Another Angle on “Popularizer”

JS sends me a link to a post talking about the problem of academic accusing other academics of being a popularizer. A few thoughts after his fine post.

If you are an academic, one of the worst things you can be called is a “popularizer.” It means you are not a serious scholar, even if you have published serious scholarly work.

This came up in Donna Freitas newly published Consent on Campus. She urges her colleagues to engage students in classes about questions about sexual ethics as it relates to course content. But she observes that academics are their own worst enemies. Faculty who refuse to remain detached but talk about the personal and real-life implications of their scholarship run the risk of criticism from colleagues as “popularizers.”

This is not a new problem. It was one that faced one of the most significant writers and Christian apologists of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis. Lewis graduated with a triple first and published landmark works on Paradise Lost, The Allegory of Love, and The Discarded Image. Yet he never progressed beyond the rank of Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. Only late in life, in 1954, was he awarded the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.

Why? He was a popularizer. His radio addresses during World War II made “mere Christianity” understandable to ordinary listeners. He addressed pressing issues that were barriers to Christian belief in clear and carefully argued best-selling books. He wrote creative science fiction. Perhaps his worst offense was writing children’s stories.

A continued source of longing I’ve encountered among thoughtful Christians is for the rise of another C. S. Lewis. What if the real issue is not intellectual brilliance or theological knowledge or spiritual devotion, but a willingness to descend from the ivory tower and risk being called a popularizer and judged as less than a serious scholar? What if the real issue is a willingness to risk career success?

To popularize is either to make academic work accessible to the populace or it is to degrade scholarship to the populist level. I suspect it is more often the former and not the latter though the latter is the judgment of the academic.

Sometimes it is petty envy and jealousy. Which it clearly was at times with Lewis.

Sometimes it is the inability of some academics to communicate clearly enough for anyone but the academic guild to read their work. I’ll avoid names and footnotes.

What shall we call NT Wright, author of monster books on Paul and very accessible sermons and lay-level books? I call it the desire to do what the Christian theologian out to do: speak to the church.

Somewhere along the line many evangelical professors became academics, looked down their noses on accessible prose, and … well, that’s why so many church folks don’t have solid books to read. Those who could write them are stuck on the nose.