Michael Luo wrote on March 4th, 2021, in a newyorker.com article, "The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind": Some of the most jarring scenes of the U.S. Capitol invasion included religious participants. He writes, "As rioters milled about on the Senate floor, a long-haired man in a red ski cap bellowed from the dais, 'Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!' A man to his right -- the so-called QAnon Shaman, raised a megaphone and began to pray. Others in the chamber bowed their heads. 'Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants. ... that this is our nation, not theirs ...'"
It gets worse. Falsehoods about a stolen election by Donald Trump may have driven the invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read, "In God We Trust," "Jesus is my Savior," "Trump is my president," and so on. Some blew shofars, biblical ram horns. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church's role in bringing the country to a dangerous moment.
A recent survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institution found that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump has been secretly battling "a group of child sex traffickers that include Democrats and Hollywood elites (a core tenet of QAnon conspiracy theory). The same survey suggests that nearly three-fourths of white evangelical Republicans believe widespread voter fraud took place in the last election, compared with 54% of non-evangelical Republicans; sixty percent of white evangelical Republicans believe that Antifa, the anti-fascist group, was the most responsible for the violence at the Capitol. Other surveys have found that white evangelicals are much more skeptical of the covid-19 vaccine and are less likely than others to obtain it.
So, what's going on here? How did we end up here? It appears that faith and reason are antipodes -- the former necessarily cancels out the latter, and vice versa. Cultivating the mind has always been important during the history of Christianity, but not any longer. Consider the famous writings of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, C.S. Lewis, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and you will find a strong emphasis upon using one's mind and intellect in understanding Christianity. What happened?
Gradually, evangelicalism in America has come to be defined by its anti-intellectualism. It probably began during the First Great Awakening when famous evangelical preachers began to focus almost entirely upon saving people's souls and neglected a weightier study of the Scriptures. Today, American evangelicals have become vulnerable to demagoguery and misinformation.
This was not so in America's beginning. When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, they brought with them a scholarly tradition that eventually founded Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth. In his book, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," Mark Noll points out that revivalism and church fundamentalists cleverly extracted from the Bible those passages that stressed premillennial dispensationalism, end time, and the quick return of Jesus, while ignoring church history and scholars drawing from history, philosophy and literary criticism to better understand biblical passages and the intentions and assumptions of the authors.
Noll says, "Much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity. Instead of obsessing over biblical inerrancy, evangelicals should understand the Bible as 'pointing us to the Savior,' and orienting our entire existence to the service of God." He concludes by stating that, in order for evangelicals to rescue the life of the mind in their midst, they need to acknowledge that the church is missing a vital aspect of worshipping God: understanding the world He made.
While I personally do not adhere to everything in this article, Michael Luo has certainly given all of us something to think about. It is difficult to understand why so many Christians continue to believe falsehoods and espouse poor theology. Surely, most Christians should be glad to study the Bible more deeply in order to better understand God, so why be afraid of any help that might be available to assist them in this task?
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Robert Box is the former chaplain for the Bella Vista Police Department and is currently the Fire Department chaplain. Opinions expressed are those of the author.