God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge

Author:John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge [Micklethwait, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2009-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

THE OPENING OF THE EVANGELICAL MIND

A third group of religiously minded intellectuals emerged from an unlikely location—the Evangelical world. If the closing of the Evangelical mind was one of the most dramatic developments in religious America in the first half of the twentieth century, then the opening of the Evangelical mind promises to be one of the most interesting developments of the first half of the twenty-first century.

The Evangelicals are perhaps the most anti-intellectual religious group in America—lacking the rich theological and philosophical tradition of the Catholics or the gentlemanly scholarship of the mainline churches. Mark Noll has observed bluntly that “the scandal of the Evangelical mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind.” Evangelicals have succeeded in creating a boisterous popular culture: there are Evangelical television channels, choirs and pop groups. They have nourished millions of believers in the simple verities of the faith. But they have singularly failed when it comes to sustaining serious intellectual life, abandoning the universities and high culture to a secular elite that looks down on them as simpletons.

To many people this is just as it should be. Evangelicalism is a religion of the heart rather than the head—a religion that emphasizes first and foremost the experience of being born again and the practice of conversion. But Evangelicals have not always been as anti-intellectual as they are today. They are heirs to a profoundly intellectual Protestant tradition that emphasized the Word and thus learning. (Martin Luther described parents who neglected the education of their children as “despicable hogs and venomous beasts.”) The Puritans who settled America believed that Godliness entailed good learning. But Evangelicals turned sharply against the intellectual establishment.

For most Evangelicals, the split with the mainline Protestant churches a century ago was a split between piety and intellect: it was a matter of emotion and faith. But for some it was also a debate. Evangelical intellectuals, such as they were, parted company with the mainline establishment over how to deal with science: the mainliners believed that you needed to adjust religion in the light of reason, while the Evangelicals clung to a literal interpretation of the Bible. This meant more than just sticking to ancient verities: Evangelicals invented (or substantially refined) anti-scientific theories. Creationism was the most obvious; nobody had been so wound up about when God created the world before. “Dispensationalism” was an even more complex structure, splitting human history into seven parts. Evangelical scholars devoted more time to searching the Bible for signs of the precise timing of Armageddon than they did to studying nature or writing history.

Evangelicals were driven from the world of higher education far more completely than members of other religious traditions. They responded to this ruthless marginalization by creating a counterestablishment of Evangelical colleges and Christian schools (and sometimes resorted to home schooling). But this counterestablishment is in academic terms a pretty poor thing. It is not just that Evangelical colleges lack the prestige and resources of the great research universities. Many of them

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