The American “Evangelical Mind” Today

At least four questions are pertinent for any attempt to assess the current state of evangelical intellectual life in the contemporary United States. What do we mean by “evangelical”? How should the contemporary academy be viewed? What kind of scholarship are evangelical or evangelical-connected thinkers producing? And what is the theological vision grounding such scholarship? If we stopped with just the first two questions, it would be a dismal picture. Going on to the others may give reasons for hope.

The examples that come first to mind when addressing such questions will strongly affect how they are answered. Thinking first of the American political sphere obviously tilts responses in one direction since pundits, publicists, popular preachers, partisan operatives, and masters of social media have slotted “evangelicals” as the most reliable supporters of our era’s most aggressively populist politicians. It should surprise no one that the marks of scholarship (patience, wide-ranging research, care in defining the objects in view, eagerness to engage critical responses, and willingness to examine problems from multiple perspectives) are not the stock in trade of these voices.

The choice of which organizations to consider, either sponsored by self-professed conservative Protestants (= evangelicals) or known to be supported by such Protestants, also makes a great difference for assessments of contemporary intellectual life. Think, as an example, of groups promoting biblically faithful views of humanity’s primal history and modern evolutionary theory. Visitors by the tens of thousands come every year for enlightenment on these questions to Ark Encounter, “a Christian religious and creationist theme park” in Kentucky. Although its picture of early human history has no standing among formally credentialed scientists, its account of the world as perhaps ten thousand years old and its dismissal of human evolution enjoy great credibility in the American evangelical world.

By contrast, Christians who are practicing scientists sponsor the Biologos Foundation, founded by the current director of the National Institutes of Health, who has written about how much C. S. Lewis aided his journey to Christian faith. The stated purpose of this organization is to affirm both the bedrock truth of the Scriptures and the main results of both modern biology concerning the evolution of humankind and modern geology concerning the age of the earth. Since both Ark Encounter and Biologos may be considered evangelical in meaningful senses of the term, it is difficult to take both into account for the purpose of assessing a contemporary “evangelical mind.”

“Evangelical”?

Considered by itself, without careful discriminating nuance, the word evangelical is now next to worthless for serious investigation of questions about Christian faith and contemporary scholarship. The difficulty does not lie with a theological or religious understanding of the term “evangelicalism.” The fourfold characterization David Bebbington provided in his 1989 book, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, has been widely used because of how well it identifies a certain kind of Christian faith that came to prominence in the Atlantic region during the eighteenth century and has now spread throughout the world. In his terms, evangelical Christianity is marked by an emphasis on conversion, “the belief that lives need to be changed,” or in broader perspective that humans need a vital personal relationship with God. It also emphasizes that “all spiritual truth is to be found” in Scripture; that all believers, especially the laity, should be active in their Christian faith, especially in sharing the gospel; and that the key to reconciliation with God is the atoning death of Christ on the cross.[1]

The problem for assessing evangelical intellectual life does not come from this characterization, but from the fact that these evangelical characteristics connect only randomly with intellectual efforts.

• An evangelical’s attitude to the results from respected centers of modern scientific research may be skeptical or trusting.

• An evangelical’s assumptions about the trustworthiness of social media may lead to crediting whatever has come across the internet about the 2020 American presidential election or never believing anything read on the internet.

• In China, an evangelical’s views about honoring the “powers that be” may lead to membership in a Three-Self Patriotic church or to identification with an unregistered church.

• An evangelical’s understanding of the Holy Spirit in relation to the human body may predispose that evangelical when ill only to pray, only to visit a doctor (understood as helpful because of God’s superintending providence), or both.

• What an evangelical takes for granted about hermeneutics, how to interpret the Bible, could lead to interpreting Genesis 2:7 (“then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground”) primarily with an eye on passages in the New Testament about Adam or primarily with an effort to understand the conventions of cosmological thinking in the ancient Near East.

Evangelical scholars researching the development of evangelical traditions have valued David Bebbington’s characterization, but they now regularly specify how the evangelical characteristics have operated. This concern usually leads to a stress on the plasticity or malleability of the characteristics in different groups at different times. Some years ago, I tried to capture that reality by calling evangelicalism “culturally adaptive biblical experientialism,” a phrase that unsurprisingly has not caught on.[2] In their Short History of Global Evangelicalism (2012), Mark Hutchinson, an Australian Pentecostal, and John Wolffe, a British Anglican, spell out much more clearly what I attempted:

Analysis of evangelicalism needs to start from the recognition that it is a fluid and diverse phenomenon. . . . It is this fluidity that has given it much of its power, even as it contributes to confusion about evangelicalism on the part of opinion makers in the public square.[3]

In his forthcoming book on evangelicalism for Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series, the Canadian theologian-historian John Stackhouse makes a parallel point by defining evangelicals and evangelical movements by a particular “style” as well as by features similar to Bebbington’s characteristics. In Stackhouse’s careful account, that style is inherently popular, it relies on voluntary mobilization, and it is concerned with gaining the widest possible response from individuals. In other words, evangelicals are not only those groups and individuals identified by the Bebbington characteristics, but identified also by the fluid, popular, and adaptive ways those characteristics have been expressed.

This expansion of Bebbington’s characterization explains why “evangelical intellectual life” is oxymoronic. George Marsden recently commented on the strengths and weaknesses of evangelicalism understood in this way. As he, David Bebbington, and I were preparing a book published by Eerdmans in 2019 (Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be), George commented in an email:

Evangelical religion is strong because it can evangelize every tribe and nation. It is weak because, being market-driven, it cannot challenge most tribal prejudices—and will even reinforce those when plausible to do so.[4]

Applied to recent United States history, this insight accounts for the state of evangelical intellectual incoherence. A minority of contemporary American evangelicals, who are invested in the culture of contemporary academia, have internalized at least some of the tribal prejudices dominating that sphere (for example, respect for critically examined evidence and views on public morality committed to justice for minorities, as well as traditional sexual ethics). By contrast, many white evangelicals outside of university worlds are invested in partisan American politics and have internalized its tribal prejudices (for example, relative unconcern for critically examined evidence and laser-like focus on defending traditional sexual ethics). The fact that evangelicals are acclimated in the competing “tribes and nations” of contemporary American life shows why it is impossible to speak of an American evangelical mind.

The Contemporary Academy

If an “evangelical” designation implies little about intellectual standing, so too might contemporary American intellectual life seem to be utterly opposed to anything even remotely Christian. The hostility to traditional Christian thought, traditional Christian morality, and even traditional morality of any kind is now widespread in American colleges, universities, and the media associated with them. To be sure, the hostility does not prevail everywhere and not to the same degree where it does exist. Yet as attested by enough well-publicized examples, standing up for what were once Christian or Christian-friendly commonplaces has led to the skewing of hiring decisions, the denial of tenure, the dis-invitation of outside speakers, and the ridicule of Christian perspectives in classrooms. Effective exploitation of advocacy strategies taken from the Civil Rights Movement has enabled previously marginal groups to mobilize for promoting their rights. In some places, the ideologies of those groups have become unforgiving arbiters of what can and cannot be said on campus and in publications. Put differently, principles of unrestrained personal freedom and aggressive efforts to redress perceived injustice now rule in some regions of the academia.

The reality of academic specialization has also complicated the picture. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was privileged to lead several yearlong seminars for groups of Wheaton College faculty aimed specifically at promoting Christian reflection on the subjects of the participants’ disciplines. Some of the seminars succeeded, others did not. When they failed, a fact of contemporary Christian life was at least partially responsible, but also a fact of modern academic life. Among faculty who shared strong Christian commitments, there could be a gross disparity between the level of academic preparation in a particular discipline and the level of theological sophistication and hermeneutical awareness. As a consequence, some scholars who were expert in the particulars of their disciplines found it difficult even to begin to think about how patterns of Christian truth or assumptions about scriptural interpretation might relate to the taken-for-granted conventions of those disciplines.

In addition, because the learning required to function responsibly in many disciplines had become so deep, it was often difficult to find a common language or a shared intellectual framework for conversation across the disciplines—among, say, physicists, music theorists, foreign language pedagogues, psychologists, historians of modern America, historians of India or sub-Saharan Africa, specialists in Shakespearean literature, specialists in non-Western literature, organic chemists, physical chemists, New Testament scholars, and theological ethicists—all of whom knew their own subjects very well but sometimes not too much more. Specialization has produced wonders in all of the sciences and to at least some degree in the social sciences and humanities. Yet as specialization increases, communication among specialists on universal considerations, like the bearing of Christian faith on intellectual effort, has become increasingly difficult.

Christian Scholarship by Evangelicals

An observer aware of the intellectual vacuity of “evangelical” taken by itself or confronted by the difficulties facing Christian believers in the modern academy might reasonably conclude that it was the worst of times for meaningful scholarship by evangelicals or evangelical-connected individuals. Nothing, however, could be more mistaken. Christian learning is now actually advancing on many fronts. It flourishes in some domains. And evangelicals are contributing their fair share. It does, however, require particular angles of vision to reach this conclusion.

Christian intellectual life, first, no longer has much to do with the way that churchmen promoting an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework regulated medieval intellectual life—or how college life at Oxford and Cambridge could inspire John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University—or before the university era when the presidents of American colleges, who were invariably clergymen, could deploy a comfortable blend of Common Sense philosophy and generic Protestantism to prepare responsible Christian gentlemen for public service. The current situation is also quite different from the American university world that existed into the 1960s, which featured a mostly secular consensus with its almost entirely male participants policing a narrow range of intellectual perspectives—but which was only occasionally overtly anti-Christian.

From that world before 1960 there has been one survival, though not without challenge in some of the humanities. It is the respect for standards of evidence, arguments, and demonstrations that rely on carefully researched and critically ascertained facts (in other words, a respect for empirical realities in the sciences and for a broader Wissenschaft in most nonscientific disciplines).

Otherwise, except for the hard sciences, it is now an intellectual Wild West.

Powerful challenges by advocates of civil rights for African Americans, other ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians, along with disillusionment about “the American dream,” have ended the deference to consensus. Partisan politics has added further fractures. For the most part, scholarship that now gains a hearing is not restricted by subject matter or interpretive conclusions, but by depth and breadth of research, persuasive organization of evidence, and articulate argumentation. For Christian scholars, the present resembles what the Jesuit Matteo Ricci experienced at the imperial court of late-sixteenth-century China where he could win respect for his learning, but where he enjoyed neither preference nor hegemony.

To be sure, limits still apply. As obvious examples, scholarship denying the Holocaust or defending the antebellum slaveholding South has no future. In addition, although scholarship grounded in a specific Christian tradition may be important for members of that tradition, it will usually not register in the general intellectual marketplace. From my admittedly limited perspective, I would conclude that much high-quality theology is now being written—and also being read in at least some parts of the broader evangelical world. Some of that theology may indeed be helpful for indicating how charismatic, Mennonite, Kuyperian, covenantal, Wesleyan, Anglican, or Lutheran theological grounding might propel more general intellectual efforts for adherents in these communities. Yet it is hard to imagine that the current intellectual environment could ever be convinced by charismatic interpretations of American foreign policy, Mennonite cancer research, Kuyperian sociology, covenantal musicology, Methodist string theory, Anglican economics, or Lutheran literary criticism.

It is different for scholarship with general Christian foundations. As perhaps the prime example, several university presses, especially Cornell University Press and Oxford University Press, have published many books in recent years with sophisticated philosophical arguments defending traditional Christian beliefs—including the Trinity, the two-natures/one-person Christology of the classical confessions, and the necessity for atonement between God and humanity (though sometimes explained in new ways). Such works were rare to the point of nonexistence two generations ago. Now, though sometimes generating strong criticism, they are commonplace. Similar advocacy can be found in other disciplines, though more often as empathetic treatment of Christian believers where that belief is given as much credibility as economic, gender, political, or social forces. As a feature of modern intellectual life, such studies appear alongside empathetic treatments of Mormons, Muslims, Eastern religions, and the reform causes that have proliferated so widely in recent decades. The current advances of Christian-inflected learning do not herald a new day of Christian preeminence, but they do testify to an intellectual pluralism that did not exist when various Christian frameworks or, later, a secular consensus prevailed.

A second matter of perspective concerns the evangelicals who are participating in the revival of Christian-friendly learning. Even as instances of scholarship abound from growing numbers of (as the neologism has it) “self-identifying” evangelicals, who teach in evangelical colleges and universities, or who may be considered evangelical fellow travelers, that scholarship is much more generally Christian than distinctly evangelical. If it does concern evangelical subjects, traditions, individuals, or movements, it more likely features empathetic explanation than overt apologetical intent.

When evangelicals make distinctively Christian arguments or examine Christian phenomena with respect for their Christian character, those contributions rarely feature the Bebbington evangelical characteristics. Such scholarship, while almost always respectful of Scripture and biblical values, is almost never grounded in a particular view of inspiration or a detailed explanation of how the Bible functions as a supreme authority. Specific attention to the atonement and conversion is also rare. Scholarship concerned about evangelical activism is more common but is usually focused on social or cultural matters rather than evangelism. When evangelism is the subject, as in David Kling’s recent A History of Christian Conversion from Oxford University Press, the treatment is descriptive rather than itself evangelistic.

One other feature of contemporary intellectual life is also significant in light of the evangelical history that stretched from the early sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth. During those years, “evangelical” came close to meaning simply “anti-Catholic.” Now evangelical scholars frequently share perspectives with Catholics, cooperate on joint projects, or build deliberately on their work.

A good example of that kind of Christian assertion now gaining a wider hearing is provided by the distinguished Gifford Lectures sponsored by Scottish universities and funded with a bequest “to promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God.”[5] During the first two decades of this century, Gifford Lecturers have promoted a smorgasbord of possibilities for construing “the knowledge of God,” but prominent in that number have been a number of figures whom most observers would call evangelical or recognize as having meaningful evangelical convictions. The subjects they have treated, however, have not been specifically evangelical in the Bebbington terms.

Alister McGrath, the biographer of C. S. Lewis and J. I. Packer, explained how theories drawn from biochemistry and evolutionary biology point to a universe fine-tuned by the Trinitarian God of classical Christianity. N. T. Wright’s conclusions about the Jewish character of the New Testament and the nature of justifying faith have not been accepted by all evangelicals, but he is well known for his many books from InterVarsity Press and similar evangelical publishers, as well as for his academic defense of the resurrection of Christ as a historical reality. Wright lectured on how the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels could ground a distinctive form of natural theology. At the time when they delivered their lectures, two philosophers were active members of the same congregation of the Christian Reformed Church in South Bend, Indiana. Alvin Plantinga argued that clashes between science and theology were due to ideological perspective rather than anything empirical, and Michael Rae meditated on the hiddenness or darkness of God.

Besides these evangelicals and evangelical fellow-travelers, the lecturers included several others with evident evangelical connections or who were known as sympathetic supervisors of advanced evangelical students. Their subjects examined the religious beliefs of scientists from different parts of the world, the ways that physical location had influenced the reception of Darwinism, traditional Christian responses to the problem of evil, concepts of sovereignty derived from classical theology and modern government, ways for traditional Christian theology to appropriate modern evolutionary theory, and what it means to love the neighbor as oneself. This varied collection of Gifford Lectures, all connected meaningfully to evangelicalism, were resolutely theistic, often specifically Christian, but not evangelical in a specific sense.

Publication from well-established university presses is not the only gauge of a culture’s intellectual life, but it can serve as a shorthand indication. Even the most superficial survey of noticed books from these publishing leaders reveals a remarkable flourishing of Christian, Christian-friendly, or Christian-alert scholarship by evangelicals or evangelical-connected authors. Again, however, this is “evangelical” scholarship as contributing to more general Christian assertion or as drawing on insider familiarity with evangelical communities. A skewed, impartial list results from the books I happen to know about, but those results are still impressive, especially compared to the relative absence of such works by such authors less than a half-century ago:

• A critically balanced but mostly positive life of Billy Graham from Harvard University Press (by Grant Wacker);

• A detailed and again critically balanced but warmly sympathetic study from Oxford University Press of the missionary work begun by the five American missionaries killed in outreach to the Woarani of Ecuador (by Kathryn Long);

• A bulging handful of detailed historical studies from Yale University Press by Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd (on the colonial Great Awakening, the religious lives of Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry, religion in the American Religion, and more);

• An equally impressive publishing record from Baylor philosopher C. Stephen Evans who—besides numerous titles from InterVarsity Press, Eerdmans, and other Christian publishers—has brought out a number of studies from Oxford and Cambridge University Presses on Søren Kierkegaard, theistic arguments, divinely ordained ethical obligations, and related subjects;

• A book in 2019 from Oxford University Press by Baylor education professors, Perry Glazer and Nathan Alleman, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Teaching, that riffed on an earlier book by George Marsden, also from Oxford (1997), The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship;

• Important studies from Oxford by professors from Asbury University on the worldview of C. S. Lewis (Michael Peterson, editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy) and on analytic Christianity and a theological approach to the New Testament (Thomas McCall);

• At least fifteen titles from Oxford and Cambridge on different questions involving Christianity and the law by Emory University professor John Witte and an equal number edited by Witte for a Cambridge series on other aspects of the same relationship;

• A series of creative historical studies from Oxford University Press by Wheaton College professor Timothy Larsen on the religious life of John Stuart Mill, the surprisingly deep Christian commitments of leading twentieth-century anthropologists, and the remarkable number of skeptics in the Victorian era who returned to Christian faith;

• From Christian Smith, forthright challenges to the unthinking secularism of contemporary American sociology, as well as a long list of books detailing his own empirical research published by major university presses—the first of which appeared when he was still identified as an evangelical, the latter after he became a Catholic (but with no real change in his evisceration of the skeptical inability to credit the reality of religion); and

• A series of edited and authored books from major university presses by Timothy Samuel Shah that employ the standard tools of political research and political theory to document conditions of religious freedom and religious persecution around the world.

These individual examples could be multiplied many times over and for many disciplines. The lists include many women authors, authors representing a broadening range of ethnicities, and an increasing number whose scholarship looks far beyond the United States and agendas set by American national life. Many of these authors also write for the religious presses (including Baker, Eerdmans, IVP, Westminster/John Knox) that have long served evangelical and related constituencies and whose support for the renewal of Christian learning by evangelicals has been too little appreciated.

That renewal, to repeat, has not created a flourishing “evangelical mind.” Large numbers of evangelicals defined by demography, politics, or denomination pay no attention to such work or regard it with suspicion. But the number who do take part is significant. Where non- or anti-Christian learning abounds in American intellectual life, so now does evangelical-sponsored learning that is in some sense meaningfully Christian also abound.

Theological Grounding

The theology underlying such recent examples of Christian-friendly scholarship produced for general consumption and treating nontheological subjects has been generic and implicit, rather than denominationally specific and explicit. A wide range of factors helps explain why the renewal of Christian learning to which many evangelicals are contributing has taken this theological shape. A few years ago, I was privileged to write a short essay on why George Marsden in 2004 could be awarded the Bancroft Prize, the most distinguished honor bestowed on books in American history, for his magisterial study of Jonathan Edwards.[6] In preparing that essay, it was relatively simple to specify more than a dozen features of postwar American life that in one way or another made this honor possible. Several concerned economic, social, generational, and political developments that reconfigured the course of American intellectual development. Some of course were personal and more obviously theological, as exemplified by Marsden’s generally Reformed perspective worked out over decades of careful scholarship, but exemplified as well by other singularly influential historians such as Timothy L. Smith, a Nazarene of Arminian persuasion.

Smith and Marsden were pacesetters, soon joined by many other historians, who followed the lead of the postwar neo-evangelicals (Carl Henry, E. J. Carnell, Bernard Ramm) who set aside the narrow absolutes of fundamentalism in order to promote themes closer to general Christian orthodoxy. In succeeding decades, many scholars with evangelical convictions went further to research and write with those themes operating as deep, but unstated, contextual background for their work. Although they may have been personally guided by the specifics of their individual theological traditions, they opted to accept the conventions of contemporary American Wissenschaft. The modest notice they have gained in taking advantage of possibilities opened by the contemporary academy’s ideological free-for-all has come from operating where differences between Christian believers are less important than points of intersection among Calvinists, Wesleyans, Mennonites, Lutherans, charismatics, often Catholics, sometimes Seventh-day Adventists, and sometimes even Mormons.

Put differently, C. S. Lewis’s winsome presentation of “mere Christianity” seemed a program for which many evangelicals were waiting. They have, in effect, taken Lewis’s observation that “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers” as marching orders for doing their best in the American intellectual world as it currently exists. As guidance for operating in that world, most seem also to have taken to heart Lewis’s admonition that “whatever you do, do not start quarrelling with other [believers] because they use a different formula from yours.”[7]

Yet given the almost completely unorganized state of American evangelicalism, it is not surprising that many evangelicals could not care less about what the denizens of the discredited Ivory Tower were up to, even if they called themselves Christians. Others have regarded evangelical academic efforts with suspicion as manifesting intellectual cowardice or simply selling out to “the world.” This indifference and this critique deserve to be taken seriously by individuals like myself who believe the Ivory Tower is actually important for life in general. If “the wounds of a friend” are life-giving, however tenuous the friendship, they deserve attention (Prov. 27:6).

Considered more generally, if there has been a scandal of the evangelical mind and if it is possible to overcome such a scandal, it will come as believers undertake unembarrassed, unencumbered study of the world and all that is in it. If those who undertake that study can follow the Pauline injunction—“Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3)—it may be possible to build bridges not only to the American academy but to other American evangelicals as well.

Mark A. Noll is the author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994), Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Eerdmans, 2011), and works on the history of Christianity primarily in North America.