Molly Worthen, _Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism_

EVERY ONCE IN a while I wander into an evangelical Christian bookstore, mainly because I have a hard time staying out of bookstores, and it is always a slightly eerie experience, like entering a parallel world. They tend to be organized like most bookstores—a biography section, current events over here, sexuality and relationships over there, self-help, classics, romances—but the shelves of those sections hold none of the titles and authors so ubiquitous elsewhere, and are instead loaded with titles and authors you will never find anywhere else. 

American Evangelical Christian culture is a world unto itself, one that borders on the USA the rest of us live in, but rarely overlaps with it. As a world unto itself, it has its own intellectual class, and Worthen’s book is a history of that class during the 20th century.

The idea of an evangelical intellectual may seem paradoxical, since intellectuals are supposed to be willing to re-examine periodically their assumptions, revise their conclusions when appropriate, and be open to new knowledge, while evangelicals famously regard certain questions as settled and eternally closed. For exactly that reason, as Worthen recounts, evangelical colleges and universities had to go a few rounds with accreditation agencies back in the day, and dialogue between secular intellectuals and evangelical intellectuals simply does not take place.

Evangelicals have their own explanations for this lack of communication, though. Worthen notes the seminal influence of Cornelius van Til and his idea of “presuppositionalism,” according to which secular intellectuals are much less objective, open-minded, and clear-headed than they think themselves, operating under assumptions they have so long ceased to examine that they are no longer cognizant of them, self-deluded in ways they can no longer see. It’s the secular intellectuals who have the blinders on, according to this view.

Worthen cleared out a good many other unexamined, cobwebbed spots in my conceptions about the evangelicals. They are not all right-wing, for one thing, although that is the preponderance lately. They have had some fruitful dialogue with Catholics, not just about abortion, but also about spiritual disciplines and practices. 

Worthen acknowledges that some extremely popular evangelical intellectuals, like Francis Schaeffer and Hal Lindsey (both of whom would have topped the NYT bestseller lists in the 1970s and 1980s had religious books been eligible), are under-informed and shallow compared to secular historians and mainstream scholars of religion. But she also wants us to know that Schaeffer and Lindsey (and LaHaye and Robertson and Falwell) are not the whole story. I don’t know whether Worthen is an evangelical herself—the final chapter has a certain exhortatory vertical lift that makes me think she may be—but she definitely left me thinking that this intellectual tradition is under-studied and probably under-valued by the rest of us.