recent reading: apostles of reason

Explaining the Venn diagram of evangelical, charismatic, Pentecostal, born again, literalist, inerrantist, and fundamentalist is a complicated thing, and beyond the scope of this blog entry, but one of the things that has happened since midcentury is that "evangelical Christianity" has become synonymous in popular discourse with conservative (and especially ultra-conservative) fundamentalist- and literalist-leaning Christianity, and in particular the white churches fitting that description, and this is neither evangelical Christianity's origins, nor does it describe all of evangelical Christianity (or all of white evangelical Christianity) today.

After all, evangelical Christianity began more or less in the early 18th century -- or to consider it another way, it is more than twice as old as the fundamentalism with which it is now so closely associated. However, pointing that out doesn't mean fundamentalism has no place in evangelicalism, either; many of the characteristics now central to Christianity overall didn't develop for centuries, and this is just the way religion works.

But it raises the question: how did it get here? (where is that large automobile?)

Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism provides some of the answers. It's not a comprehensive history of American evangelicalism, nor of American evangelicalism in the period of time it covers -- it focuses principally on white evangelicalism, for one thing, and seeks to trace the rise of the politicized conservatives among them, by tracing evangelicals from the late 19th century to more or less the present day.

One of the themes that emerges quickly that of recurring clashes between -- let's just use this terminology -- conservatives on one side, and liberals and moderates on the other, resulting in the backing down or attrition of the liberals or moderates, and the subsequent strengthening of the conservative position. One of the most emblematic examples of this for me involves faculty members at an evangelical college, raising issues with the requirement that they pledge to uphold inerrancy-- what exactly does inerrancy mean here, the moderates asked? It means what it means, the conservatives said, that the Bible overrules reason, so there's no point thinking too much about it; the conservatives wound up resigning over the debate, but the moderates didn't really "win" as a result, because of the way these "losses" feed the conservative evangelical persecution complex and the need for enemies.

When I said that explaining that Venn diagram is a complicated thing, though, I wasn't blowing smoke. Just defining those terms is a tough thing. "The term evangelical," Worthen points out, "is so mired in adjectives and qualifiers, contaminated by politicization and stereotype, that many commentators have suggested it has outlived its usefulness. In America alone, the broad tent of evangelicalism includes a definition-defying array of doctrines, practices, and political persuasions. Perhaps no label is elastic enough to contain a flock that ranges from churchly Virginia Baptists to nondenominational charismatics in Los Angeles. At the same time, the mudslinging of the 1990s culture wars turned many conservative American Protestants away from a label now synonymous in the media with right-wing radicalism and prejudice. Yet we are stuck with it. Believers and atheist scholars, politicians and pundits, all continue to use the word evangelical. To observers and insiders alike there still seems to be a there there: a nebulous community that shares something, even if it is not always clear what that something is."

Nailing down what "evangelical" means is sort of like nailing down what "Christian" means -- both insiders and outsiders think they know, and yet the reality is that there are many different groups answering to that name, sharing some common ground but disagreeing about doctrine, practice, and in-group membership, and often unaware of how deep this disagreement runs or how many groups unlike them there are. This tends to be especially problematic with evangelicalism, since at least Christianity as a whole has actual named denominations and movements, whereas the differences within evangelicalism are not so clearly labeled, and not every evangelical church or group belongs to a larger ecumenical organization.

"... The trouble is that evangelicals differ widely in how they interpret and emphasize 'fundamental' doctrines. Even with the 'born again experience,' supposedly the quintessence of evangelicalism, is not an ironclad indicator. Some evangelicals have always viewed conversion as an incremental process rather than an instantaneous rebirth (and their numbers may be increasing)."

Evangelicalism has historical roots in European Pietism; "catchphrases like 'Bible-believing' and 'born again' are modern translations of the Reformers' slogan sola scriptura and Pietists' emphasis on internal spiritual transformation."

"Three elemental concerns unite [evangelicals]: how to repair the fracture between spiritual and rational knowledge; how to assure salvation and a true relationship with God; and how to solve the tension between the demands of personal belief and the constraints of a secularized public square." These are pretty broad concerns, and not all Christian groups with these concerns are evangelical, certainly; Worthen is just attempting to delineate the common ground among evangelicals without invoking specific terminology like "born-again" which, as pointed out, is treated differently in different groups. But as the subtitle of the book indicates, what she sees here is an overall concern with "problems of intellectual and spiritual authority."

This is one of the most important parts of evangelicalism: "American evangelicals have a strong primitivist bent. They often prefer to think their faith indistinguishable from the faith of Christ's apostles, and scoff at history's claims on them. But they are creatures of history like everyone else, whether they like it or not."

In what we now think of as the classic conservative evangelical community, this "primitivist bent" is not just integral to group identity, it's the basis of evangelicals' criticism of other Christians, which in turn insulates them from both criticism and analysis. Fundamentalism, for these folks, was not introduced at the dawn of the 20th century, it was revived at that point, returning Christian practice to the only form that true Christian practice could ever have taken. What I'm describing is, of course, the conservative view -- but the conservative view has become particularly important since, as I've talked about before, it became so dominant in religious discourse, influencing the way liberal Christians talked about their faith and non-Christians' views of Christianity.

Worthen's three keys again, rephrased: "three questions unite evangelicals: how to reconcile faith and reason; how to know Jesus; how to act publicly on faith after the rupture of Christendom."

Despite modern evangelicals' originalist claims, they act fairly divorced from history, and for that reason they often -- not just the conservatives -- forget just how close their origins are to the Protestant Reformation, which must seem to them like the distant past. But under Catholicism, certain questions -- especially about the role of faith in the public sphere -- had, if not easy answers as such, at least well-established arguments. Much as the formation of Christianity meant reevaluating Jewish thought and scripture to ask, what do we take, what do we leave behind, and what to we reinterpret, Protestant factions had to do likewise with the previous millennium-plus of Catholic thought. Some of it was dispensed immediately because it was the source of the rift, but Catholic thought by that point in time was incredibly broad, and Catholic theology was built on generations upon generations of commentators. How much of doctrine went away? How much of that theology was no longer valid?

That too is too complicated an issue for this blog entry, but what matters is the big canvas that it created. As far as the issue of authority, for instance, for various reasons -- particularly the political power and political relationships of the Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, as well as the need to protect the interests of Reformers, and the political interests of the states that flipped Protestant -- most of the early Protestant religions were state churches, affiliated with national governments. The antecedents to evangelicalism begin with a reaction against that, which goes a long way toward explaining evangelicals' embrace of home churches, unaffiliated churches, and churches that are only loosely affiliated with one another rather being led by formal ecumenical hierarchies.

"Pietist preachers critiqued the state churches that emerged from the Reformation as overly formal and cerebral. They called on believers to study the Bible and strive for personal holiness." That could damn near describe evangelical churches today, but Worthen is describing the late seventeenth century.

As for fundamentalism, it grew out of "The Fundamentals," a series of pamphlets written in the 1910s by faculty at Princeton's seminary, controlled at the time by theological conservatives. The Princeton conservatives considered inerrancy -- the idea that the Bible is without error, which is not the same as the idea that the Bible is literally true, but the line between an inerrantists and a literalist can be fine, and laymen do not always pause to consider the difference, however important its implications -- to be "fundamental" to the Christian faith, and their defense of it was a reaction to the Biblical criticism coming out of the German universities. Generally moderate, even conservative by today's standards, the "modernist" approach to Biblical criticism seemed impious to these proto-fundamentalists because it did not take the Bible's inerrancy for granted. Keep in mind that although some of the scholars the conservatives took issue with would certainly include non-believers or scholars challenging basic premises of religious belief, it also included numerous scholars who were themselves religious but simply didn't believe it was necessary to consider the Bible an error-free account of history, or to ignore the obvious parallels between the Old Testament and other Semitic religions, or to believe the traditional views that Moses had written the Torah and the Gospels had been written shortly after the death of Jesus, as first- or secondhand accounts. Scholars, again many of them religious (including clergy), were willing to question whether Jesus's miracles really occurred, not to mention what to make of the Earth being created in "six days." The basic dispute, from a conservative perspective especially, was whether the Bible overruled reason or vice versa.

(There is an extraordinarily large problem with taking the conservative side even apart from rejecting reason, which is the problem with "sola scriptura": despite hundreds of years of claims to the contrary, the Bible cannot be understood "by itself." Many readers certainly believe that, having read it -- or some part of it -- they come to a conclusion about what it means, but they do so because they bring to it preconceptions, viewpoints and perspectives impacted by religious teachings they have absorbed prior to their reading, and so on. Other readers claim that this problem can be alleviated by praying for guidance, and yet history clearly shows that the Bible and individual passages of the Bible have been interpreted in many different ways at many different times -- not just opportunistically, but by sincerely pious people who we must assume similarly prayed for guidance. In other words: whatever your religious beliefs, to make the claim that the products of human reason must be weighed against what it says in the Bible is nonsense, because "what it says in the Bible" cannot be ascertained except as a product of human reason. Indeed, belief in God, God's creation of humankind, and the divine guidance of the writing of the Bible should carry with it belief that this is one of the ends to which reason should be used.)

This is a dispute that continues in much of conservative Christianity today, obviously, and the dumbing down of Christianity, the sapping of religious literacy, has not helped. One reason conservatives are so convinced of the originalism of their Christianity is because some hundred years ago, they began constructing their echo chamber, expelling moderates and liberals from their churches, seminaries, and periodicals when they had the power to do so, starting their own when they did not. An echo chamber, a persecution complex, and a sense of superiority arising from the conviction that they were practicing the only real form of Christianity while everyone else readied themselves for the coals: that is the essence of conservative evangelical Christianity as it developed in the United States over the course of the 20th century.

(Even the pamphlets did not uniformly defend inerrancy, it's worth noting, despite being published by an inerrantist group and inspiring a largely inerrantist movement. They defended "traditional interpretations of the Bible," which is a slightly broader category, and the authors included some theologians who would soon, as The Fundamentals gave way to fundamentalism, be positioned more at the moderate edge of conservatism, notably James Orr, who argued stridently against inerrancy, but also against the excesses of German modernism. Fundamentalism wasn't defined by The Fundamentals so much as by the activity that surrounded and followed them, and the pamphlets themselves -- written by theologians, typically subtler and more nuanced in their arguments than either the laity or, for that matter, less intellectually-inclined clergy -- represent a wider range of theological positions than would later be tolerated.)

(A quick Worthen quote that goes far in explaining the difference between inerrancy and literalism: "Inerrantists often acknowledged scripture's inconsistencies, such as multiple, conflicting accounts of the same event. They freely admitted that when God inspired the biblical authors to set down his perfect revelation, he did not place them in a divine crow's nest peering over space and time. They asserted that simply because, in our finite judgment, the evangelists seem to disagree about how many times the cock crowed before Peter denied Jesus, there is no reason to conclude that the first chapter of Genesis is all metaphor, that the Marys did not find the tomb empty -- or, more fundamentally, that scriptura could truly stand sola, that the plain meaning of God's word somehow depended on human authorship or interpretation.")

(Both literalism and inerrancy are difficult to impossible theological positions to defend. But literalism approaches true indefensibility: the Bible cannot be literally true, because it contains too many contradictions. It is easier to argue that the Bible is "without error," and construct it as a series of divine revelations that may contain details that conflict with the details of other revelations in that series, but as moderate evangelical theologians themselves have pointed out, this requires incredibly detailed discussions of what exactly "inerrancy" means, such that the inerrancy claim becomes pointless. And yet.)

As Worthen points out, "Pastors who encountered the careful critiques of [theologians like] Orr second- or third-hand rarely preserved their prudence and intellectual agility. As conflict against modernists intensified in the 1920s and 1930s, fundamentalists lost interest in nuance. They refashioned a once-subtle doctrine into a shield to protect the Bible from the revisions of blasphemers. Orr and the scholars of old Princeton had understood themselves as explicating centuries of Christian widsom in modern terms. They held steady at the siren call of sola scriptura -- that problematic promise that every believer could grasp scripture's plain meaning -- by binding themselves to the mast of a venerable theological tradition. Later fundamentalists, however, became polemicists rather than apologists. The difference is subtle but crucial. Winning the war against modernism became more important than illuminating orthodoxy. Inerrancy came to represent not only a set of beliefs about creation or the reality of Jesus's miracles, but the pledge that human reason must always bow to the Bible. As fear of modernist theology and new science began to infect a wide range of Protestant churches, this new variety of fundamentalist deployed inerrancy as a simple shibboleth to separate sheep from the goats. It was no longer a doctrine with historical roots or an ongoing debate among theologians. Inerrancy was common sense."

Emphasis mine. Surely you have had an argument with a fundamentalist at some point -- even an atheist parroting fundamentalist views as an argument against religion -- who has made essentially these "points," since they have become so commonplace.

To Worthen's basic focus:

"From the beginning, [evangelicals'] concerns were existential and epistemological: They had to do not just with points of belief, but with how Christians accounted for human knowledge, how they lived in the world, and how they claimed to 'know' the divine in their minds and hearts. While many ancient Christians assented to the basic doctrines that scholars mark as 'evangelical,' that assent took on a different character after the seventeenth-century rebirth of reason and the invention of our present-day notions of 'religious' and 'secular.' The sundry believers who share the evangelical label have all lacked an extrabiblical authority powerful enough to guide them through these crises. Roman Catholics obey the Vatican (more or less). Liberal Protestants tend to allow the goddess of reason to rule over the Bible (or to rule, relatively untroubled, in her separate sphere). Evangelicals claim sola scriptura as their guide, but it is no secret that the challenge of determining what the Bible actually means finds its ultimate caricature in their schisming and squabbling. They are the children of estranged parents -- Pietism and the Enlightenment -- but behave like orphans. This confusion over authority is both their greatest affliction and their most potent source of vitality."

Out of the second generation of fundamentalists mentioned above came the neo-evangelicals (such as Billy Graham). "'Neo-evangelical' would come to describe a self-aware intellectual movement of pastors, scholars, and evangelists within the conservative Protestant community roughly (but not entirely) contained within the NAE. ... while evangelical connoted a broad swath of conservative Protestants averse to the old fundamentalist model of feuding separatism but still eager to defend the authenticity of religious experience and the authority of the Bible, neo-evangelical became a more precise label, embraced by a small circle of self-appointed leaders."

The NAE is the National Association of Evangelicals, formed in 1942. It is not a denomination but an association of evangelicals that includes both evangelical denominations (dozens now) and nondenominational churches. and later (in the 1970s) sponsored the New International Version translation of the Bible. The NAE's founders had concrete problems to address, very similar to the concerns of today's conservatives -- increasing evangelical representation among the chaplains who served in the armed forces, fighting the influence of modernism of public school curriculums, guiding Sunday School curriculums, and increasing the presence of conservative voices on religious radio, which was then dominated by liberal denominations, believe it or not. The fight against modernism and the defense of "traditional Biblical beliefs" informed all of these concerns, and just as you hear from the radical Right today, the threat posed is one of corruption from within: "Without a firm defense of Biblical inerrancy ... America would fall to enemies within and without, as had imperial Rome. Western civilization was sick with secularism and socialism, the modern spores that had overrun their hosts in the Soviet Union. The Kingdom of Hell was at hand."

Furthermore, in the view of the neo-evangelicals, "prior to the advent of modern biblical criticism and the theory of evolution, all Westerners shared a Christian Weltanschauung -- an unqualified respect for biblical authority, even if corrupted in some regions by Catholic rule.... The neo-evangelicals were overfond of this word, Weltanschauung, and its English synonyms: worldview, world-and-life view. They intoned it like a ghostly intonation whenever they wrote of the decline of Christendom, the decoupling of faith and reason, and the needful pinprick of the gospel in every corner of thought and action."

"From the neo-evangelical point of view, if Christian civilization was to survive the twentieth century, then biblical inerrancy and a reenergized Christian Weltenschauung must form its bedrock. The neo-evangelicals championed other theological principles too, but they recognized that conservative Protestants might reasonably disagree on details of doctrine. The NAE had no business taking a firm stand on predestination or exactly when Christ was due to return. Biblical inerrancy and the totality of the Christian world-and-life view, on the other hand, were different. These were not really doctrines at all, but facts: facts that made sense in an age when everyone from Nazis and communists to Catholic theologians and U.S. Foreign Service officers were talking about worldviews and presuppositions."

"The trouble was that neo-evangelicals presumed an evangelical solidarity that did not exist. The call for cooperation that began with the NAE would expose discord and ambivalence -- not least because, as it turned out, the neo-evangelicals' instinctive response to debate was to turn a deaf ear and close ranks. They differed from their fundamentalist forefathers only in the degree of their separatist impulse." Many evangelical denominations declined to join; the Nazarenes didn't join until the 1980s, and the Southern Baptist Convention, not only the largest Protestant denomination in the country but several times the size of the entire NAE, stayed out of it entirely, as did most Restorationist churches and denominations -- the churches that had grown out of the Second Great Awakening.

"Neo-evangelicals assumed that the battles against modernists in the early decades of the twentieth century had left all evangelicals with the same experience and collective memory. Nothing could be further from the truth. Restorationists fought over the use of musical instruments and worship and the degree of bureaucratic organization permissible for a 'New Testament Church.' The Nazarenes and Mennonites argued about 'worldliness' and abandonment of older customs and styles of dress."

Southern Baptists, meanwhile, rejected the NAE because both evangelicalism and fundamentalism seemed like Yankee phenomena to them, even though the Southern Baptists had fought the same fight against modernism, and shared many of the same anxieties. However, while the Princeton fundamentalists had been concerned with biblical criticism, the Southern Baptists of the same era had been occupied with an internal battle between conservatives who supported the Convention's authority and moderates and Landmarkers who fought for the autonomy of individual congregations -- a battle informed by concerns over how those autonomous congregations would then interpret the Bible, in light of prevailing modernist trends, but nevertheless not solely concerned with interpretation.

The Mennonites are part of the Anabaptists tradition. Writing in 1955, young Mennonite scholar John Howard Yoder -- after corresponding with Carl Henry of the NAE -- articulated some of the problems with neo-evangelicals, from the point of view of Mennonites and like-minded evangelicals: "Yoder urged Henry to relinquish his obsession with doctrinal details and philosophical rationalism. The Fundamentals pamphlet series 'was a time-bound polemic strategy' that addressed issues pertinent to the early twentieth century, but could not meet the challenges of the 1950s. 'For instance, they included nothing about social ethics, nothing about what Christian United is and is not, and further, the polemic strategy then chosen served better to build a barrier than to speak across the gap.'"

"Only a small minority of conservative American Protestants shared the neo-evangelicals' rationalist, Reformed heritage. Most churches continued to emphasize other themes -- such as personal holiness, internal transformation, or gifts of the Holy Spirit -- over intellectual assent to philosophical claims about the nature of God."

The NAE's striving for evangelical solidarity also suffered due to some of the alliances made by some of its more prominent members. Billy Graham, one of the most famous crusaders of the 20th century, came under fire by some conservative Protestants for allying himself both with Catholics and with liberal Protestants in the name of revivalism (and, arguably, in the service of promoting the Billy Graham brand).

Graham was a trustee at Fuller Theological Seminary, which is at the heart of one of the phenomena I mentioned earlier, the attrition of liberal and moderate evangelicals. Fuller was founded in 1947 by radio evangelist Charles Fuller and NAE co-founder Harold Ockenga. "In the late 1950s, a number of Fuller professors -- including the founder's son, Dan Fuller -- concluded that they could not abide by the seminary's statement of faith on the point of strict inerrancy. They had come to believe that while the Bible remained an 'infallible' guide on matters of doctrine, worship, and Christian life, it was not accurate in every scientific and historical fact. By 1961, the atmosphere at Fuller was poisonous."

One of the moderate board members pointed out the "complexity of the inerrancy debate, the 'very real problem of arriving at a precise meaning of the word inerrancy ... It would be literally impossible for you or anyone else who has a good knowledge of the Bible to sign our doctrinal statement without at least some degree of reservation. I -- along with others -- believe the statement should be carefully review by our faculty in much prayer and in the Holy Spirit ... the Fuller faculty and board compose the only group I know of in evangelical circles who are honest enough to face this matter openly."

Consider the source here. This isn't a modernist. This isn't a secularist. This is a professor at an evangelical seminary founded by the neo-evangelicals, literally the intellectual center of the neo-evangelicals, the home of Billy Graham, arguing not to throw out evangelicalism but simply that inerrancy is an indefensible doctrine, and that the faculty should pray together and come to a decision about revising the statement of faith required of professors and students. This is not a liberal revolt.

But it was treated as one. The moderates "won," insofar as Fuller to this day admits both conservative and liberal Protestant students, and the most conservative faculty resigned over the inerrancy issue. But they made martyrs of themselves in resigning, and included many of the best-known names among the faculty, the heroes of the scene. Inerrancy was the hill they were willing to die on.

Billy Graham launched Christianity Today in 1956, one of many evangelical magazines in an age when most American households still subscribed to and read multiple magazines. The title is a deliberate counterpoint to The Christian Century, the most popular mainline Protestant magazine of the day. "The neo-evangelicals behind Christianity Today did not propose to modernize old-time religion. On the contrary, they were proud defenders of fundamentalism." But they still sought to engage with mainstream America more than the less worldly, separatist, less "neo" evangelicals -- what Worthen calls the unreconstructed evangelicals.

Christianity Today is the spiritual sibling, so to speak, of The National Review, founded the previous year by William F. Buckley Jr. "Neoevangelical conservatives felt just as embattled as the editors at Christianity Today. The editors of the National Review founded their magazine out of a similar desire to rally their cause in a hostile marketplace and overcome liberals' caricatures of the 'Neanderthal Right,' as Buckley put it."

"Midcentury American conservatism featured -- on a grander, more tumultuous scale -- the same insecurity and discord that the neo-evangelicals perceived in their conservative Protestant world. Its various factions formed a dysfunctional family, clamoring with clashing beliefs and pet obsessions, whose members spent as much time squabbling among themselves as they did lobbying for right-to-work laws or denouncing progressive rulings by the Supreme Court. They felt both marginalized in the corridors of power and exhilarated by their increasingly well-funded drive to take back America. Buckley, however, was a master coalition builder. He managed to keep secular libertarians and Catholic traditionalists on the same masthead and maintain a healthy distance from the John Birch Society and other radioactive characters in the movement. This uneasy alliance was the key to his ability to lead an intellectual resurgence that eventually penetrated Washington ... [In 1961], one journalist conducted a survey of the shifting climate on college campuses and gave Buckley 's organizations the lion's share of the credit for the burgeoning 'revolt not only against socialist welfare statism in government, but also against indoctrination by leftist professors ... The conservative student revolt is a campus phenomenon from Stanford and Berkeley on the West coast to the Ivy League, from the University of Washington to the University of Miami."

Christianity Today was dependent on the financial support of oil exec John Howard Pew, who skewed more conservative than some of the writers -- Pew had also provided funding for libertarian journals and political groups, the Liberty League (an anti New Deal group), and the John Birch Society. In part because of Pew's support -- which kept the magazine afloat in the first decade, when it ran at a deficit of several hundred thousand dollars a year -- Christianity Today hewed close to the National Review's political conservatism, "toe[ing] the conservative line on every significant political and theological issue from foreign policy and civil rights to evolution and the ecumenical movement. (Pew called one of the CT founders, Carl Henry, a "socialist" for believing that evangelicals should be getting more involved in activism like the civil rights movement rather than doubling down on their opposition to it; their clashes contributed to Henry's forced resignation in 1968.)

Political conservatism and conservative Protestant theology seem synonymous now, inevitably linked hand in hand, but it need not be so, nor was it always so. For one thing, conservative Protestants -- evangelicals especially -- had often called for keeping churches out of politics, and explicitly contrasted themselves with Catholics and the Social Gospel movement among liberal and moderate Protestants when doing so. For another, conservative Protestants have also supported liberal political positions in the past -- some of them in alliances with the Social Gospel on some issues, for instance. The history of the politicization of the abortion issue is by now well-publicized; conservative evangelicals were largely disinterested in it until relatively recently in their history. Christianity Today's political positioning was part of the process that laid the groundwork for this politicized and politically conservative evangelicalism.

That said, it's interesting what form political conservatism took in those early days: after Henry resigned -- in 1968, remember -- Pew's further financial contributions were "contingent on the promise that Henry's successor, Harold Lindsell, would continue condemning 'the ecumenical church's political involvement.'" It's hard to imagine today's analogues to Pew having reservations with the church being politically involved. The assumption was that "political involvement" meant, at least to some degree, support for liberal causes, rather than the conservative activism that soon became common.

"These noisy internal quarrels concealed one remarkable silence: the dearth of conversation with conservatives outside the neo-evangelical bubble. In the magazine's early years, when nearly every issue featured essays lambasting communism, urging a retrenchment of conservative Christian values, and otherwise echoing many themes favored by William F Buckley and other writers in the rash of new conservative journals, the editors of Christianity Today gave little sign that they considered themselves comrades in arms with conservative Catholics, Jews, and repentant ex-socialists."

Fundamentalism and obsession with the end times had played roles in shifting evangelicalism away from social activism. "The belief that this world will fall into greater misery and chaos before Christ's Second Coming dampened evangelical enthusiasm for collaborating with secular authorities to reform society ... After all, social decay was a sign that Christ's return was drawing near. In the context of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, large-scale social activism was contaminated by association with the enemy: those heterodox liberals who did not merely live out the gospel through good deeds, but seemed to believe that good deeds might replace the gospel altogether. In a massive shift that evangelical sociologist David Moberg later called 'The Great Reversal,' many conservative Protestants began focusing more energy on evangelism, personal moral crusades (pressing for Prohibition rather than fighting poverty), and denouncing modernism, all at the expense of social reform."

Both CT and the NR were intellectual outlets. However ... "In the 1950s, many conservative intellectuals were in the business of historical rediscovery, reconstructing an intellectual genealogy to support their critique of liberal theories of human progress and individual autonomy. Against modern secular liberalism, they asserted the sacralized and sin-stained worldview of medieval Christendom, the natural law of the ancient Greeks, the civic decrees of Roman philosophers."

"The editors at CT pondered much of the same history in these years ... yet the commitment to biblical inerrancy had warped neo-evangelicals' understanding of the past. Although no godly revivalist's teachings stood on par with scripture, the basic principle of inerrancy -- that historical circumstance does not influence human authorship or interpretation, when that human writes or thinks by God's will -- seeped into the way they interpreted history outside the Bible as well. They were less interested in understanding ancient thinkers in their own historical context than in thinking themselves to a succession of proto-fundamentalist torchbearers, Christians who 'believed in the Bible' as the neo-evangelicals themselves thought scripture should be read. Their ahistorical view of scripture, their overriding desire to defend their doctrine of inerrancy as ancient, immutable, and God-given, made sensitive scholarship impossible. In the hands of CT's editors history became a legal brief for inerrancy, a purity test for the present."

The intellectual commitment of CT -- and the failings of that commitment -- would have extended to Crusade University, "the first evangelical research university, an omnibus institution with undergraduate and graduate programs, churning out original scholarship in the Lord's name," the brainchild of Graham, Henry, and other CT founders. They were unable to either secure funding, though, or -- particularly given the neo-evangelicals' opposition to the separatism of unreconstructed fundamentalists represented by Bob Jones University (founded in the 1920s) -- successfully address the balance of evangelical orthodoxy and mainstream academia.

Crusade University's failure to manifest did not keep evangelicals from going to school -- and grad school -- in large numbers, however. "Several neo-evangelical scholars earned PhDs and ThDs at Harvard in the 1940s and 1950s ... Fuller graduates were winning Fulbrights ... as Mark Noll has noted, the problem was not so much evangelicals' failure to excel at secular academic institutions, but rather their ability to compartmentalize their faith from new learning. They tended to position themselves in fields where no one would corner them too aggressively on their views about, for example, how one ought to interpret the creation narrative in Genesis."

That said, many evangelicals viewed higher education with suspicion, even as they availed themselves of it. Bob Jones and other "separatist" universities existed in part because of this superstition, and evangelical colleges dragged their heels in seeking accreditation -- and were often criticized for doing so -- usually not doing so until the late 1950s, about 3-4 decades after mainline Protestant schools and 20 years after Catholic ones. "Fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals understood the history of American higher education as a story of decline from holiness to heterodoxy. Their own institutions were oases where the Bible still reigned. Moreover, early Bible college leaders were unimpressed by a self-policing, credentialed elite. They exalted the common sense of the layman whose faith was unmuddled by the mystifications of the so-called experts."

Sound familiar?

I'm going to stop there because that's where I stopped marking pages -- I tended to mark fewer in the book's coverage of the 70s and beyond because, well, the part of history that I lived through, I'm more likely to remember.