The Scandal of the Liberal Mind Anti-intellectualism: it ain't just for the Evangelicals
Posted September 22nd, 2016 by Alex Wilgus & filed under Religion . American Christians, especially Evangelicals have long been taken to task for rejecting the life of the mind. Mark Noll’s 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and most recently Alan Jacobs’s much discussed piece for Harper’s “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?” tell a story of withdrawal from academia and intellectual pursuits. The long and short of it seems to be that yesterday’s fundamentalists and today’s evangelicals make up the religious wing of Richard Hofstadter’s famous assertion of American “anti-intellectualism” and the national preference for sloganeering over sophistication. The evangelicals, like their fundamentalist forbears, shrunk from the intellectual calling because of some animus toward smartypants types. But there is a different way to tell the story. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, the world was in a scientific mood. New industry and...
