On Dec. 8, some of America’s brightest contemporary intellectuals gathered at the New School to discuss the tenuous relationship between “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” Sponsored by Brooklyn-based literary magazine n+1, the panel featured The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell and James Wood and The Nation’s former associate literary editor Christine Smallwood. While these thinkers all grew up in close proximity to evangelicalism, there was one conspicuous absence from the conversation: an intellectual who still professes the Christian faith. The discussion was predictably thoughtful, though evangelical belief was treated as something necessarily dispensed with on the way to becoming a public scholar.
This feeling of intellectual distance from grass-roots Christianity is not new. It’s been almost 30 years since Charles Malik, a former president of the United Nations General Assembly and a devout Christian, gave a speech at Wheaton College called “The Two Tasks.” To the audience assembled for the dedication of Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center, he said: “The greatest danger besetting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism.” This idea was picked up by historian Mark A. Noll 14 years later in his 1994 book “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” The “scandal” of the title, he said, was “that there is not much of an evangelical mind,” despite what he sees as a biblical mandate to better understand creation. Mr. Noll asserts that this lack is reinforced by the historical experience of evangelicals in America, whose churches and ministries have gained more adherents at the cost of fostering anti-intellectualism and bad theology.
[blockquote] …whose churches and ministries have gained more adherents at the cost of fostering anti-intellectualism and bad theology. [/blockquote]
Two favored pastimes in America.
This is a complex issue with lots of causes, effects, and motivations. It probably is, however, a verifiable fact that it is easier to motivate large numbers of Americans (and this is no doubt true elsewhere) with by uniting them in ignorance, fear, and disparagement of the “other”, than it is to bring them together in reason, careful analysis, and candour about the ambiguities and contradictions of the historical record, whether it be in secular or spiritual matters. One sees this all the time, not just in a religious context. American politics have become pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of leaders being able (or even willing) to guide the citizenry through the complexities of issues facing society. Someone trying to start and sustain a mega-church isn’t going to devote a lot of time to New Testament scholarship and exegesis and the intricacies of doctrinal development over the early centuries of the Church.