Culture War, Civil War

Political histories of the Religious Right miss the underlying ferment that gave rise to the movement, argues Molly Worthen in her recent Apostles of Reason. The eruption was more fundamentally an eruption of tensions within Evangelicalism itself.

Worthen argues that Evangelicals are united by three dominant questions: The reconciliation of faith and reason, the desire to know Jesus, and the challenge of public faith in a post-Christendom situation (6).

At bottom, these tensions and questions arise from the problem of “intellectual and spiritual authority.” Worthen admits that this problem is not unique to Evangelicals, but argues that “under the pressures of Western history, and in the absence of a magisterial arbiter capable of settling uncertainties and disagreements, these concerns have shaped a distinctive spiritual community” (4).

Worthen points to the way this problem manifests itself in Evangelical higher education, where “because of financial and cultural pressure to accommodate secular norms . . . evangelicals have made the greatest strides in balancing these contesting standards. They still struggle to please two gods: to negotiate between the professional mainstream and their own constituents.” Alluding to Wheaton, she writes that “even at evangelicalism’s flagship institution, the faculty, students, administrators and watchful alumni still expect open inquiry to stop short of challenging fundamental doctrines” (257).

She anticipates the Evangelical objection. Citing Stanley Fish, she acknowledge that “The presuppositionalists are correct. The secular university is not neutral” (258). Yet, she thinks that “most of us strive to approach the ideal of perfect disinterest,” venerating “the goddess we can never know” (258). She recognizes that authority is inescapable in any intellectual inquiry, and claims that the problem is not that Evangelicals obey authority but that “evangelicals attempt to obey multiple authorities at the same time” (258).

This is a perceptive analysis of the current state of Evangelicalism, and suggests that we won’t be able to address the scandal of the Evangelical mind without addressing the deeper scandal of Evangelical sectarianism.