The Battle for the Mind
Conservative Christians are often perceived by the world as backward, bumbling purveyors of ignorance. Some even go so far as to describe conservative Christians as willfully ignoring plain facts in order to retain outdated views. These representations are painful, sometimes infuriating, though perhaps not completely unfounded.
Even though Peter commanded us to always be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pt. 3:15), we often fail to obey. Afraid that we’ll be overwhelmed by unfamiliar arguments or encounter doubts in our own minds, many times we avoid interacting with the world around us. We skim over newspaper articles about the legal arguments for same-sex marriage, tune out the newscaster talking about stem-cell research, and tell our children to ignore whatever their teachers say about evolution. However, this is laziness and disobedience to a direct Scriptural command. By refusing to defend the faith, we feed the secular narrative that Christians are fearful anti-intellectuals holding to disproven theories.
In this post I will define intellectualism and briefly detail describe the influence of anti-intellectualism in American Christianity. Finally, I will propose a way forward regarding our attitude toward intellectualism. How should we prepare to defend the reason for the hope within us?
What Is Anti-intellectualism?
Historian Richard J. Hofstadter’s book Anti-intellectualism in American Life is perhaps one of the most important works on America’s uneasy relationship with intellectuals. Hofstadter’s scathing attack aims at what he perceives as the source of much of America’s problems—anti-intellectuals. He defines this contingent as people who regard “the life of the mind” and its representatives with great “resentment and suspicion.”[1] To determine the accuracy of this statement we must first discern what he means by “the life of the mind.”
Hofstadter’s intellectuals are reflective thinkers forming uninhibited theories and critiques of any and all subjects. “The meaning of the intellectual life,” he writes, “lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties.”[2] Under this paradigm, intellectuals must rely solely on their own reasoning capacity for their investigations, which should only produce more questions.[3] Nothing must obfuscate the pure objective enquiry of the uninhibited mind! For Hofstadter, anyone who was unwilling to ask certain questions, or more importantly was pre-determined not to reach certain conclusions, couldn’t be considered an intellectual. However, this definition is seriously flawed.
Presuppostional Intellectualism
Hofstadter limits intellectuals to those with an empiricist epistemology because he perceives them as unbiased or objective. The concept of an objective investigator is a development of the High Renaissance’s confidence in humanity’s ability to understand the world through unaided reason.[4] However, Leroy Forlines has shown that even empiricists have presuppositions.[5] Not only this, but most philosophers, Christian or not, deny that we as humans can be purely objective; we necessarily rationalize through the lens of our limited experiences.
When empiricists limit their data to observable events (experiences with our five senses), they immediately exclude the possibility of a personal God communicating with humanity. By excluding this possibility, empiricists begin with a very specific set of presuppositions about the nature of reality. Their course leads only to skepticism.[6] Therefore, we must conclude that what Hofstadter means by intellectual (and this bears out in his work) is actually just an empiricist whose skepticism regards all truth as shifting, relative, and temporal.
Following Hofstadter’s logic, Isaac Newton, Thomas Aquinas, T.S. Eliot, John Calvin, or any thinker living before the divide in knowledge, including non-Christians like Plato and Aristotle, were not intellectuals. All these men held clearly stated presuppositional convictions, and yet were deeply interested in the life of the mind embodied in robust reflection on the natural world. The entirety of church history is filled with men and women who have advanced human knowledge in every field including philosophy, politics, natural science, astronomy, chemistry, biology, history, and economics—to name only a few. Our presuppositions don’t hamper our abilities to investigate the world around us; instead, they aid our intellectual pursuits.
Anti-intellectualism in Our Churches
Though Hofstadter’s definition of intellectuals is unsatisfying, he may be right about our attitudes toward intellectuals. He describes evangelical Christians as often regarding intellectuals with suspicion and resentment. Is this a fair assessment?
The Second Great Awakening
Briefly, when anti-intellectualism presents itself in American Christianity it’s usually for two primary reasons: the success of the Second Great Awakening and the treason of liberal Protestants. The Second Great Awakening was a hyper-emotional revivalist movement that began in 1801. Soon the movement spread across the United States from its Kentucky origins. To be sure, God created us with emotions, and to be a person is to be a thinking-feeling-acting being.[7] The Second Great Awakening, however, over-emphasized the place of emotion and experience. In this setting orthodoxy was increasingly insignificant.
As the nineteenth century concluded, the afterglow of the Second Great Awakening left many Christians with a shallow faith, based on emotionalism and devoid of doctrine. Even so, with time the balance of emotion and reflection might have evened out, had it not been for liberal Protestants’ betrayal.
Empiricism and Protestant Liberalism
Early American Christians found much about empiricism with which to agree. They believed in a reasonable God Who created the universe to be ruled by discernable natural laws.[8] Empiricism offered all sorts of wonderful new discoveries and physical benefits: eyeglasses, steam engines, the Franklin Stove, lightning rods, intercontinental sailing, and any number of other luxuries. It wasn’t until Higher Criticism began to attack the Bible’s authority that people began to worry. Back in England, Protestant Liberals had chosen to follow Enlightenment empiricism in the 1700 and 1800s, even if it meant abandoning historic Christian doctrines. Much of this development had begun in Germany and spread through Europe and England.
Add to this the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which exploded like a bomb in 1859. The ever-increasing demands of empiricist skepticism finally had the “scientific proof” it needed to undo Christianity. Christians who had been enamored with empiricism’s ability to explain God’s laws in creation and reason’s success at forming systematic, theological structures found themselves in a predicament. Darwin seemed to have empirically proven that the Genesis creation account, along with myriad creation references throughout the rest of Scripture, were at best mistaken and, at worst, complete fiction. As this theory of origins combined with Protestant Liberalism, no one could have predicted the damage to be done as Christians abandoned the faith for the world’s philosophies. By the late 1800s/early 1900s, these were on full display in America.
What Now?
With the Second Great Awakening’s emphasis on emotional, experiential religion, and the betrayal of many academic church leaders, it’s hard to imagine a different response than a growing suspicion of intellectualism. Some tried to hold the line against anti-intellectualism and make a defense, but their efforts were largely ignored by the press after the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925). Most of American believed that Fundamentalist Christians had chosen to withdraw from engaging the culture that had abandoned them.
Fortunately, American Christianity was not left to wander aimlessly through the desert of withdrawal. Wonderful thinkers like G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, J. Gresham Machen, Carl F.H. Henry, and Francis Schaeffer reminded Christians that a faithful life of the mind was possible. They showed us that we could stand firm on the Bible and defend our faith as Peter commanded.
Yet many Christians are still suspicious of too much thinking. Deep thought and reflection is still seen as too dangerous for most. “Perhaps,” we say, “it would be best to leave all that thinking to others and not worry about intellectual matters.” But Peter did not leave us that option. We must be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks [us] for a reason for the hope that is in [us]” and we must do so with “gentleness and reverence” (1 Pt. 3:15). This is indeed difficult, but we must stand firm in our day. We must trust in the truth of God’s Word, diligently study the Bible, extensively read and consider all aspects of the faith, and last of all courageously stand and fight.
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[1] Richard J. Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 7.
[2] Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, 30.
[3] Ibid., 25.
[4] Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture L’Abri 50th Anniversary Ed. (1976, Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005), 60, 81.
[5] F. Leroy Forlines, “Dealing with the Influence of Epistemological Atheism” (paper presented at the National Association of Free Will Baptists Commission for Theological Integrity Theological Symposium, Nashville, TN, October 25, 1996).
[6] Forlines, “Dealing with the Influence of Epistemological Atheism,” 2.
[7] F. Leroy Forlines, Biblical Ethics: Ethics for Happier Living (Nashville: Randall House, 1973), 16.
[8] Abraham Kuyper describes this process as the “capacity bestowed upon human beings enabling them to pry loose from its shell, as it were, the thought of God that lies embedded and embodied in the creation, and to grasp it in such a way that from the creation they could reflect the thought which God had embodied in that creation when He created it” (Abraham Kuyper, Wisdom and Wonder: Common Grace in Science and Art, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman [1905; repr., Grand Rapids: Christian’s Library Press, 2011], 41).
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