Mark Noll's Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Mark Noll is a chaired professor of "christian thought," at Wheaton College - one of the great Evangelical liberal arts colleges, as well as being one of the leading church historians of our time. Noll is also one of the leading public intellectuals within the Evangelical movement. (By public intellectual, I mean an academic whose is grounded in rigorous scholarship but who also writes - at a high level - for the general public. Stephen Carter of Yale is another good example of a Christian public intellectual.)

In the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll issues a wake-up call for a renewed commitment to the life of the mind on the part of Evangelicals. Noll begins by persuasively demonstrating the existence of an intellectual deficit among Evangelicals. In contrast to the Catholic-leaning journals like First Things or the New Oxford review, there is no real Evangelical journal of public thought. There are few scholarly journals focusing on Evangelical perspectives. Evangelical colleges emphasize teaching at the expense of scholarly research, despite decades of proof that the good teaching and good scholarship goes hand in hand.

Noll then traces the historical roots of this scandal, showing that there was a time when Evangelicals dominated top institutions of learning. What caused the decline? In what must surely be the most controversial portion of the book, Noll lays the blame on an anti-intellectual strain of populist fundamentalism. As someone who grew up with many working class fundamentalist relatives, I am more sympathetic towards that world view than Noll seems to be. Indeed, Noll candidly admits that his thesis rests in part on his theological disputes with fundamentalism. Yet, as an adult convert to Catholicism from Evangelicanism, I have no doubt that the life of the mind is more highly regarded in Catholicism than in fundamentalist protestantism. Unfortunately, the fundamentalists' rejection of modernity and secular humanism painted with too broad a brush.

Noll concludes with a slightly self-serving call to action. I say "slightly self-serving" because Noll's call to action includes the idea that Evangelical colleges ought to pay more attention to scholarship. As a top-notch scholar at a leading Evangelical college, Noll probably would benefit from such a shift in emphasis. Yet, as Adam Smith pointed out centuries ago, there is no more powerful engine for the public good than enlightened self-interest. Noll's call to action deserves to be heeded. All Christians, including all evangelicals, are called to serve God not only with our heats but also with our minds.