I have been thinking a lot about the divergence in the rhetoric and the reality around the evangelical church and had a recent breakthrough.
I became a scholar because that was one of the highest callings according to the evangelical community of my youth. Para-church evangelical organizations such as Summit Ministries, the National Christian Forensic and Communications Association, and publisher of my primary high school curriculum all encouraged cultural engagement. I repeatedly heard that my generation, those of us at these events and reading these books, were called to be leaders who would reshape our world in light of the Christian gospel. For example, during a Teen Pact weekend retreat in Alabama in 2001, I remember Tim Echols inviting those of us at the event to stand up if we felt God's calling to serve in elected office sometime in the future. I stood (along with around a dozen others), willing myself to believe that I would someday be a member of the Senate (the Presidency seemed too ostentatious and the House too insignificant, so I settled on the Senate). I was frequently in groups where evangelical leaders told us that we were a special group that was going to be used by God to make the world a better place.
As I applied to college, we were challenged to do our best in our studies while also being faithful Christians. The expectation was that we would get degrees as part of the credentialing necessary for us to speak with authority and change our culture. I remember discussing what colleges to apply to with speakers on economics and politics at such events and being steered toward some schools and away from others on the basis of their worldview.
Looking back, I have struggled to understand my subsequent sense of alienation from these groups. On the one hand, I disagree with them on a variety of points, theological and otherwise. At the same time, however, I continue to have the sense that I have done precisely what they asked me to do, and now they dislike the consequences without seeming to have an answer for what went wrong.
I have a better sense of why my experience played out the way that it did after reading Barry Hankins' biography of Francis Schaeffer: I unwittingly recreated a split among evangelicals on precisely this issue that took place before I was born.
For those from other backgrounds, Schaeffer was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century evangelical Christianity. His career was unlike any of his contemporaries in that he had strong credentials as a fundamentalist crusader against liberal theology in the 1930s-40s, then lived in Switzerland for decades. In 1955, Schaeffer and his wife, Edith, ran a youth hostel (known as L'Abri) where he presided over discussions about Christianity and the youth counter culture. He and Edith provided a model of hospitality and generosity to young adults, many university students, while arguing for the superiority of Christianity to alternative worldviews, such as French existentialism, nihilism, and marxian thought in various forms.
Drawing on his experience in these conversations, in the 1960s Schaeffer began a series of lectures on college campuses around the United States, many of which were evangelical schools including Wheaten College and Calvin College. Students at those schools were discouraged from exposing themselves to the world as a potential source of contamination, but Schaeffer modeled a form of engagement with contemporary culture that was electrifying. Rather than retreat from what was happening in the world, he took modern art, philosophy, and literature with deadly seriousness and insisted that Christians must appreciate their meaning if they were to be faithful Christians.
I came to the scene much later, of course, but had a similar experience. In high school I read several of Schaeffer's books from this period (which were lightly-edited transcriptions of these lectures). Banned from listening to secular music (which in practice was largely defined by the record label), I was excited about a model of Christian engagement with the world that appeared to be grounded in free inquiry and humane sympathy. All ideas were worth listening to, even if I suspected they were wrong, because they reflected real-world human concerns. While that might seem obvious, I had grown up in world in which music, movies, and books were often described as if they were created for the sake of anti-Christian propaganda, either intentionally by those who made them, or through some supervening demonic authority acting without human knowledge. Schaeffer's call of serious cultural engagement inspired me, as it did a previous generation of evangelical scholars (including Hankins), to participate in the life of the mind as an act of Christian service.
All of this was generally known to me before reading Hankins' book. His description of the final decade of Schaeffer's life was revelatory, however, as it helped me understand the the origins of the movement in which I was raised. Schaeffer, urged by his son Franky, spent his final years working on projects oriented toward a culture war. The issue that ultimately drove this change was abortion, which he was gradually persuaded to view a serious issue for evangelicals (and not just Catholics). Schaeffer worked on issues related to bioethics and urged the rise of the religious right as a political force with Franky, and later C. Everett Koop (who later served as Surgeon General under Ronald Reagan) and John Whitehead (who founded the Rutherford Institute and championed an idiosyncratic interpretation of the United States as a Christian Nation that he picked up from the Christian Reconstructionist Rousas Rushdoony).
I had known of these individuals and of Schaeffer's work with them, but had not read their books. More significantly, I had not known of the intense split that took place between Schaeffer and the most prominent evangelical historians, including George Marsden, Mark Noll, Ronald Wells (an alumnus of L'Abri), and Nathan Hatch in the early 1980s.
Hankins chronicles their months-long correspondence (Noll and Marsden were the primary interlocutors) as the historians pushed back against the historical interpretation of the American founding that Schaeffer and Whitehead had presented in A Christian Manifesto (1982). Noll, Marsden, and Hatch's The Search for Christian America (1983) was the published version of their response.
The debate ultimately centered on the question of the nature of evangelical scholarship. The issue for Schaeffer came down to demonstrating one's tribal identity in the contemporary culture war. He believed that the evangelical scholars who nit-picked his interpretation of the past were undermining the Christian position and thereby helping the forces of secular humanism that were threatening Christianity and western civilization. He put it this way in a letter to Whitehead:
Noll and Marsden, along with the other evangelical scholars, pushed back by insisting that historians had a duty to get the story right, even if that was inconvenient for one's preconceived notions. Christians must be willing to face the truth even if reality is more complicated than they would like. Both were openly Christian and publicly engaged scholars, but they were unwilling to defend evangelicals regardless of the facts of the matter. This was why Marsden had testified against the Arkansas law that required teaching Creation Science in 1982, accurately noting that this requirement was in practice the "establishment of the views of a rather small group of Christians." Schaeffer, on the other hand, interpreted the case in light of his inaccurate assertion the the law allowed the teaching of Creation Science and so was a matter of religious freedom. (Hankins, 209) Marsden's insistence on precision on the facts put him on the wrong side of the culture war, defeating the purpose of evangelical scholarship from Schaeffer's perspective.
The disagreement was deep and Schaeffer took action: he encouraged Marsden to have the Christian Reformed Church (with which Calvin was affiliated) silence Wells because of his interpretation of the Reformation. Although that effort failed, Franky responded with a blistering attack in 1984, arguing that many supposedly evangelical professors at institutions like Calvin College (Marsden and Wells' institution) and Wheaten College (where Noll taught) were undermining Christianity. Francis Schaeffer died that year of cancer, ending that round of the debate.
Not knowing this history, as an undergraduate and graduate student, I followed the model of serious cultural engagement that I acquired from Schaeffer's earlier works. I interpreted the calls for evangelical cultural engagement through his arguments from the 1960s. Later I found echoes of this in the work of C.S. Lewis, who described the vocation of the Christian academic in this way:
I was raised in the branch of evangelical culture that had rejected the work of evangelical scholars because they did not submit their work to the needs of the movement's culture war. Drawing on the "wrong part" of the tradition, I unknowingly aligned myself with the traitors from the 1980s. I did not understand the polemical nature of evangelical rhetoric calling for open-mindedness and a fair hearing for all perspectives from evangelicals in their defense of the teaching of Creation Science and Intelligent Design, or in the consideration of Christian influence on the founding of the United States. I was confident that Christianity was true and would not ultimately be contradicted by any serious study of reality. When I did not come to the preordained conclusions, I did not assume this was a failure of Christianity but rather a sign that some Christians had misinterpreted reality. This statement must be true as a general point because of how many divisions there have been among Christians, and so I found it nonthreatening. My approach trusted the method of free inquiry rather than insisting on a particular result because I believe that Christianity was true and so I do not need to adopt a defensive posture toward reality.
For what it is worth, I do not believe that most of the evangelical culture warriors that I met were acting in bad faith. They meant what they said and genuinely believed that they were acting in support of truth and justice. Their error, however, was that they were entirely confident that they understood matters that they had not adequately studied. Many of those who explained these issues lacked advanced training in history, political science, or the natural sciences. Believing falsehoods and convinced that Christianity's survival depended upon the defense of those falsehoods, they championed scholarship as an essential genre in their culture war. I was supposed to provide new weapons in defense of what they believed; my education and study was entirely instrumental, a way to acquire cultural authority that could be deployed to defend what they believed despite not having undertaken the work necessary to establish that it really was so.
The problem that Schaeffer and these other culture warriors missed was that they could be mistaken about some things. Accepting one's finitude requires humility and can be frightening, especially when the stakes are high. But refusing to do so is even more dangerous, because there is a reality out there and the tensions that grow from insisting on a false ideology will not go away. Some day reality will bite back and then one's ideology will collapse, revealing that it was a house of cards all along.
I became a scholar because that was one of the highest callings according to the evangelical community of my youth. Para-church evangelical organizations such as Summit Ministries, the National Christian Forensic and Communications Association, and publisher of my primary high school curriculum all encouraged cultural engagement. I repeatedly heard that my generation, those of us at these events and reading these books, were called to be leaders who would reshape our world in light of the Christian gospel. For example, during a Teen Pact weekend retreat in Alabama in 2001, I remember Tim Echols inviting those of us at the event to stand up if we felt God's calling to serve in elected office sometime in the future. I stood (along with around a dozen others), willing myself to believe that I would someday be a member of the Senate (the Presidency seemed too ostentatious and the House too insignificant, so I settled on the Senate). I was frequently in groups where evangelical leaders told us that we were a special group that was going to be used by God to make the world a better place.
As I applied to college, we were challenged to do our best in our studies while also being faithful Christians. The expectation was that we would get degrees as part of the credentialing necessary for us to speak with authority and change our culture. I remember discussing what colleges to apply to with speakers on economics and politics at such events and being steered toward some schools and away from others on the basis of their worldview.
Looking back, I have struggled to understand my subsequent sense of alienation from these groups. On the one hand, I disagree with them on a variety of points, theological and otherwise. At the same time, however, I continue to have the sense that I have done precisely what they asked me to do, and now they dislike the consequences without seeming to have an answer for what went wrong.
I have a better sense of why my experience played out the way that it did after reading Barry Hankins' biography of Francis Schaeffer: I unwittingly recreated a split among evangelicals on precisely this issue that took place before I was born.
For those from other backgrounds, Schaeffer was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century evangelical Christianity. His career was unlike any of his contemporaries in that he had strong credentials as a fundamentalist crusader against liberal theology in the 1930s-40s, then lived in Switzerland for decades. In 1955, Schaeffer and his wife, Edith, ran a youth hostel (known as L'Abri) where he presided over discussions about Christianity and the youth counter culture. He and Edith provided a model of hospitality and generosity to young adults, many university students, while arguing for the superiority of Christianity to alternative worldviews, such as French existentialism, nihilism, and marxian thought in various forms.
Drawing on his experience in these conversations, in the 1960s Schaeffer began a series of lectures on college campuses around the United States, many of which were evangelical schools including Wheaten College and Calvin College. Students at those schools were discouraged from exposing themselves to the world as a potential source of contamination, but Schaeffer modeled a form of engagement with contemporary culture that was electrifying. Rather than retreat from what was happening in the world, he took modern art, philosophy, and literature with deadly seriousness and insisted that Christians must appreciate their meaning if they were to be faithful Christians.
I came to the scene much later, of course, but had a similar experience. In high school I read several of Schaeffer's books from this period (which were lightly-edited transcriptions of these lectures). Banned from listening to secular music (which in practice was largely defined by the record label), I was excited about a model of Christian engagement with the world that appeared to be grounded in free inquiry and humane sympathy. All ideas were worth listening to, even if I suspected they were wrong, because they reflected real-world human concerns. While that might seem obvious, I had grown up in world in which music, movies, and books were often described as if they were created for the sake of anti-Christian propaganda, either intentionally by those who made them, or through some supervening demonic authority acting without human knowledge. Schaeffer's call of serious cultural engagement inspired me, as it did a previous generation of evangelical scholars (including Hankins), to participate in the life of the mind as an act of Christian service.
All of this was generally known to me before reading Hankins' book. His description of the final decade of Schaeffer's life was revelatory, however, as it helped me understand the the origins of the movement in which I was raised. Schaeffer, urged by his son Franky, spent his final years working on projects oriented toward a culture war. The issue that ultimately drove this change was abortion, which he was gradually persuaded to view a serious issue for evangelicals (and not just Catholics). Schaeffer worked on issues related to bioethics and urged the rise of the religious right as a political force with Franky, and later C. Everett Koop (who later served as Surgeon General under Ronald Reagan) and John Whitehead (who founded the Rutherford Institute and championed an idiosyncratic interpretation of the United States as a Christian Nation that he picked up from the Christian Reconstructionist Rousas Rushdoony).
I had known of these individuals and of Schaeffer's work with them, but had not read their books. More significantly, I had not known of the intense split that took place between Schaeffer and the most prominent evangelical historians, including George Marsden, Mark Noll, Ronald Wells (an alumnus of L'Abri), and Nathan Hatch in the early 1980s.
Hankins chronicles their months-long correspondence (Noll and Marsden were the primary interlocutors) as the historians pushed back against the historical interpretation of the American founding that Schaeffer and Whitehead had presented in A Christian Manifesto (1982). Noll, Marsden, and Hatch's The Search for Christian America (1983) was the published version of their response.
The debate ultimately centered on the question of the nature of evangelical scholarship. The issue for Schaeffer came down to demonstrating one's tribal identity in the contemporary culture war. He believed that the evangelical scholars who nit-picked his interpretation of the past were undermining the Christian position and thereby helping the forces of secular humanism that were threatening Christianity and western civilization. He put it this way in a letter to Whitehead:
I think with Noll and others like Ronald Wells at Calvin, however, that it is something deeper. I am convinced that they really wish to flatten out the difference between what the country was and what it is. If this is not conscious at least it seems to be an obsession. I am increasingly convinced that this stream of 'Christian historians' is one more element, along with those who devaluate[sic] the Scripture and those who confuse the socialistic program with the kingdom of God, who really must be challenged. This is not only a necessary thing if there is going to be a battle fought against the collapse of our generation, but especially if the students in these Christian schools are really going to be any help at all in trying to turn around the sad situation which we face. (Hankins, 215)For Schaeffer, the consequences were too significant to tolerate the work of scholars who were attempting to describe what happened with precision, thereby complicating the historical narrative that Schaeffer deployed in defense of his vision of the United States. The culture war was what mattered and anyone who failed to prioritize the former had betrayed evangelical Christianity.
Noll and Marsden, along with the other evangelical scholars, pushed back by insisting that historians had a duty to get the story right, even if that was inconvenient for one's preconceived notions. Christians must be willing to face the truth even if reality is more complicated than they would like. Both were openly Christian and publicly engaged scholars, but they were unwilling to defend evangelicals regardless of the facts of the matter. This was why Marsden had testified against the Arkansas law that required teaching Creation Science in 1982, accurately noting that this requirement was in practice the "establishment of the views of a rather small group of Christians." Schaeffer, on the other hand, interpreted the case in light of his inaccurate assertion the the law allowed the teaching of Creation Science and so was a matter of religious freedom. (Hankins, 209) Marsden's insistence on precision on the facts put him on the wrong side of the culture war, defeating the purpose of evangelical scholarship from Schaeffer's perspective.
The disagreement was deep and Schaeffer took action: he encouraged Marsden to have the Christian Reformed Church (with which Calvin was affiliated) silence Wells because of his interpretation of the Reformation. Although that effort failed, Franky responded with a blistering attack in 1984, arguing that many supposedly evangelical professors at institutions like Calvin College (Marsden and Wells' institution) and Wheaten College (where Noll taught) were undermining Christianity. Francis Schaeffer died that year of cancer, ending that round of the debate.
Not knowing this history, as an undergraduate and graduate student, I followed the model of serious cultural engagement that I acquired from Schaeffer's earlier works. I interpreted the calls for evangelical cultural engagement through his arguments from the 1960s. Later I found echoes of this in the work of C.S. Lewis, who described the vocation of the Christian academic in this way:
By leading [the learned] life to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be, as Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie. I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, of their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God's sake. (Lewis, "Learning in Wartime," in The Weight of Glory (1949, rev. 1980), 56.)In pursuing my studies seriously with the sincere desire to learn what was true, I changed. My understanding of Christianity, both its theological content and Christianity as a historical movement, have deepened considerably. The contrast between my understanding now and that of my teenage self is a source of humility--I recognize to a greater extent the limits of my own understanding. I have engaged at times in conversations with those who have not changed in these views and been perplexed by the sense of betrayal that is sometimes expressed. Having read Hankins' biography, however, it makes much more sense.
I was raised in the branch of evangelical culture that had rejected the work of evangelical scholars because they did not submit their work to the needs of the movement's culture war. Drawing on the "wrong part" of the tradition, I unknowingly aligned myself with the traitors from the 1980s. I did not understand the polemical nature of evangelical rhetoric calling for open-mindedness and a fair hearing for all perspectives from evangelicals in their defense of the teaching of Creation Science and Intelligent Design, or in the consideration of Christian influence on the founding of the United States. I was confident that Christianity was true and would not ultimately be contradicted by any serious study of reality. When I did not come to the preordained conclusions, I did not assume this was a failure of Christianity but rather a sign that some Christians had misinterpreted reality. This statement must be true as a general point because of how many divisions there have been among Christians, and so I found it nonthreatening. My approach trusted the method of free inquiry rather than insisting on a particular result because I believe that Christianity was true and so I do not need to adopt a defensive posture toward reality.
For what it is worth, I do not believe that most of the evangelical culture warriors that I met were acting in bad faith. They meant what they said and genuinely believed that they were acting in support of truth and justice. Their error, however, was that they were entirely confident that they understood matters that they had not adequately studied. Many of those who explained these issues lacked advanced training in history, political science, or the natural sciences. Believing falsehoods and convinced that Christianity's survival depended upon the defense of those falsehoods, they championed scholarship as an essential genre in their culture war. I was supposed to provide new weapons in defense of what they believed; my education and study was entirely instrumental, a way to acquire cultural authority that could be deployed to defend what they believed despite not having undertaken the work necessary to establish that it really was so.
The problem that Schaeffer and these other culture warriors missed was that they could be mistaken about some things. Accepting one's finitude requires humility and can be frightening, especially when the stakes are high. But refusing to do so is even more dangerous, because there is a reality out there and the tensions that grow from insisting on a false ideology will not go away. Some day reality will bite back and then one's ideology will collapse, revealing that it was a house of cards all along.
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