Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: A Book Reflection

One book I have read several times is historian Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It’s a justly provocative title for the American evangelical and non. Coming from a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (“non”) and now Anglican, I have been intrigued to see how much American evangelicalism is woven into other Christian traditions. Let’s walk through this valuable book together. As a reminder, here's the general outline of this post: I will . . .

1. Contextualize the author's writings as a whole (bibliography)
2. Bring the author's major ideas to the present day
3. Comment on major sections of the book, or important chapters, depending on organization

Noll's Other Writings

As an academic historian serving at various times at Regent University, University of Notre Dame, and Wheaton College, Noll has authored, coauthored, and edited a large number of books and articles. Here is the Goodreads list of his solo-authored. Oils. Edited and co-authored books have been omitted for brevity. Common coauthors include George Marsden and Nathan Hatch.

• The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (2 editions)
• Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity
• The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
• The History of Christianity in the United States and Canada
• America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln
• The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity
• Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind
• The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the Wesleys
• The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith
• God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
• Is the Reformation Over?: An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism
• Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction
• From Every Tribe and Nation: A Historian's Discovery of the Global Christian Story
• The Work We Have to Do: A History of Protestants in America
• In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783
• Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America
• America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911
• What Happened to Christian Canada?
• Christians in the American Revolution
• Eerdmans' Handbook to Christianity in America
• American Evangelical Christianity
• One Nation Under God: Christian Faith and Political Action in America
• Princeton and the Republic, 1768-1822: The Search for A Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith
• Seasons of Grace
• Protestants in America
• The Life of David
• World History of Christianity 1900-2005
• The Princeton Theology: An Anthology

As you can see, his area of historical interest is evangelical Protestantism in the United States. 

Noll's Major Ideas in Scandal

The central idea in this book is that the Christian mind (borrowed from a book with that title by Harry Blamires) does not exist among the corpus of American evangelical Christians, and there are choices within history that have made that the case. Lack of a way of systematically thinking with a deeply Christian lens about non-faith areas is a bad thing. 

What does it mean to have a Christian mind? The mind is operationally defined as more than the brain and that which governs the body and lips of a person. To have a Christian mind is to think all of one's thoughts through a Christian lens--well beyond sequestering one's Christianity (faith and practice) to an hour or so of Sunday and some daily quiet time. Blamires and Noll have pretty much the same concept of who should have a Christian mind (any Christian) and what subjects should be governed by said mind (everything, particularly academic disciplines).

Lastly, I want to provide context on why I and Mark use the term “American evangelical” rather than just “evangelical.” Here's a source on British evangelicalism, and one comparing British and American evangelicals. Per the sources, the religious aspects of both continental types of evangelicalism are similar, but politically they differ (resulting, in Husband's experience, in differences in music). AEs tend to lean right of center as a rule; BEs don't lean in any particular direction. Both "flavors" originated in the Protestant Reformation but are also heavily influenced by the Enlightenment and potentially Romanticism.

Scandal Walk-Through

Noll divides the book into four parts, each with several chapters. In the foreword to the 2022 second edition, he reiterates that most American evangelicals reject the intellectuals in their own midst to their detriment. 

Part 1: The Scandal (1-2)

Noll defines having a Christian "mind" as thinking like a Christian in all academic subjects, thinking through logically and carefully. After an operating definition of American evangelicalism, he notes that evangelicals are characterized by an individualistic rather than corporate mentality towards church and theology. Along with this, ignorance is preferred as superior in virtue to intellect. 

Why is this the case in this group? Page 12: “As I will try to show in the chapters that follow, the scandal of evangelical thinking is America has just as often resulted from a way of pursuing knowledge that does not accord with Christianity as it has been an ‘anti-intellectual’ desire to play the fool for Christ.”

What are the dimensions of the scandal?

• Cultural: "To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment" (p. 12). Seen as recently as Gulf War (1991) - books were published in the following weeks about fulfilling end-times prophecy.
• Institutional: use of the press for networking/debate but not really intellectual contribution (where are the big-name evangelical scholarly journals?); tendency to found Christian colleges/Bible schools while trying to reinvent the wheel (vs using tried-and-true educational models and credentialing) with some exceptions (e.g., Wheaton). Evangelical colleges are generally not producing scholars or top-quality graduate work.
• Theological: best represented by a quote from Os Guinness on p. 23: "Evangelicals have been deeply sinful in being anti-intellectual ever since the 1820s and 1830s. . . . It has always beena sin not to love the Lord our God with our minds as well as our hearts and souls. . . . We have excused this with a degree of pietism and pretend[ing] that this is something other than what it is--that is, sin. . . . Evangelicals need to repent of their refusal to think Christianly and to develop the mind of Christ."

In chapter 2, Noll addresses some objections people might have to his thesis. Aren't sheer numbers of evangelicals a mark that their anti-intellectualism is the better way? Isn't Christianity more for the common person than for the intellectual scholar anyway? Doesn't higher learning make one lose saving faith and become prideful? His answers:

• The intellectual life (that of the mind) deserves equal attention/respect compared to other aspects of life, especially for the Christian.
• A Christian mentality helps to reunite things that culture has separated--e.g., body, relationships, mind, and spirit.
• If we do not cultivate Christian-minded intellectuals within the church, whom will we trust to teach our children and theirs? How will we avoid the herd mentality of culture around us?
• Historically speaking (focusing on Protestantism in this book), magisterial Protestants kept the tradition (from generation 1 of the Church) of attending to the mind (e.g., philosophy). A quote from John Calvin exemplifies this (p. 37): "The profession of Christianity requires us to be immature, not in our thinking, but in malice (1 Cor. 14:20)." Puritanism, despite its flaws, did try to integrate Christianity into a coherent worldview.
• Further historically speaking, several Christian movements sabotaged the intellectual dimension of the Christian life by going to extremes (e.g., Pietism).
• A particularly pointed quote on p. 50: "Evangelicals who think that the basic intellectual operations performed by the modern research universities can be conceded to 'the world' without doing fundamental damage to the cause of Christ may think of themselves as orthodox Christians. In reality, however, they are modern-day Manichaeans, gnostics, or docetists."

Part 2: How the Scandal has Come to Pass (3-5)

In chapter 3, Noll surveys important movements in the development of the American evangelical mindset. These include revivalism (characterized by popular speakers, simple message, broad audience, antitraditional including learning), separation of church and state (formalizing religious freedom), Christian-cultural synthesis (making their American culture equate with Christianity), republican government ("a commonwealth emphasizing the well-being of its people" p. 69), democratic society (emphasizing individual autonomy and liberty), and liberal economy (classically free market). Jonathan Edwards is one example of an exception in terms of having a comprehensive Christian worldview rather than piecemeal.

In chapter 4, we see how the Enlightenment shaped American evangelicalism. Why? "For evangelicals who wanted to preserve traditional forms of Christianity without having to appeal to traditional religious authorities, the commonsense reaoning of the Scottish Enlightenment (at least as that philosophy took on a life of its own in North America) was the answer" (p. 86). What are some marks?

• Trust in objectivity...to an extreme. "How the biblical text appears to me."
• Empiricist apologetics--everything must be proved from evidence/observation.
• Public morality matters for everyone.
• Revivalism--specifically, books on revivalist method that was rather Baconian.
• Nationalism--culminating in "white Christian nationalism" today, I might add. Fusion of Christianity and culture was ok only if culture matched Christianity, but evangelicals didn’t do the thinking through philosophical implications of assumptions the way their non-Christian colleagues did. After the Civil War this schism became apparent. 
• Textual and higher criticism calling everything into question. Evidentialism in examining and teaching Bible. 

In chapter 5, Noll zeroes in on fundamentalism. Fundamentalism was thoroughly anti-intellectual from the start (1865-1900). Social Darwinism became more dominant in universities in general. Fundamentalists, in response, held on to wrong things as well as right things. Theological innovations included Holiness, Pentecostalism, and premillennial dispensationalism—which emphasized what new cultural elites were against. Falsely simple slogans undercut biblical theology. Fundamentalist defense of the Bible bloated the importance of inerrant autographs while ignoring the humanity of the authors. Evangelical intellectuals have drawn meat from every Christian tradition except for fundamentalism. Downstream influences include young-earth creationism (YEC), the Christian Right, and silence on current complexities. 

Part 3: What the Scandal has Meant (6-7)

The scandal has created political and scientific effects in particular. Chapter 6 speaks about the former. Evangelicals tend to embrace revivalist ways of political influence—these are decidedly not analytical. Additionally, they gravitate toward simplistic justifications for involvement in a particular cause, ignoring the natural world and how it works. “Those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to write end-times books. Corollary: God doesn’t read prophecy books” (175). 

Scientific effects are seen mainly due to compartmentalization of one’s scientific work and theological beliefs. There is a relatively recent split between those who didn’t see evolution as a threat (e.g., B. B. Warfield) and those who did. Evangelicals generally operate under the (false) assumption that YEC was the consensus interpretation of Genesis 1-2 from the beginning of Christianity. They combine this with a simplistic, untenable idea of what “facts” are. 

As a result, creationist arguments tend to drown out careful/reasoned voices from sides and middle. 196 “Fundamentalist habits of mind have been more destructive than individual creationist conclusions. But…” Noll ends with an exploration of what I rephrase as "how the biblical text it appears to me" on page 198: “The tragedy is that creationists preserve a misguided Baconianism for the Bible and abandon a healthy Baconianism for science.” 

Part 4: Hope? (8-9)

This section is a bit briefer, and I didn't take as many notes on it. Noll notes that there is a potential renaissance of the Christian mind within American evangelicalism, but that this may take generations, with help from those outside of and reacting to their own evangelical fundamentalism. Page 243: “Can a Christian mind develop out of American evangelicalism? Based solely on twentieth-century historical precedent, it does not seem likely.” Many distinctives of evangelicalism aren’t Christian essentials, and more need to realize that.

If you've read this book, what do you think of it? If you haven't read it in its entirety, are you curious to find out more? Feel free to share in the comments!