I was hoping Darryl Hart would weigh-in on Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. My hopes were realized last night when I checked Religion in American History. I have posted a small taste of the review below. Hart’s review revolves around evangelical boundaries. Who is an evangelical and who is not? And who gets to decide?
And so the theme of who or what to include in a historical narrative returns. As mentioned above, born-again Protestants over the last seventy years have beefed up their academic credentials and done so in part by imitating the professional academic organizations of the university world. The Society of Christian Philosophers and the Conference on Faith and History were two expressions of this evangelical initiative. Both relied significantly on the leadership provided by Dutch-American Calvinists who taught at Calvin College, intellectual descendants of Abraham Kuyper, the man who popularized the concept of Christian worldview. And these organizations became platforms for some of the most significant work (at least as the mainstream academy judges it) by evangelical scholars – George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nick Wolterstorff, and Alvin Plantinga. Yet, as important as these institutions may be in answering the questions that Worthen uses to define evangelicalism, they do not appear in her narrative, while Marsden, Noll, Wolterstorff and Plantinga at best make cameo appearances. This was a missed opportunity since Worthen did so much work on the constellation of contexts that allowed made these scholars’ careers plausible. And since several of them have retired from teaching, historical assessments of their work – both in writing projects and in forming associations of like-minded scholars and students – is now possible in ways it had not been in the heyday of their work. At the same time, because these scholars used Kuyperian themes, sometimes mediated directly through Cornelius Van Til (as in the case of Marsden), to question epistemological assumptions of the mainstream academy, Worthen had a chance to test her assessment of evangelicalism’s crisis of intellectual authority not against the two-dimensional characters of Francis Schaeffer or Hal Lindsey but against academics whose scholarship is highly regarded and whose Christian commitments have not been questioned.
Yet, Worthen did not take this turn. Because she did not her history of post-World War II evangelicalism has more the feel of a study of evangelical exoticism than of evangelical normalcy. If she had followed carefully the evolution of serious evangelical academic life – from Fuller Seminary to the University of Notre Dame – rather than the popularizers who incite the evangelical mob, she might have produced a study of people who are apostles of reason in ways much more profound than talking heads at religious assemblies or marches on the National Mall.
I generally agree with Hart's critique of the fuzziness of evangelical boundaries, yet I think he goes too far in reaction in this review. While it is true that evangelicalism is a constructed and contested idea, that nature shouldn't obfuscate the very real power of the concept. After all, simply because gender and race are culturally-constructed, we don't dismiss them as meaningless artifice.
During the mid-20th century, “evangelical” became a term of self-identification for a growing number of conservative Protestant denominations. Its boundaries were always ill-defined, but evangelicalism did actually have meaning as a way of indicating who was “in” and who was “out” of a particular bundle of groups during WWII and the Cold War. For example, the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals represented a key moment of “evangelicalization” for several major Pentecostal groups like the Assemblies of God (a proposition developed by Edith Blumhofer that I hope to expand upon at the 2015 ASCH meeting). Being considered evangelical meant greater acceptance of Pentecostals by formerly leery traditional Protestant denominations. Sure, who got “in” and who was left “out” was deeply contested, but being in or out had real consequences.
Hart scored big with this one. Exc work.
The academic left [but I repeat myself] prefers its fish in a barrel, thus “evangelical” must be synonymous with Glenn Beck or David Barton or that mook who runs the “Creation Museum.”
Molly Worthen is getting beaucoup accolades for her work, but if Hart's charges are true, she's not hitting the mark. Noll, Marsden, et al., are considered the gold standard for the New Unscandalous Evangelical Mind, and no “history” is complete without them.
Have you read Worthen's book @Tom Van Dyke?
I am an evangelical, have read Worthen's book, and found it mostly spot-on.
Fred Clark nails it, that D.G. Hart seems disappointed that Molly Worthen wrote Apostles of Reason, rather than the book he wishes she had written instead.
But Hart’s review stands out for its conclusion, which offers a spectacular example of a favorite switcheroo move beloved by the tribal gatekeepers of white evangelicalism.
This switcheroo is a defensive move — a means of fending off legitimate criticism directed toward the most prominent, most popular, most vocal, most central and most influential leaders of the tribe. It’s simple enough: just pretend that these folks are not prominent, popular, vocal, central or influential. And then find somebody somewhere who seems less vulnerable to whatever the critics are saying and then pretend that this person is actually the real prominent/popular/vocal/central/influential leader of the tribe — nevermind that almost nobody in the tribe has ever heard of them or of their ideas.
And…
That’s the switcheroo. The best-selling authors who reshaped white evangelicalism in America during the 1970s and 1980s are dismissed by Hart as “exoticism.” A handful of well-regarded academics are presented, instead, as the standard-bearers of “evangelical normalcy” — even though the vast majority of white evangelicals have never heard of them, or of their ideas.