The Evangelical Mind, And Its Discontents

From the 16th century onwards, the Protestant Reformation was unified by the Reformers’ belief that the Roman Catholic Church had drifted so far away from Christian Truth, that it had withered to un-salvageability and must be completely abandoned.

It was never unified by much of anything else.

At the Marbury Colloquy of 1529, convened by Prince Philip I Of Hesse in order to unify Protestant doctrine, Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther found themselves divided over whether or not Jesus Christ is really present in the Eucharist, Zwingli saying No and Luther saying Yes. Early in the 18th century, John Wesley rejected John Calvin’s assertion that salvation, once given by God to man, can never be lost. The Reformation saw the rise of the Anabaptists in Central Europe, who were persecuted by both Lutheran and Reformed Protestants for their belief that infant baptism is invalid.

This splintering, this lack of unity, accelerated as time passed, and today there are thousands of Protestant denominations with irreconcilable doctrines, as well as Protestants of no denomination, the latter being the prevailing factor in the United States’ religious landscape. Hence, it’s unsurprising that, given the profound lack of unity within Protestantism, that Protestantism is also divided over the role that learning and intellect should play in our religious lives.

---

Eastern Orthodox Churches in the United States, under normal circumstances, require a Master Of Divinity degree for their priests, and the Catholic Church will usually prescribe a Masters Of Theology or Philosophy. Among Protestants, the Puritans and Presbyterians who immigrated to America in its Colonial Era were very much in favour of “the life of the mind”; they were the ones who founded colleges like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and William And Mary to educate their ministers. Yet there was no universal mandate that all Protestants must follow the path they’d carved. Revival-oriented Evangelicals, who both influenced and escaped from the major denominations, were particularly uninterested in following that path. Because Protestants made room for an Anti-Intellectual wing, Protestantism is where that style flourished.

Historian Richard Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, says that learned, liturgical religion started losing ground to the revivalists at the time of the Great Awakening in the 18th century.¹ This was the time when newer waves of immigration, more Extroverted and less valuing of intellect than the average of the groups they descended from, who remained in Europe, were gaining ground from the Puritan English. The learned clergy of the time, whether Congregationalist (New England) or Anglican (Tidewater Virginia), were not wholly innocent according to Hofstadter, because they’d become “too civilized”, their sermons “attended by sleepy congregations…were often dull and abstruse exercises in old dogmatic controversies.”²

Although the old guard clergy welcomed the Awakenings at first, this changed once the old guard realized the revivalists didn’t regard them as fellow workers, building the Body Of Christ, but as enemies to be put down and defeated. This tone has been dominant in American religion ever since then. America’s preference for psychological Extroversion, when applied to industry, led it to prefer quick, efficient production of easy molds, the fast-food mindset, to slow painstaking masterpieces. In religion, it led to the widespread victory of the Evangelical spirit, and a disenfranchisement, and often a loss of Faith, in the Introverted and learned.

---

At the time of the framing of the United States Constitution, it has been estimated that around 90% of America’s population was unchurched, and concerns over correct doctrine were buried by a burning desire to quickly gift conversion to those who’d never been exposed to the Bible.³ Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), revivalist preacher and central figure of the Second Great Awakening “[looked] upon piety and intellect as being in open enmity”⁴ and dismissed literary greats like Shakespeare, Byron and Sir Walter Scott as “triflers and blasphemers of God”.⁵ Already we see the attitude appear, that the deep thinker, the lover of literature, is an inherent enemy of Jesus Christ.

During the earlier years of the Methodist movement, the denomination's critics noticed that their leaders “appealed to the poor and the uneducated, and they proposed to make a virtue of it”.⁶ The movement seemed uninterested in theological education, given that the ministry's work was “to preach a simple gospel to a simple people”. ⁷ Is the educated man, the complex man, the bright man, someone that the Church should neglect? Is his neglect something the Lord would approve of?

After Methodism's intellectual establishments grew, they came under attack by the itinerant preacher Peter Cartwright, who said that creating a learned clergy takes too much time, and the people would fall into infidelity unless the unlearned quickly moved into action to preach to them.⁸ A fall into infidelity, of course, can also occur when incompetent preachers lack the knowledge to answer questions from the curious or skeptical, but this doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cartwright.

Dwight L. Moody, the late 19th century evangelist who later founded the Moody Bible Institute, is described by Hofstadter thus: “the knowledge, the culture, the science of his time meant nothing to him, and when he touched upon them at all, it was with a note as acid as he was ever likely to strike.”⁹ Are all Christians to follow Moody’s peculiarity in this regard?

William Jennings Bryan, Congressman, lawyer, Secretary Of State and 3-time presidential candidate, was partial to the evangelicals and populists. “Christianity is intended for all, not the so-called 'thinkers' only”, he declared. ¹⁰ What becomes apparent when the preceding quotes from the Evangelicals are considered all at once (and our own experiences providing even more) is that his movement didn’t believe that Christianity was intended for thinkers. It’s easy to assume from these quotes that the deep thinker is inherently villainous to the Evangelical movement, that God must have made a mistake in creating them, and that their miserable rejection as untouchables and black sheep will be a fitting prelude to the rejection awaiting them once they depart this earthly life.

---

Why the hostility?

“God authored the Bible specifically to be interpreted by even the most simple among us”, a Protestant clearly influenced by this revivalist tradition once told me. What would the Bible itself say about this attitude? Nothing affirming. On the other hand, the Apostle Peter, mentioning the letters of his brother, the Apostle Paul, says they contain: “some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they also do the rest of the Scriptures.” (2 Peter 3: 16) Such admission that the Scriptures contain difficult things to understand, and that the untaught are the ones committing the misunderstandings, can't easily be reconciled with the Evangelical populist assertion that the simpleton is the best Bible teacher.

Populist-style Bible teaching can have its uses; it is mandatory in situations where the ordained priests and bishops have succumbed to heresy, as has often happened in Christian history. However, pride is not a sin limited to the clergy, and much of the Reformation simply involved the transfer of pride from the clergy to the laity. The desire to be one’s own boss, to interpret “call no man Father” (Matthew 23: 9) as a rejection of the priesthood, to set one’s self up as the ultimate judge and authority of Scripture, of what is and isn’t Christian, these are Luciferian impulses. Let there be no doubt.

Charles Chauncy, a Boston cleric who witnessed the First Great Awakening in 1743, perceived the pride in the evangelists: “Men of all Occupations, who are vain enough to think themselves fit to be Teachers of others; Men who, though they have no Learning, and but small Capacities, yet imagine they are able, and without Study too, to speak to the Spiritual Profit of such as are willing to hear them.”¹¹ Given that evangelical revivalists often accused the learned clergy of arrogance, a charge of hypocrisy can be added.

This is also widely suspected to be a contributing factor in America's historic animosity towards the Catholic Church. Trevor Burrus at Forbes Magazine wrote that centuries ago: “Many Protestants doubted that Catholics could be truly American... America was a bottom-up nation that believed in the power of the common man...Catholicism was a top-down religion that discouraged the common man from finding religious truth for himself.” If nothing else, I can certainly confirm that this was my own defense of my Protestantism when, as a teenager, I tried to be a good Protestant and a Good American.

In other instances, sheer envy revealed itself to be a motive of the revivalists. Early Baptist culture was deeply anti-intellectual; not only did they often accused educated clergy of “only being in it for the money”, so to say, they also refused to team with missionary societies to spread the Gospel on the frontiers, for fear of not measuring up. One Baptist preacher voiced his objection: “the big trees in the woods overshadow the little ones; and these missionaries will be all great men, and the people will all go to hear them preach, and we shall be all put down. That's the objection.” “Instead of rejoicing that the Lord had provided better gifts to promote the [Faith], they felt the irritability of wounded pride, common to narrow and weak minds.”¹²

---

“It is more difficult to labour with educated men, with cultivated minds and moreover predisposed to skepticism, than with the uneducated”,¹³ a 19th century evangelist would write. I dispute the charge that the educated and cultivated are more pre-disposed to skepticism, in some ways they actually seem more credulous and trusting, and I propose an alternate explanation.

The historically knowledgeable Orthodox Christian sees the 2nd millennium A.D. as being marked by two catastrophic declines in religious quality: first the Great Schism of 1054, where the Pope broke away from the Orthodox Church when the Eastern Patriarchates did not recognize his jurisdiction over them. And second the Reformation, where every individual Bible reader became the sole determiner of religious truth as he or she saw it.

When something previously pristine has flaws introduced into it, the most sensitive, perceptive and thoughtful members of a society are probably the first people to notice, the people most bothered by the decline. It must be said forthright: much of what spouted from the Protestant fountainhead was easily refutable nonsense to the intelligent, and the more intelligent Protestants usually distance themselves from the Reformation’s more cringe-inducing aspects (Pre-Tribulation Rapture Mania, anyone?). Consider three questions:

1. If Christians are to use nothing but the Scriptures for their beliefs and practices, why is this commandment absent from the Scriptures, and why didn’t God will the printing press invented thousands of years earlier to facilitate much wider dissemination of the Scriptures?

2. If Christians must totally abstain from alcohol, why would Jesus Christ, the Living God, turn water into wine for His first public miracle, declare at the Last Supper that wine was His blood, and take a sip of wine during His crucifixion?

3. If the Bible is filled with verses about God’s benevolence, how can this be reconciled with the Calvinist belief that the damned are damned, inalterably, through no sin of their own, but solely because God wills them so?

How many times have quiet, thoughtful young people been raised in a Protestant church of one denomination or another, encountered theological issues like the ones above, and left the church, or perhaps even belief in God altogether, as a result? How many of those people, after growing older, returned to these issues and have found the passage of time did nothing to make these doctrines make more sense to them? How many times has this drama played out? Ask yourself, reader, whether the educated mind is simply more prone to skepticism, or if this is an instance of sharp-eyed merchants who can spot when a coin is counterfeited.

---

In 1994, historian Mark Noll won Christianity Today’s Book Of The Year Award for The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind, a no-holds-barred indictment of the Evangelical movement, of which Noll is a member, for its neglect of the life of the mind. Heavily indebted to Hofstadter, Noll shows how Evangelicalism’s problems from the earlier eras had continued into the modern age: as of 1994, Evangelicals didn’t sponsor a single research university or a single periodical dedicated to in-depth interaction and analysis of modern culture. ¹⁴ “By‘ life of the mind’ I mean more the effort to think like a Christian – to think within a specifically Christian framework – across the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts.”¹⁵

Noll also noticed a lack of opportunities for Biblical scholars in theological seminaries to research alongside Christian scholars in other disciplines: “we have no universities as they do in Europe at which experts in theology work side by side with those doing serious research in other academic disciplines”. ¹⁶“The few who choose to integrate their faith and scholarship in a lifelong calling must do so at their own initiative, with precious little encouragement either from the church or from the academy.”¹⁷

Though he doesn’t devote much space to discussing psychology of personality, Noll traces Evangelicalism’s history in America and notes several times that Evangelical leadership seems based upon public speaking abilities, and that these leaders themselves (such as William Jennings Bryan) preferred speeches to written words. He also correctly describes Evangelical life as having: “little room for intellectual life because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment”,¹⁸ and preferring “the immediate experience of the [perceived] Holy Spirit instead of contemplating God in the created realm”. ¹⁹All three of these characteristics are common in very Extroverted people. Reviewing Noll’s book in 2006, William H. Gross of OnTheWing.Org made this annotation: it may be that American individualism and its thirst for direct control and immediate gratification sought out this style of religious life.²⁰

Here, I think some sympathy for both Noll and the Evangelical mainstream is warranted. Noll believes enough in Evangelicalism to count himself in the group, and he is justifiably troubled by much of what he sees and recounts. He wants things to be different, he wants a place where people like himself, a PhD in history, can thrive and influence spiritual life for the better, and that simply isn’t happening, because the Evangelical mainstream doesn’t care. But Evangelicalism has its nature, it has those who respond favorably and unfavorably to it. Noll might simply be asking for changes that can’t take hold; those with very high intellectual aptitudes could be permanently underrepresented in Evangelicalism because of forces beyond his control. We can’t ask people do to things they’re incapable of, and we especially can’t react with anger towards them for this lack of capability. Billy Sunday, one of the most famous, loudest, most assertive evangelists, sought ordination before the Presbyterian Church in 1903, and couldn’t pass the examination before the board of elders; his answers were in the vein of “that’s too deep for me”.²¹ I would feel very awkward if I had to advise someone like Sunday to become more of an intellectual, and in some ways that seems to me like Noll has done.

The inherently Extroverted nature of mass immigration determined what the personality of America, a “nation of immigrants”, was going to be: it was going to be a nation where the perspectives of the less-intellectual Extroverts carried far more value than they did in Europe, a nation that would often treat Introversion, more intellectual, with neglect at best, and outright cruelty at worst. And it would be a nation where this personality issue would dominate religious life, unless explicit dogmatic restraints on this tendency were instituted and could be enforced. Because of American policies of religious freedom, such restraints can’t be applied to the population at large.

Our concluding opinion: the scandal of the Evangelical mind can’t be unscandalized because the style of religion belongs to people who aren’t usually affected negatively by the scandal, and even benefit from it. The revivalists who shaped Evangelicalism in America didn’t want certain personality styles, interests and modes of life to interfere with their Low Church ethos, and their own quotes and actions prove it. Evangelicalism was seemingly made for the Extroverted, the Less Intellectual, and the Emotionally Enthusiastic. Those who don’t fit this mold are destined to become Evangelical Protestantism’s discontents, or even abandoners.

---

Noll dreamt of an intellectually robust Evangelicalism, one that could strike down spiritual wickedness in high places, convert unbelievers, fulfill the Great Commission, and build God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, counting among its tools: the power of study, imagination, analysis, and deep thought. I dreamt of something like this too, in an earlier life. It was at the time I cherished those dreams that I started investigating and attending Eastern Orthodox Churches. Not only did I find all my dreams fulfilled there, I found religious satisfactions that had always previously eluded me. I was eventually baptised into it.

In college, I was part of an “intellectual Evangelical fellowship” that Noll probably would’ve appreciated. We all had a passion for history, apologetics, and the concept of religious authenticity. We tried to apply the Christian worldview, as best we could perceive it, to every aspect of life we could find. At least 8 members of our fellowship became baptised Orthodox.

God does not pit personality styles against one another; He allows them to complement one another in the task of salvation. Hence His True Church must be one that treats personality in this way. The Orthodox Churches that I’ve attend, gathers all personality styles into this task, where we learn from one another, admire and respect one another, pray for one another, let our strengths cover others’ weaknesses, and let others strengths cover our weaknesses. It feels perfectly Introverted and perfectly Extroverted at the same time. Orthodoxy is simultaneously deeper than the oceans, yet simple enough that a 6 year old child can grasp many of its ancient teachings and pray its prayers. Curiously, this applies not just to personality but to gender. Orthodoxy is one of, if not the only Church that can attract male worshippers in the same quantity as female ones. But more on that some other time.

We don’t have to be discontents. If you’ve been given a style by God, there is a Church for it. I have planted my roots, I will not plant them anywhere else, and I hope countless multitudes plant where I have planted, that many might be saved.

In an upcoming article, I’ll trace several of my own subjective first-hand experiences from both my life in Evangelical and in Orthodox Churches, as well as several specific examples of how the Orthodox Life has prized Introversion and spiritually strengthened its Introverts.

1. Hofstadter, Richard. (1962/1963). Anti-Intellectualism In American Life. New York City, New York. Vintage Books. Page

2. Ibid, Page 65.

3. Ibid, Page 82.

4. Ibid, Page 94.

5. McLoughlin, William. (1959). Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney To Billy Sunday. New York City, New York. Ronald Press Company. Pages 118-120.

6. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism In American Life. Page 97.

7. Ibid, Page 100.

8. Cartwright, Peter. (1856/1956). Autobiography Of Peter Cartwright. (Wallis, Charles, editor.) Nashville, Tennessee. Abingdon Press. Pages 63-65 and 266-268.

9. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism In American Life. Page 108.

10. (Vanderlaan, Eldred, editor). (1925). Fundamentalism Versus Modernism. New York City, New York. The H.W. Wilson Company. Page 36.

11. Chauncy, Charles. (1743). Seasonable Thoughts On The State Of Religion In New England. Boston, Massachusetts. Rogers And Fowle. Page 226. Retrieved from University Of Michigan Library Digital Collections, August 7, 2024. (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=evans;idno=N04182.0001.001)

12. Sweet, William Warren. (1931). Religion On The American Frontier: The Baptists, 1783-1830. New York City, New York. Harper And Brothers. Pages 73-74.

13. Cole, Charles C. (1954). The Social Ideals Of Northern Evangelists, 1826-1860. New York City, New York. Columbia University Press. Page 80.

14. Noll, Mark. (1994). The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, Michigan. William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company. Pages 3-4.

15. Ibid, Page 7.

16. Ibid, Pages 18-20.

17. Ibid, Page 21.

18. Ibid, Page 12.

19. Ibid, Page 32.

20. William H. Gross. May, 2006. The Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind By Mark A. Noll, Synposis And Comments By William H. Gross. OnTheWing.org. Page 10. (https://www.onthewing.org/user/Ev_Scandal%20of%20the%20Evangelical%20Mind%20-%20Noll.pdf) Retrieved August 9, 2024.

21. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, Page 115.