A summary:
Holy crap! WTF with the Jesus and Trump flags at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot?
We are treated to descriptions of earnest evangelicalish prayer on the part of the rioters who had broken into the Senate chamber.A quick mention of how forms of Christian faith have become distorted.
A lengthier survey of Christian intellectual history moving from Thomas Aquinas through Reinhold Niebuhr to T.S. Eliot (in other words, evangelicals were not always opposed to intellectual engagement with the world).
Consideration of the cultural history after the 1960’s and a reaction that produced resentment and suspicion of the world on the part of some Christians.
A look back to evangelical roots within “revivalism” that emphasized an individual’s direct connection to God (this then diminished the intellectual enterprise).
Then a description of how Christian faith split into liberal (mainline) and evangelical (fundamentalist) branches. One often rejected Orthodoxy and the other became fixated on “plain reading” of scripture and a worldview that became anti-historical, anti-philosophy, anti-science.
The article ends by going back to the opening consideration of the Trump era which demonstrated the almost complete emptying of the evangelical mind.
Amen. Amen.
When I was a teenager in the evangelical church, before entering university I was warned by very many people in the church about the dangers of attending a “secular” university. Later, as a pastor I saw that often stances were valued over true intellectual engagement. People were told what to think, not necessarily how to consider different perspectives and nuance.
Michael Luo, in the article, describes well what has happened in culture and politics largely as a result of evangelicals giving up the intellectual enterprise.
Those of us who have pushed away from the evangelical church, largely because of faith, not in spite of it, can help to articulate a better way forward.
Even reading articles like this is a step. It is a curious consideration that some of the best work on what has happened in evangelicalism is not necessarily coming from within evangelicalism, but from publications like The New Yorker. I guarantee you that there are still many evangelicals who say that the article must not be worth reading because of where it is printed. To that I would point out, “There. That’s it, the anti-intellectualism that we are talking about.”
For another form of media expressing pushback to anti-intellectual evangelicalism, take a look at the following TikTok:
Anti-intellectualism can come in many forms. It is by no means restricted to the evangelical church – which is, of course, a worldwide movement, not the property of the United States.
Many evangelicals in the Vancouver area (where I live) care about issues of the mind – not least those at Regent College and Trinity Western University, which both offer good models of how to wrestle with intellectual issues.
I sometimes thank God that I was raised in a good solid non-Christian home in a basically non-Christian culture, because it allows me to see some of the strengths of evangelical culture in a way that those raised in it (and all too aware of its many and real flaws) often cannot.