Are Evangelicals anti-intellectual? (Part 2 of 3)

Spinoza courtesy samefacts.com

Steven Wall with Randy Smart

    Concepts of the intellect, the intellectual and the anti-intellectual are very complicated.  Airey’s essay might not set us up to deal with these topics properly.  

    We will first champion the new regard recently opened to Evangelical intellectualism and then discuss the Evangelical intellectual process (in Part 3).

    Intellectually, Evangelicals have often been their own worst enemies.  While thinking persons of faith have tended to be highly regarded in the 20^th Century, the traditions they represent have not (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, C. S. Lewis, Corrie ten Boom).  In Anglo-American culture, uncontested faith in an unchanging, personable God arguably stalled with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which opened the way for a secular explanation of the universe sans God and thereby birthed the "godless" Enlightenment.  Faith as a living process anchored by a rational God (including the basis of the Mennonite gemeinde) began to falter in 1914 with the beginning hostilities in World War I and the horrors which followed.  Arguably, the entire spectacle over the Scopes’ Monkey Trials of the 1920s were symptomatic of these stumbles, and not their cause.  Soviet atheism did not disprove God, but sought rather to replace God and inhabit (perhaps even control) that realm of the transcendent.

Are Evangelicals Anti-intellectual? A Response to Tom Airey (Part 1 of 3)

Steven Wall and Randy Smart

    Are Evangelicals anti-intellectual?  Are we, as Tom Airey of California recently claimed, overly susceptible to cult-hero-worship?   Are we naïve thinkers content to follow the path of least resistance in a struggle to maintain backwards, redneck theologies and opinions?

    Both raised in traditional evangelical Mennonite (EMB), or Brüderthaler, communities and churches, Rev. Randy Smart, currently of Winkler, Manitoba, and I, originally of Lustre, Montana, hardly know where to begin in answer to Airey’s very simplified world of clean cut definitions and judgments.  Clearly, Airey finds little of value within the Mennonite Evangelical tradition.

    To review, Airey criticizes Evangelicals for being:  suburban, white, anti-big government, anti-crime, anti-gay, anti-abortion, etc., etc.  He quotes Cornel West that evangelical conservatism is a back-lash against Civil Rights and Dr. King.  Seemingly, Airey, a “post-evangelical church leader,” or Emergent, has it all figured out.

    Smart and I had difficulty determining whether to address the simple historical inaccuracy of Airey’s perspective or to focus on his charges of cult-hero worship, naïve thinking, and anti-intellectualism by indicating how current practice does not easily conform to Airey’s convenient definitions against Evangelicalism.