didaskalos's Blog

Evangelicals are often considered to be ignorant and uneducated people who force their religious beliefs on others. The article by D. Michael Lindsay, an assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007), begs to differ.

To read the whole article in it's context, click on the following link: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i35/35b01201.htm >

Here are a few excerpts for that article.

In 1993, Michael Weiskopf wrote an article for The Washington Post in which he described evangelicals in the United States as "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." Although the comment provoked outrage from evangelicals, Weiskopf's assertion was not without merit. At the time, only 15 percent of evangelicals held college or graduate degrees. Even though religious conservatives dominated higher education at the turn of the 20th century, by 1993 they had lost their influence within the academy.

Yet on campuses across the country, evangelicalism is rebounding. Evangelical students make up larger and larger portions of the incoming classes at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. They join robust campus-ministry groups that sponsor everything from debates to spring-break "mission" trips. And while they still fall slightly below the national average, the percentage of evangelicals receiving bachelor's degrees has climbed 133 percent from 1976 to 2004, according to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Corporation, more than doubling the change within the general population.

What is driving this seismic change in American higher education, and what does it mean? To answer those questions, I spent the last five years interviewing 360 evangelicals who are members of the nation's political, business, and cultural elites — perhaps the most comprehensive examination of religion at this level of society ever conducted.

Ethnic diversity also matters. Whereas Asian-Americans account for only 4 percent of the U.S. population, they represent 15 percent of the student enrollment at Ivy League institutions. Many of these students are evangelical. In fact, I found that 90 percent of the members of the Yale chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are Asian-American. In the 1980s, the same chapter was 100 percent white. The changing demography of incoming classes at institutions such as Duke, MIT, and Yale has played a significant role in the evangelical ascendancy.

At the same time, evangelical scholarship has become part of the intellectual mainstream. ... Evangelical scholars have become particularly noticeable in disciplines that address religious questions, but respected scholars in other fields have been coming forward in recent years to talk about their evangelical faith. The most conspicuous example is Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who wrote the best-selling The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006).

The "opening of the evangelical mind," as Alan Wolfe has aptly called it, may be surprising to some, but it is not unprecedented. Indeed anti-intellectualism within Christianity is actually an anomaly of the 20th century. ... History is on the side of evangelical intellectual strivings.

Evangelicals have reinvigorated theistic approaches to philosophy and paid attention to subjects in political science and sociology that were, for too long, overlooked by others. ...  In a column for The Chronicle, Stanley Fish wrote, "When Jacques Derrida died, I was called by a reporter who wanted to know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion." In the same article, Fish contended that religion must not be simply studied at arm's length, but must be considered as a viable "candidate for the truth."

Forty years ago, conventional sociological wisdom said that society would secularize as it modernized. Such predictions were dead wrong. Levels of education and development have risen sharply around the world, while at the same time religion's influence has grown. It's time for the academy to come to grips with this dynamic.

Unlike fundamentalists who retreat from pluralistic environments, evangelicals relish the chance to engage people who hold different beliefs. This could present an opportunity for deeper understanding on our campuses, but it will happen only if we bring evangelicals into our classroom discussions. Just as the debate surrounding intelligent design has forced many biologists to engage religious topics in the classroom, so will rising religious pluralism.

Evangelicals are the most discussed but least understood group in American society. ... Other observers conclude that evangelicals principally serve their own interests, but Allen D. Hertzke's persuasive Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) shows that evangelicals work as vigorously to protect the religious freedom of Buddhists and Jews around the world as they do that of their fellow Christians. A number of journalists and pundits have written about evangelicals since 2000, but the most interesting and helpful works have been academic studies based on empirical research. (Pick up one of those instead of a best-selling polemic to learn more about the subject. Hint: Avoid any work that includes "theocracy" in the title.)

Nearly every evangelical scholar I encountered embodies a "cosmopolitan" evangelical faith. They are "worldly" believers, in the best sense of the term. They regularly rub shoulders with people of different faiths and of no faith at all. They aim not to "take back" the country for their faith, but simply want their faith to be seen as reasonable, genuine, and attractive. This cosmopolitan style of faith has helped evangelicals gain a seat at the table within the arts world. Evangelicals who have succeeded, such as the visual artist Makoto Fujimura — the youngest person ever named to the National Council on the Arts — don't desire to impose their moral vision on the rest of the artistic community, but at the same time, they don't want to exclude their faith from the work they do. The same can be said of evangelicals within the groves of academe. Their rise into the halls of power is significant, but not menacing. Cosmopolitan evangelicals will not overturn the apple cart. They want civil discourse, not a culture war.

And we can learn from them. Indeed, in our understanding of evangelicals and the evangelical movement, we could all benefit from a more cosmopolitan outlook.

What are your thoughts and comments about the article or the above selected excerpts?