This blog is so old people used to find it through AltaVista.
From February 5, 2013, “Secrets and lies and the deeper scandal of the evangelical mind“:
This isn’t just a problem for professional scholars and academics. It affects thousands of evangelicals with undergraduate degrees from mainstream evangelical institutions like Wheaton, Calvin and Gordon. It affects every seminary educated evangelical pastor.
Those folks studied things and learned things. And now they know things. But they also know that much of what they know is not welcome, not accepted, in the wider evangelical subculture. So they have to keep quiet, because if they say in public what they know — what they know to be true — they’ll wind up in trouble with members of their congregation or with donors to their institution or with the evangelical customers of their publishing house.
Who wrote 2 Timothy? How old is the Earth? Does carbon trap heat? Does reparative therapy produce “ex-gays”? Is contraception “abortifacient”?
Evangelical scholars and graduates — including most pastors — know the answers to such questions. But they also know what will likely happen to them if they provide accurate, honest answers to such questions. And they are, as Enns writes, “legitimately afraid of what will happen to them if they do.”
So evangelical scholars and graduates and pastors keep their mouths shut. Evangelical college students learn not to tell their evangelical parents what they’re learning in biology classes, or in geology, or astronomy, or philosophy, or Intro to New Testament. Evangelical pastors develop a knack for dodging or deflecting questions they’re afraid to answer honestly.
This evasiveness and secret-keeping is an integral — or, rather, a dis-integral — part of the education of every educated evangelical. The duplicity is baked right in.
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