Whose Mind is Wasted Now, Evangelical or Secular?
To waste something means it had a better use than it got used for. A person with great intelligence could have been a scholar, but instead they became a drug addict. “What a waste”, everyone says. A person with special athletic talent won’t go to class and thereby is declared ineligible for collegiate competition and exits the university sans degree. Again, “What a waste.” There has been, and there will continue to be, great waste in the church. What the church has been in the past two thousand years has been enough to inspire billions, create great art and literature, and lead to the misery of millions. When it comes to waste, clergy flying around on private jets funded by donations and fully robed priests saluting Adolf Hitler with uplifted right arms has no rival. [1]
We turn our attention back to Michael Luo’s New Yorker article, The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind. I am sure of this, the problem with the church has not been, and will never be, primarily intellectual. If you are intellectual, and your heroes are intellectuals, and most of those intellectuals are secular minded, then of course, all problems with religion are intellectual. What is meant by intellectuals here are the properly degreed elites or public intellectuals who agree and support the power centers of the ruling elites and their major organs. These organs are The New York Times, the Washington Post, the mainstream media, Big Tech, Big Corporations, Big Sports, and all things Woody Allen.
Anti-intellectualism is a problem, but a very small problem for the existing church. Yes, it is writ large in conventional academia, but in most local congregations in America the variety of minds and levels of minds are as varied as humans are unique from one another. The minds of most people are sufficient to understand the necessary principles and even nuances of spiritual life. Furthermore, even though most have not been schooled in streams of intellectual categories or vocabulary, their minds joined to their souls provide wisdom to live good lives every day. Possessing the correct worldview is much more important than sheer brain power.
If a person believes that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, he or she has a clear advantage on the person who doesn’t have a clue who is behind everything or what the meaning of created life is about. If you start with the wrong premise or, as atheists, agnostics, and skeptics begin with, (which is no premise at all or saying, “We don’t really know much, but we are working on it.”), then regardless of how smart you are, one can only say, “What a waste.”
It reminds me of the two men arguing on an airplane ride. When the plane landed the skeptic told the Christian, “One thing I am sure of is that there is no such thing as absolute truth.” The Christian smiled, “Are you absolutely sure about that?”
His point was made. All opinion, even scientific theory, is belief and faith based. The skeptic didn’t grasp that his logic was self-contradictory. A scientist can only do science because he or she believes and has faith in their brain and the order and the repetition of physical laws of the universe to draw any meaningful knowledge that could be placed into a category called truth. The Bible makes a claim about minds that are out of alignment with their creator.
The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God. As the Scriptures say, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent. So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used the foolish preaching to save those who believe. [2]
I am sure the author would say at this point that I am making his point for him because I am anti-intellectual. I need to say that I am enthralled with scholarship and have spent my life in pursuit of knowledge and have endeavored to follow the evidence. My conclusion, provisionary of course, is that intellectual pursuits without a suitable starting point is a fool’s errand. If you start with something, the universe for example, sprang from nothing, then everything you build on that premise will crumble. If you posit some order, some mind that has created enough order to do science itself, and that mind is not a person, you’ve gotten yourself into a philosophical pickle. You find yourself advocating an unscientific theory that itself denies any principle of science. If you have no material, no mind, no person, no guiding force with design, then you have a very religious position but with less evidence than a Pentecostal snake handling preacher dancing on an altar two miles down a red dirt road.
I don’t want to speak for Mark Noll who taught at Wheaton College in the mid 1990s when the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was published, but I think his larger point was that evangelicals needed to integrate themselves into institutions of power and prestige in order to get a seat at the cultural leaders table. Also to create journals and serious organs of communication in the academic societies. The purpose was missional, at least that is what I took away from it. If we were to be salt and light and fulfill our mission regarding the Gospel, we would need to be taken seriously by cultural leaders. I believe that is a worthy goal, but I must fast forward to a world that has changed far faster and in even more dastardly ways that he feared. To Noll’s credit however, he clearly stated in the book's introduction, “On the one hand there is enormous growth of the Church, and on the other it's almost complete lack of influence.”[3]
There is an absolute frenzy in popular culture, which has now become the controlling narrative in American life, to purify and strip the culture of political incorrectness. It is a cross between Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word. In 1984, Big Brother controls what one reads, says, and even thinks. A surveillance society is created with new technologies. If you conform, you will be miserable at first, but you will grow accustomed to soft totalitarianism which will be followed by hard core control and punishments. You will be cancelled, stripped of certain careers, privileges, and societies, and money making opportunities will be denied you. This won’t be done by the government though. Private industry, which now is more powerful than the government, will do the dirty work while the government will stand by and let it happen. In exchange, Big Tech, Big Entertainment, and Big Corporations will fund the feckless politicians who will look the other way.
While Orwell’s vision of dystopia was tight controls, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New Word feared not the burning of books such as Dr. Seuss, or the removal from store shelves of Uncle Ben’s Rice or Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Syrup, but the society will have been transformed from facts, news, and responsible journalism to all communication becoming entertainment. Please see cable news networks, periodicals, popular books, and television and movies as the evidence.
Evangelicals have lost the culture wars and we have been out discipled by the advocates of progressivism. In more recent days, meaning 2011, Carl R. Trueman issued a tract called The Real Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. He has proposed that the actual scandal is not that there is no mind, but rather that there is no evangelical. He claims that Evangelicalism has no well-defined theology and, therefore, no clear understanding of the Gospel. In other words, the entire discussion concerning the evangelical mind is impossible because an evangelical is more of a way of thinking than a group with agreed upon doctrine. More importantly, evangelicals don’t have an agreed upon ecclesiology like Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Eastern Orthodox. Each subset of the evangelical community holds to different versions of church purpose, polity, and authority. There is no one to keep them in line, except for individual congregations, book publishers, conference bookers, and Christian music companies. This could explain the reason that theological capitulation has been so easy for the movement. And it is falling apart as a definable entity.
I don’t entirely agree with this premise. I would say that evangelicalism has become a convenient way for people who are Christ centered, who believe the Bible to be authoritative, and hold to the idea that conversion is a needed event or process can gather around. And finally, that all Christians are to be a part of Christ’s mission to make disciples. It sounds a bit more refined than Southern Baptist, or Evangelical Free, Evangelical Covenant, or Free Will Baptist, General Conference Baptist, Christian & Missionary Alliance, Mennonite Brethren, etc. Yet evangelical got tangled up in partisan politics and, therefore, many younger evangelicals want to disassociate themselves from the movement and declare themselves not-guilty and innocent of the movement's sins.
After saying all of this, the facts remain the same. The progressive train has left the station and evangelicals are not on board. This is partially evangelicalism’s own fault. What Noll has written, part of what Michael Luo has claimed is true. The church has opted out of the academy as a primary strategy for world evangelization. Even Bonhoeffer made the mistake of thinking an intellectual elite, a spiritual nobility, could save Germany or at least rebuild it after the war. The first century church was populated with some of history’s sharpest intellects - the Apostle Paul comes to mind. The church was not in power, and was persecuted regularly by those in power for three hundred years. Yet, what put them into a position of prominence in the Greco-Roman world was not strategy, it was spiritual power that cannot be accounted for by IQ or cultural acceptance among the ruling elites.
Whatever mind has been given to you, love God with all your mind. If you are elite in your mental abilities, then your mission should be into the academic world. If you have other loves such as business, the arts, sports, or mechanics, love God with all you’ve got in those fields. Yes, intellectuals do matter and they do shape young minds who become leaders, but some of you need to start companies, movements, to compete with Big Tech, Big Corp, Big Media, Film, and Literature. The wasting of the evangelical mind would be to allow those who don’t have the mind of Christ to set the ground rules, remain the gatekeepers, and control the narrative of what is true or false, good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Don’t waste the mind God has given you, put it to work and put aside the advice of those whose minds are blinded to God’s truth.
[1] Ezekiel 34:1 NLT - “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I now consider these shepherds my enemies and I will hold them responsible for what happens to my flock.”
[2] I Corinthians 1:18-21 NLT
[3] Taken from the Akron Survey of Religion and Politics in America 1992.
