Tag: evangelical scholarship

The Latest Nicotine Theological Journal

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

The October 2023 issue just went out to “subscribers.” The issue will be posted at this website in three months — but the way the editors keep schedules, don’t hold your breath.

For now, here’s a taste of the really late latest:

Celebrity Pastors Think, We Don’t Have To

Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind came out in 1994 about midway in the era of peak evangelical intellectualism. This was a period, 1980 to 2010, when evangelicals embraced the scholarly task with a zeal not before evident among born-again Protestants. The former date – 1980 – marked the founding of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College. Launched by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, with inspiration from George Marsden, at the Harvard of the Bible belt, the ISAE sponsored important scholarship from historians who studied American Protestantism. The center of energy at Wheaton became a path for evangelical colleges (most notably Calvin College – now University) to receive grants from foundations in support a variety of research projects from scholars across the disciplines. The year 2010 is notable for the cover story in The Atlantic, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” by the Jewish-American sociologist, Alan Wolfe, that highlighted the strides evangelicals had made in the corridors of American higher education.

Coming mid-way in this golden age of evangelical scholarly output, Noll’s Scandal warned about not going back to old ways of thinking. The old evangelical habits – perhaps characterized as hyper-spiritualized or biblicistic – led to fundamentalist fears of theological compromise, revivalist fixation on soul-winning, and premillennialist obsession with Christ’s immanent return. Each of these intellectual tics and spiritual instincts undermined the mental discipline required for genuine scholarship. At the same time that Noll was warning about the past, he was also cheering on contemporary evangelical scholars and hoping college and seminary administrators would nurture even more scholarship. It did not hurt that this was a period when foundations like Pew and Lilly were bankrolling evangelical institutions. Pew was the most significant and reflected an effort to move beyond theological education into the arts and sciences. The Lilly Endowment’s support, typically reserved for mainline Protestants, was a recognition that evangelical scholars were catching up to scholars within the network of established Protestant institutions.

Since 2010 the evangelical mind has been buffering (like when your web browser has too many cookies). The closing of the ISAE in 2014 was one indication that either evangelicals did not have scholars to carry on what Noll and Hatch had started or that leaders of evangelical colleges no longer thought scholarship was sufficiently important for Christian higher education. Christianity Today’s decision to cease publishing Books & Culture, was another indication of evangelical mental fatigue. The magazine had aspired to be evangelicalism’s New York Review of Books. Even so, Books & Culture had always depended on subsidies from its parent company or from foundations. By 2016 the heads of Christianity Today gave up on the dream of a heady evangelical publication that monitored books and ideas.

After all of this thinking, did evangelical scholarship prevail over the scandal about which Noll warned? Do evangelicals think about the world and their faith better now than they did before the evangelical renaissance? One test is to see whether evangelicals read non-evangelicals for insights into the world. After all, evangelical scholars, if they are doing good scholarship need to keep abreast of the best scholars in their field – most of whom are not Christian. If evangelical scholars know how to use and evaluate the work of non-Christians, can ordinary Protestants in a similar way take counsel and instruction from pundits and observers who make no profession of faith?

Tim Keller may have benefitted as much as any pastor from the flowering of the evangelical mind. His ties to the seminary world (Gordon-Conwell, Westminster, Reformed) prevented his easy circulation among the historians and philosophers at colleges who were at the forefront of the evangelical mind. But Keller’s years of greatest influence coincided with those of peak evangelical mind. The atmosphere of evangelical scholarship made plausible a pastor in the wealthiest and most influential city in the world conducting a ministry that made Christianity seemingly plausible to secular elites. Evangelical minds also encouraged pastors to have a take on contemporary affairs and to do so in a distinctly Christian voice.

In 2020, the most recent Year Zero, Keller wrote a series of articles on the current things that were agitating the American people and the rest of the world (thanks in part to a global obsession with Donald Trump). The topics that absorbed Keller’s attention were Race, Racism, and Justice. The last article in the group – the big finish – was “A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory.” This was precisely the sort of thinking the evangelical mind was supposed to produce. Keller spent 6,900 words – the average length of the NTJ – showing how he evaluated social justice as a Christian thinker. . . .

The Politics of Scholarship on Evangelicalism

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

John Turner provides relief for those tired of the complaint about evangelical hypocrisy in voting for Donald Trump:

American evangelicals, white and otherwise, are far more interested in charity and evangelism than they are in politics. As Kidd comments, “charitable action is a more constant attribute of evangelicals than Republican political engagement is.” He then concludes, “we should not define evangelicalism by the 81 percent.” Rather, “being an evangelical entails certain beliefs, practices, and spiritual experiences.” For Kidd, voting for Donald Trump is tangential rather than central to the reality of most American evangelicals.

Two thoughts. 81%! Kidd suggests that pundits and scholars are hampered by definitional confusion about the definition of evangelical. Pollsters count many people as evangelical who would not define themselves that way. Still, 81%! I think Fitzgerald is correct. It’s not just that most nominal evangelicals voted Trump. Most committed, church-going white evangelicals did so as well. In fact, the more frequently people attended church, the more likely they were to vote Trump. This is one reason I attend a Presbyterian church. There’s no midweek worship, and you can be in and out in a shade more than an hour on Sundays. This inoculates me against Trump-voting. I won’t spend more time in church until after he leaves office, just in case. Hopefully he’ll be gone by the end of January 2020, and I can safely worship more frequently.

At the same time, I think we as historians err if we define evangelicalism – or our interests in evangelicalism – by that political statistic. Evangelicalism is not a political movement. Most churches that one might reasonably categorize as evangelical are not especially political, let alone hyper-partisan. Rather, those evangelical churches focus on weekly worship, small-group Bible studies, support for missions, and all sorts of other activities that rarely catch the attention of pundits.

Evangelicalism is primarily a phenomenon of religion. That makes sense.

But what did the emergence of the religious right during the Reagan era do to the scholarship on evangelicalism? And would anyone care about evangelicalism (if such a thing exists en mass) if not for politics?

In 1978, when Ernest R. Sandeen and Frederick Hale compiled an annotated bibliography on religious history, American Religion and Philosophy, evangelicalism did not even register an entry in the subject index, and the title index contained only four books or articles. By the early 1990s, when Butler felt he was drowning in a sea of born-again historiography, evangelicalism not only claimed more space in standard reference works but had grown to need its own. In 1990, Joel Carpenter and Edith Blumhofer produced the first bibliography exclusively on evangelicalism, Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: A Guide to the Sources; and Norris Magnuson enlarged the corpus with American Evangelicalism: An Annotated Bibliography (1990), which he supplemented in 1996 with a second volume, American Evangelicalism II: First Bibliographical Supplement, 1990–1996. Reference works may not be the best guide to a subject’s popularity, but they do help to confirm that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, evangelical Christianity went from merely a footnote in the fundamentalist controversy to a threat to the preeminence of mainline Protestantism.

The new scholarship on evangelicalism is clearly related to the surge of born-again involvement in electoral politics. Had the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons not emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s as politically powerful, most non-evangelical academics would have had few reasons to care about the development and legacy of revivals, biblical inerrancy, the second coming of Christ, or the events of the first chapter of Genesis. Christine Heyrman conceded in Southern Cross (1997) that “Evangelicalism’s complex beginnings in the early South would probably claim the curiosity of only a small circle of historians were it not for the fact that this legacy now shapes the character of conservative Protestant churches in every region of the United States.” Despite the boost the Protestant Right gave to students of evangelicalism, born-again historians have remained remarkably silent on politics, let alone evangelicalism’s assumed default political perspective, conservatism.

So as much as I want to agree with Turner, I continue to think that the world of evangelical higher learning and scholarship would not exist if not for a wider public wanting to know something about the politics of those odd people with Jesus in their bosoms.