The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind
The problem is not only to win souls, but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world.
Charles Malik
The above title was the subject of an article in New Yorker magazine by Editor Michael Luo on March 4, 2021. If there is one thing I noticed from the start, the author didn’t understand the Christian mind, nor did he have an evangelical mind. He did draw heavily from Mark Noll’s polemic issued twenty-seven years ago, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The article was informative for younger readers who did not live through the last fifty years of evangelical development and decline, like the author himself. But I must take issue with the author’s premise and overall purpose in writing the article.
Put simply, the article presents a connection between the lack of serious intellectuals in the evangelical community to the attack on the nation’s Capital Building on January 6, 2021. More specifically, because some of the more prominently dressed and vocal rioters said prayers and invoked the name of Jesus Christ. Somehow this could have all been avoided if real Christians had graduated Harvard, or at least a privately held Eastern Seaboard college. Maybe if these people knew the difference between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotelian philosophy, they could have avoided going down the biblical rabbit hole. Because of this ignorance, these limited in mind wooden headed literalists, wouldn’t have fallen prey to QAnon conspiracy theories.
Have you ever attempted to research the origins of QAnon or the identity of Q? After much research, the only solid answer is John Cleese, who played Q in a James Bond film. I think Cleese would enjoy being the founder of QAnon and could ridicule the idea better than anyone I know. QAnon is a few crackpot ideas perpetrated on the internet by a variety of people. Usually, some moderate to low IQ person who has been wronged by the government or brilliant minds who recite great siliques into broken mobile phones and then posts them on the social network. The idea that it represents any organized group with a leadership structure is not supported by the evidence. In order for an insurrection to take place, there needs to be someone behind the attack to take over the government, and there is no evidence that this conspiratorial line of thought has one. The idea that the church, or any of its credible leaders, had a hand in the attack is preposterous. I don’t know one Christian or Christian leader who supported the attack or that even sympathizes with any of it.
I would agree that Donald Trump bears some responsibility because he challenged the election results and went too far. I also agree that the gathering in Washington DC that day consisted of many Christians. But 99% of them did nothing illegal and peacefully left the area. It seems to be obvious, from subsequent research, that whatever was being planned was pre-planned. And that 1% of the overall group and only a small fraction of them had bought into the conspiracy. I think this weakens the author’s premise that conservative Christians don’t think critically or have abandoned reason for faith. It also demonstrates an obvious oversight in that he missed the huge growth industry in evangelical minds of apologetics both practical and philosophical in the past fifty years. He also has confused Christianity with a few guys in bunkers and basements posting rants on the social networks.
The author states, “The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.”
Do you notice how the first amendment has been flipped? Instead of the state being dangerous to the freedom of religion, religion is now dangerous to the health of the state? The state becomes the victim. The state, not the people and their God given rights, is what is to be preserved. This is the line of argument taken by the Catholic Church to start the Inquisition. It is the consistent apologetic for tyrannical governments who intend to silence any challenge to their power. This is the state turning its attention to the dangers of free religion. The press is free as well; they are protected by the same amendment to be as crazy as a fruit cake and they have been. Again, there may be some churches who have been captured by conspiracy theories, there always have been and it will always be around. But this is not a serious or prevailing presence among evangelicals or any churches of note. The author quotes studies by The American Enterprise Institute and others, but the analysis lacks precision. The idea, for example, that 75% of people surveyed thought that widespread voter fraud exists is not news. Most seasoned political watchers know that there has always been voter fraud. The issue was how much, and I think most concluded, as the courts did, not enough to change the results. If 50,000 people show up for a rally, what percentage is that of the 74 million who voted for Trump?
I think the Antifa question is laughable - this is the height of journalistic hypocrisy. The leadership elite and press were silent all summer concerning the riots, destruction of public property, the injury to police, and the beating of citizens clearly led by Antifa, but have lost their minds when it comes to the Capitol riots. This is because the press has been swallowed by their own political views and ceased to be a trusted source for information. They, not the church, have lost their souls.
The Evangelical Mind
The article presents a short history of some of the church’s great minds: Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, then jumps to C.S. Lewis, and finally, falls off a theological cliff with Reinhold Niebuhr, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. I don’t mean to speak ill of Niebuhr, Eliot, or Auden, but they are a very different kettle of fish from those previously mentioned. I believe Luo is correct in his statement that the most popular and influential pastors have tended to be a more public message that sells on television. That reveals the Americana that exists in the gospel message, a product that can be plucked out to help those in pain and special need. But this trait is found in virtually every field of endeavor.
Journalism as practiced in the early 20th century up through Watergate is dead and gone. Woodard and Bernstein in All the President’s Men was both the apex of classic journalism, and the start of its decline. Woodstein, as they were called by Ben Bradlee, became famous; it made their careers. Journalism became the thing, and people went into it to become famous, to practice a journalism that sells. And this is no more obvious than in present day cable news and the scrabble among print media to survive. The tendency to extract the fashionable from the serious and to market it for profit is human. It is also very Americana and part of the competitive nature. Religion does it, all humans do it, for themselves and for profit. Interviewing Prince Harry, who is estranged from the Royal family, is done not because it is important, but because it sells. Just like cable news hosts who are partisan call themselves journalists, some religious people take the gospel and corrupt it for personal gain and call themselves godly.
The Pastor as Scholar-Theologian
The article quotes Richard Hofstadter,
“The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter.”
Religion became part of the marketplace. It is competitive, may the best salesman win. Yes, true enough, and that is what made American Christianity robust and aggressive. This is quite different from the parish idea that led to the great decline among higher sacerdotal Christianity with a European base. The question remains, whose pews are empty? The answer is found in those groups, schools, and denominations that have adopted progressive deconstruction of the biblical text in order to accommodate and appease the fast-changing culture. This deconstruction has been led by once great universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Scholarship among evangelicals has grown substantially in the last fifty years. The growth of new and outstanding seminaries and conservatives involved in leading academic circles and organizations has exploded, but this is limited to those who operate within the academic society and who are willing to give their careers to such work.
It seems obvious that the majority of persons are not academics. For that same reason, pastors as humans are apportioned in giftedness and interest as any other profession. There are a few select ones who become scholars. There is a second tier that are hybrids, academic in orientation, careful exegetes, but with a focus on the average person as their student. To this is added a sense of pastoral care and responsibility. The third tier are biblically based, thoughtful, and action oriented. They would rather spend twenty hours a week with people than in their study making sure their sermons reflect the latest in cultural niceties, or that their sermon notes include an appendix on the Medes and the Persians. Hopefully these three tiers provide a balanced faith community and the information of the scholars, the pastor theologians and faithful practitioners will edify the entire church. The idea, however, that the ideal is a church being led by scholarly contemplatives does not square with reality.
There is sadly, a fourth tier made up of abusers, exploiters, and charlatans. They give the Christian faith a bad name. It seems those who oppose or have a prejudice against conservative Christians, use this group as a means of attack. I would suggest that journalists, media leaders, and big tech executives take the words of Jesus seriously here and first take a look at the timber in their own eye, before trying to remove the speck out of another person’s eye.
Next week I will address other portions of the article. I am not sure if Mark Noll would update his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I will take a look at some of the circumstances then and now and assess what progress has been made. I read the book when it came out, conditions have changed for the better and for the worse. I am not sure the scandal is found today in the evangelical mind; I propose it is in the secular mind.
