temptation has been great in historical analyses of evangelical, pentecostal, fundamentalist, or pietistic movements simply to label adherents anti-intellectual and then move on to other considerations. Some classic books have come close to adopting this procedure. Ronald Knox’s scintillating study Enthusiasm, for example, contrasted traditional Roman Catholic thinking (where grace perfects nature) with the approach of enthusiasm (where grace destroys nature and replaces it). Of the Enthusiast (a category that for him included most evangelicals), Knox concluded as follows: That God speaks to us through the intellect is a notion which he may accept on paper, but fears, in practice, to apply.¹¹

Closer to the American situation, Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life identified the evangelical spirit as one of the prime sources of American anti-intellectualism. For Hofstadter, there was a