He ain't heavy...he's my brother in Christ

It’s been well over ten years now since Mark Noll published his treatise The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which began famously, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” For those who detest holy rollers and god-mongers of all sorts, this shot across the bow is surely delightful stuff, but one would do well to remember that Noll himself is no such person. He is the Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Christian Thought at the very evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois. That the 20th century evangelical tradition in the United States is a wasteland of intellectual achievement was, and is, not news (though having it uttered by an evangelical was mildly newsworthy). So what was Prof. Noll up to in mounting such a furious assault on the weakness of evangelical intellection?

In writing his book, Noll was sounding a call to arms in an attempt to reverse the century-long slide into irrelevance that has plagued American evangelical thought. The main thrust of Noll’s argument takes on what he sees as the corrosive effects of Fundamentalism, which is, broadly, the cocoon evangelicals wove for themselves after losing the cultural war waged earlier in the 20th century, a defeat best typified by the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. Evangelicals came out worse for wear when they attempted to engage in public discourse, so they simply quit the scene and retreated from view for several generations. The collected doctrines associated with this tactical retreat were characterized by an overarching theology that evaded the annals of modern thought altogether, salving wounded psyches with the false security of biblical literalism and a personal pietism premised upon a rather Manichean interpretation of Christian morality. Prof. Noll’s critique extends far beyond theology and hermeneutics, however, and attempts to chart how such a system of belief, over time, diminished evangelicals’ ability to interact with the world at large, creating a cognitive rift that subsequent generations have found difficult, if not impossible, to bridge. More so than theology or matters specific to religion, Noll would argue that this rift is best seen in other areas of endeavor—the natural sciences, the arts, and the allied humanities such as rhetoric and philosophy, areas that traditionally have been much enhanced through their contact with Christianity.

To understand how Prof. Noll’s gripe plays out in the real world with real people, one need look no further than the evangelical blogosphere. Take, for example, a recent thread concerning same-sex marriage at Evangelical Outpost, one of the more popular and well-regarded evangelical blogs. One initial post and dozens of comments produced fulminations on everything from polygamy to bestiality to miscegenation, but precious little directed specifically at the concept of gays marrying (other than visceral loathing or vacuous justifications) or marriage itself. Instead, there was a collection of arguments by analogy that left one to ponder how well the combatants actually understood marriage as a theological and/or legal concept. To be sure, one doesn’t expect allusions to Saint Augustine or Reinhold Niebuhr, but it was edifying to note that, amid all the rancor and debate, the word sacrament did not appear even once. For that matter, I don’t recall the word contract, either. There was no collective sense of how marriage evolved in American religious thought or secular law, how it differs in Protestant theology versus Catholic, or how their own congregations understood and practiced it!

Ah, welcome to American evangelicalism.

This latter observation in my judgment comes closest to the heart of the matter. In discussing Prof. Noll’s book, Robert Wuthnow, who directs the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, once wrote:

Noll does not depict evangelicals as a righteous remnant, disdainful of intellectual work because it runs counter to their faith. Rather, he suggests that evangelicals are thoroughly a product of American culture. In fact, I would go further: American evangelicalism is the quintessential adaptation to a society dominated by the marketplace and consumerism…To be sure, evangelicals are generally devout, church-going Christians who take the Bible seriously and try to live in obedience to their Lord. But study after study shows that they seldom understand the Bible very well, know little about theology, buy heavily into the therapeutic culture of feel-good-ism, and are caught up in a cycle of overspending and consumption like everyone else. In my view, this is the real scandal of American evangelicalism.

Or, for those who may require a second opinion emanating from a Christian college, try James D. Bratt, a Professor of History at Calvin College, who put it this way:

Our culture is antinomian in every sense of the word. All America has become…piecemeal, sporadic, erratic, medicinal, and therapeutic. In such soil, any use of the law must struggle to survive, much less thrive.

Building on Prof. Noll’s premise, one could argue—as these gentlemen have—that the intense personal pietism of yesterday—reinforced by an equally rigid biblical literalism—has evolved over the years into a form of spiritual narcissism that helps to explain the aforementioned cognitive rift. Evangelicals rarely allude to religious teachers or authority of any kind, because it is thought that the believer with a Bible is enough to keep the demons at bay. Except, of course, it isn’t. This mental interiority is hardly unique to evangelicals (in fact, it’s as American as apple pie), but that rather reinforces the point.

What ever became of Prof. Noll, you might ask? It was announced in February that this semester would be his last at Wheaton, as he has taken an appointment at Notre Dame University. Noll, named by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 “Most Influential Evangelicals” in 2005, will now hold an appointment from that most Catholic of American institutions.