TOKENS PODCAST: S5E3
Conservative Christians are often seen in the public eye as anti-intellectuals who have altogether discarded reason in favor of a sort of “blind faith” in religious authority. And yet, within the history of Protestantism is a thread of open-minded questioning that appears to take reason quite seriously. “You could make the argument that American Protestant Evangelicals are perhaps the most preoccupied with squaring reason with their understanding of faith,” says Molly Worthen. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Worthen’s recent work on Western Christianity’s complex relationship with intellectual norms.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Molly Worthen is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a freelance journalist. She received her PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on North American religious and intellectual history. Her most recent book, Apostles of Reason, examines American evangelical intellectual life since 1945, especially the internal conflicts among different evangelical subcultures. She created an audio and video course for The Great Courses, “History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch,” and recently released an audio course for Audible, “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America." Worthen teaches courses on North American religious and intellectual culture, global Christianity, and the history of ideas. She writes regularly for the New York Times and has covered religion and politics for the New Yorker, Slate, Foreign Policy, and other publications. She is currently writing a book about the history of political and religious charisma in America.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
My guest today is Molly Worthen. Her recent book Apostles of Reason begins with a quote from the historian Sidney Mead. It reads: "Americans since 1800 have in effect been given the hard choice between being intelligent, according to the prevailing standards in their intellectual centers, or being religious, according to the standards prevalent in the denominations. This," continues Mead, "really is no secret." Mead is saying that the choice we've been given in American culture is simple: you can be smart or you can be religious, but you cannot be both.
Ah, what a fine dichotomy to explore. Is it a false one? A true one? Or partly false, and partly true?
Molly: I went into my research for that book, trying to essentially unpack the intellectual backstory behind that, kind of faith and reason fight.
Lee: That's Dr. Worthen, author of the aforementioned book Apostles of Reason. She is Associate Professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill.
Molly: You could make the argument that American Protestant evangelicals are perhaps, the most preoccupied with, squaring reason and certain aspects of Western science with their understanding of faith.
One thing I have really come to appreciate about evangelicals and the life of the mind at especially Christian universities and liberal arts colleges is the far more explicit wrestling with, different sets of presuppositions.
That's not something that the educated, secular public, as much as, they may fancy themselves thoughtful people. That's not something that they are in the habit of doing quite as much.
Lee: A fascinating, wide-ranging conversation about American religious history and its grappling with reason, authority, and the intellect. And learning how to listen,
Molly: without letting your mind become preoccupied with what you are going to say next.
Lee: All this, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Dr. Worthen is an associate professor of history at the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a freelance journalist. Her research focuses on North American, religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity, her most recent book, Apostles of Reason examines American evangelical intellectual licensed 1945. Dr. Worthen is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and has written about a religion and politics forThe New Yorker, The American Project, Foreign Policy and other publications, and just rolled into Nashville just last night. Welcome Dr. Worthen.
Molly: Thanks for having me.
Lee: It's great to have you here.
So, you're here for the Christian Scholars Conference, our friends across the street here in Nashville. So, it's a delight to have you. What's particularly are you going to be talking about at the Christian Scholars Conference?
Molly: I suppose we will be attempting to further analyze the great morass that is the relationship between religion and politics, particularly evangelicalism and American politics.
And we've been going round and round in circles for many years on this and we'll continue going round and round later today.
Lee: You're on there with two other folks we've interviewed here recently, my friend Randall Balmer and, John also, right?
Molly: That's right.
Lee: Yeah, that'd be a great conversation.
So, welcome to town. We're glad that you're here. You, you began your book Apostles of Reason, the introduction as a couple of quotes that I thought would just be an appropriate place to begin from Sidney Mead, 1963, who was a sociologist of religion, if I remember correctly, is that correct?
Or was he more historian?
Molly: He was primarily a historian.
Lee: Okay. Yeah. He says, “Americans since 1800 have in effect, been given the hard choice between being intelligent, according to the prevailing standards in their intellectual centers or being religious, according to the standards prevalent in the denominations, this really is no secret.” Or then this one from Alan Wolf, “Of all America's religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism, at least in its 20th century, conservative forms has ranked dead last in intellectual stature.” Ow. And yet it seems to me that I might summarize your book as saying you're simultaneously pointing to the ways in which what they say is true and the way in which what they say is, false. Is that a fair enough summary, or at least pointing to some of your agenda?
Molly: That's exactly right. Yeah. So, the story is more complicated than those provocative quotations suggest.
Lee: Yeah. As you say there early on, evangelicals have cared a lot about ideas.
Molly: Absolutely. You could make the argument that American Protestant evangelicals are perhaps, at least in some of the byways and subcultures under that broad umbrella term, the most rationalistic, the most preoccupied with squaring reason and certain aspects of Western science with their understanding of faith.
It's an obsession in this community in a way that is, if not totally unique, then quite special. And so, to call American evangelicals, anti-intellectual is a very shallow characterization that misses wrestling, I think, that really characterizes centuries of history.
Lee: Yeah.
You suggest as well to characterize evangelicals as authoritarian seems somewhat problematic as well?
Molly: There is this cliche among outside observers that the big problem with American evangelicalism is that evangelicalism kowtow too easily, too readily to authority. And there are stereotypes of, you know, pastor warlords or, you know, very kind of dictatorial approaches to scripture. And that understanding, I think kind of gets it backward. In my research across a fairly wide range of primarily white conservative evangelicals, I found that it's really the wrestling with authority and, and the, problem of being pulled in different directions by different often incompatible sources of authority that explains the most about American evangelical history.
That's a human tendency. I mean, everybody, all of us in our lives are pulled in different directions by different authorities. But I, found for historical theological reasons that that human predicament is especially pronounced for white American evangelicals.
Lee: Yeah. Before I go on and ask you a follow-up question about that.
I suppose that perhaps one of the things that you set up early on and kind of as a persistent, frame perhaps is that, perhaps there's an authoritarianism in the secular approach that is a sort of unquestioning yielding to the authority of secular reason. How does that factor in your storytelling?
Molly: That's interesting. This question of how to characterize the mainstream secular attitude toward enlightenment empiricism that you might encounter in a mainstream secular university. I don't think I would use the word authoritarian, but you're certainly right that it is a framework that, most people operating in that space don't think a whole lot about.
And one thing I have really come to appreciate about evangelicals, and the life of the mind at especially Christian universities and liberal arts colleges, is the far more explicit wrestling with the friction points between different sets of presuppositions.
That's not something that secular academics or, the educated secular public, as much as they may fancy themselves thoughtful people. That's not something that they are in the habit of doing quite as much. So, we all have unquestioned presuppositions. And so, to the extent that community might, hold to those presuppositions in a kind of unthinking way you're right.
That can turn into a sort of obedience, if not authoritarian in character then, because it is somewhat unquestioning, it, can lead in that direction.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. So let me go back to the other question there. So, the subtitle of your book, crisis of authority, describe for us in what you think the crisis has been in evangelicalism with regard to authority.
Molly: I went into my research for that book, trying to essentially unpack the intellectual backstory behind the rise of the Christian, right. And seek an answer to the question. If white evangelicalism is such a diverse ecosystem of quite radically different traditions, why is it that out of this, this one particularly narrow ideology worldview has come to have this disproportionate influence to stand up as a kind of spokesman for this, diverse community? How did that happen?
And so, I took core samples, you could call them, across a range of traditions, including many that would not label themselves evangelical. I was interested in communities ranging from Pentecostals to Southern Baptist, Churches of Christ, various interdenominational ministries and, Christian schools in between.
So, in part, the crisis of authority I was writing about is the kind of Civil War within white, broadly speaking, conservative evangelicalism since World War II, but that's in a broader context. That's in the context of a tradition that really has its origins in the great Pietistic revivals that unfolded in Europe and later in North America. You know, in the wake of kind of the second and third generations after the Reformation, really in the context of the Scientific Revolution, what we think of as broadly speaking the Enlightenment. The Catholic Counter-Reformation, a context in which these new Protestant thinkers were having to shape their own tradition in conversation with resisting, pushing back against challenges from all these different quarters, these other intellectual movements with very different ideas of authority.
And so, for me, that kind of faith and reason fight is really central to that broader evangelical conversation that shapes these disparate church traditions in a way that really makes them one conversation. Related to that, too, is the birth of what we might call modern secularism in the West.
And this idea that your religion is a private affair. What then is the relationship between your private religion and this public increasingly pluralistic square? So that's the other dimension of the crisis of authority that I think has really shaped evangelical history.
Lee: Just if I can try to summarize then the crisis is this sort of the choice or this intersection between one's presumed standard of authority in the Christian faith revealed in scripture, and the norms and standards of secular reason or contemporary assumed criteria of knowledge, or making truth claims. Is that at least one element of the crisis, then?
Molly: That's right. And, also, I would add to that one's personal subjective experience. I found it useful to define evangelicalism as a set of questions rather than a list of doctrinal points. And one is how do you reconcile faith and reason? Second, how do you know Jesus? So, this question of personal experience, and what if your personal experience doesn't perfectly align with church teaching or these other outside authorities?
And then third, how do you live out this faith in the context of an increasingly secular pluralistic world?
Lee: Those three questions make sense to me as getting at a lot of what we typically call evangelicals but also it seems to me, I mean, one of my closest friends here in town is a Catholic priest. And it would seem to me that he wouldn't have a problem saying that those three questions, they might not be the three most prominent questions in his life, but they certainly would be three questions that would be significant for him and his congregation. So how do you see those as kind of distinguishing this sociological grouping from say, conservative even to liberal progressive Catholics?
Molly: That's a great question. I think these questions take on a special shape and a special sort of power and a continuing roiling sense of crisis for evangelicals in the relative absence of a strong central authority to guide them through, through the problems those questions raise. And here I am, doing a lot of lumping as opposed to splitting. I'm making broad generalizations because I think they're helpful in making some distinctions, not because they are perfect. I would say that Catholics, Mormons, mainline Christians, mainline Protestants, and their relationship to the establishment institutions of empiricist reason, they struggle less with these questions because they have a central authority that, while it doesn't of course settle every disagreement. I mean, that would be, very silly to suggest that Catholics don't disagree among themselves. It's a crucial distinction.
And I think so much of the unique characteristics of American evangelical life, culture, theology, have to do with the tremendously weak ecclesiology that characterizes most, if not all of the tradition. The centrifugal tendency to spin off when you have a disagreement and found your own church, you know, found your own podcast, your own ministry.
That, Protestant tendency that sort of grows more prominent the further West, the Protestant reformation moved, you know, kind of finds its apotheosis in American evangelicalism.
Lee: Yeah. I'm, I'm reminded, I'm reminded of an experience I had my first, semester doing grad work at Notre Dame where our professor was a well-known, liberal Catholic Christian ethicist. And so, at break, we were standing in his dining room and some of my Catholic colleagues started talking about some of the kind of right-wing Catholic newsletters running everybody else down, and the way some of the liberal Catholics were responding.
And I started laughing and I said, you don't realize how bizarre it is for me as a Protestant to hear you all talk about that because the presumption among Protestants often seems to be that the papacy means everybody does what the papacy says, but here you are talking about.
You have this immense diversity within the Catholic tradition, it seems because you have a papacy. But whereas with us, when we have the kind of disagreements you're talking about, we go start our own church. And they laughed back and said, yeah, it's this presumption that in fact, what the papacy does is it allows us to have more disagreement, but because of the authority structure, we have a unity within that sort of. And so that was a bizarre sort of unexpected, counter-intuitive reality to me.
When you look at these sorts of maybe competing consequences, you've got a sort of strain of what we typically call anti-intellectualism and yet a serious grappling with, substantive intellectual ideas. What are some of the major moves that you, see develop, with regard to taking ideas seriously?
One in particular I'm thinking of is, talk to us about the way in which the doctrine of inerrancy plays a role in your storytelling.
Molly: The doctrine of inerrancy emerged as a real cornerstone of the worldview that I found myself trying to understand. And the more I learned about it, in the context of these different theological subcultures, the more I saw that, that, simple phrase conceals all kinds of diversity and, different understandings of what it means.
But at the same time there is a unity there. There is a way we can kind of summarize the story that I found very helpful in beginning to think about long-term trajectory of American evangelicalism. If you think of American evangelical intellectual roots coming out of this really fraught European context in which Protestant theologians were sort of fighting off different kinds of enemies as they were forming the beginnings of their own interpretations of scripture. I think we can begin to, to understand where some of the basic frameworks for American evangelical ideas of inerrancy come from. This idea that we should read the Bible in the same way that we would read a science textbook or a history textbook that we can look to scripture, not only as perfect and without error in regards to matters of salvation, but in every discreet scientific or historical fact from the scope of the flood, you know, to the, the dynamics of, ancient middle Eastern politics. We need to ask, well, where does that come from? Because that's not, that’s not the way. Even within Protestantism, every tradition has understood the authority of scripture.
It's a particular understanding of scripture that in my reading comes out of a set of, roughly speaking, 18th century mostly reformed with a few Lutheran theologians thrown in. These Protestant thinkers who were trying to kind of fend off both the Enlightenment philosophers, the emissaries of the Scientific Revolution and, scholastic theologians of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, who were annoyingly good at picking apart Protestant claims to scripture's authority and that, that style that we associate with the Scholastic logicians.
And there's a reason why historians call this generation of Protestant thinkers, Protestant scholastics, because they adopted in trying to kind of turn their enemies’ weapons back upon them. They adopted this highly rationalistic approach to defending the authority of scripture that insisted on taking the terms of the enemy to defend the authority of the Bible.
So, this is quite different from reading the Bible, primarily as a guide to discipleship. One that should be discerned in the context of a community living day to day, with the challenges of how to live out the gospel in a hostile world. That's how I might characterize the traditional Anabaptist approach to scripture.
For example, what I'm describing is different too, from the classical Wesleyan vision that places more emphasis on a kind of dialogue between, you know, personal experience, scripture tradition, and the, the sort of role of the holy spirit.
Lee: Kind of a Wesleyan quadrilateral.
Molly: Exactly.
Lee: Just in case you're unfamiliar: in the British church context, that is, the Anglican tradition, scripture, tradition, and reason had all been thought to be important sources for theological reflection. Then there's John Wesley, 18th century Anglican who became the forefather of the Methodist tradition. He also emphasized scripture, tradition, and reason as sources for theological reflection. And then he added what he called "Christian experience" as a fourth source. It became popular in the twentieth century to refer to this emphasis upon these four sources for theological reflection as the "Wesleyan quadrilateral."
Molly: Not to draw incredibly from black and white distinctions here between these traditions, there's a lot of mingling, but you can find in the early generations of Protestantism, this kind of diversity, and yet this particular view of inerrancy that I would say comes to its full flower in the American context at, say Princeton Theological Seminary in the, in the 1800s.
This becomes a really powerful intellectual tool for defending the cultural authority of conservative Protestantism. Uh, an understanding of inerrancy that applies not just to salvation, but, speaks to science, speaks to history, and can easily, frankly, be simplified in a way that loses a lot of the nuance of the theologians who were thinking through these things in the ivory tower, it became very seductive to a wide range of evangelicals, even those whose roots lay in different understandings of the authority of scripture.
Lee: You mentioned the theory of evolution, the significance of that a moment ago and the unfolding of this in the American context. It's fascinating how often that rises in interviews with people talking about the history of American Christianity. Though not surprising, you know, because clearly the Scopes Trial here in Tennessee, it was a huge kind of historical significance. And we continue to see the Tennessee state legislature in my mind, stick their nose into things they ought to keep their nose out of, in doing things like the law they pass that led to the Scopes Trial in 1925. But it was amazing to me, and listeners to the podcast I might be testing their patients cause I've recounted this maybe three times now, but it was amazing to me to learn from Ed Larson years ago that here you have William Jennings Bryan, who's one of the most socially liberal candidates for president ever.
He's almost a pacifist, he's highly critical of laws, on laissez-faire capitalism. He's very caring for the poor and the working class he's associated a good social liberal, right? And yet here he is a fundamentalist arguing against the ideology and the teaching of evolution. But at least two of the reasons he was so concerned about teaching the theory of evolution was because one, the ideological teaching of a theory of evolution seemed to support predatory capitalism. It's survival of the fittest in the economic realm, as well as German militarism, which they had just come out of World War I, so German militarism seemed to be survival of the fittest writ in global political warfare. And so, he's very concerned about these things and he sees that ideology as propagating the acceptability of these grave, social ills.
And so, I keep wondering, I mean, and clearly by the time you get into 20th century, nobody knows that story practically, right? It's just the fundamentalists with all of their social conservative stuff on one side and the social liberals would their social liberal stuff on the other side and views of scripture separated out similarly.
But as you look at that sort of history, how could that have unfolded differently, you think? I mean, if you had to point to a couple of variables about why it shook out the way it shook out, any speculation or conviction for you about what happened that led us to the kind of false dichotomies that we have to choose from today?
Molly: When I teach the history of American religion, I try as often as possible to compel my students to question aspects of religious history that they might take for granted. So, in the context of North Carolina, where most students have, if not personal than some observational experience with conservative evangelicalism, this clash between evolution and Christianity is, one thing that I think they very much take for granted that well, isn't it obvious. That conservative evangelicalism has this particular shape, this affiliation with conservative political ideas that, as you say bear a little resemblance to the ideology of someone like William Jennings Bryan. All we have to do is look North of the border to the story of Canadian evangelicalism to see that it was not inevitable. That in fact there are features of American theological political demographic history that made the situation in this country quite exceptional. So, to take the intellectual piece, there is an in the United States, a sort of unique theological DNA.
It's quite diverse, but it's also, disproportionately influenced by the reformed strain of early immigration that has come to have kind of outsized influence on American theology and has a very, sort of rationalistic, get your dukes up and let's have a fight about this cast to it that is not nearly as prominent in Canada.
By the time of the early 20th century, too, a fair amount of cultural and intellectual lag time had developed between European ideas and their percolation in the centers of, cultural influence. And then the hinterlands in the United States, simply because of our, geography in this country, which was quite different from the way ideas circulated between, Europe, the United Kingdom especially, and Canada.
At that time, Canada has this story of very slow gradual, political independence from the United Kingdom and therefore Canadian theologians were much more inclined to experience theological developments in Europe as developments in their own intellectual community, not an outside invading virus. Also, there is this revivalistic culture in American evangelicalism that is far more pronounced and, the historian, George Marsten has some really good analysis of this.
I mean, he suggests that there is in this revivalistic character of American evangelicalism, a tendency to be very black and white about things, to say, either you are for Jesus or you are against him, you are for the Bible, or you are against it. That militates against nuance. So, the story you get in Canada, I mean, there is a fundamentalist movement in Canada.
But the dominant story is one of leading evangelical theologians who were much more interested in making peace with these intellectual developments. And also, and here's the political piece of it, played a tremendously important role in building the Canadian social welfare state. So, Tommy Douglas, the architect of Canadian Medicare was a Baptist minister who, you know, played a founding role in the social democratic movement in Canada.
Now that points us, I think, to the absence of the legacy of race-based chattel slavery in Canada that I think created, or at least made possible a very different attitude toward, expanding the social safety net.
It made it, easier to think of government intervention, as means to help people like us people, part of the same community, an attitude that was much harder to cultivate in the context of the racial divides in the United States. So, it gets complicated, but there isn't that marriage between evangelicalism and a kind of selective, but very powerful libertarianism that you have down here.
Lee: This raises another question that I have that I'd love to hear you reflect upon. We have, in evangelicalism, you know, this sort of, I think any of us in academics in relatively conservative Christian contexts, we well know that there's a lot of populist sorts of anti-intellectualism in the sense that academics get distrusted and they seem to be other and potentially a threat.
And you would serve the church just as well if you didn't go too far in your degrees, that sort of stuff. And we know it's there and we experience it. You know, those of us who have been in these kinds of communities, we experienced that and it's, and it's a painful thing to experience, but, so there is that form of anti-intellectualism.
And yet you're pointing to the ways in which conservative Christianity has taken ideas quite seriously. Do you think that that sort of populist anti-intellectualism, is it more due to the unfolding of the American Christian experience or are the roots of it perhaps more grounded in the American experience more broadly?
Molly: The American evangelical expression of anti-intellectualism, this distrust of elites, universities, a valorization of a certain idea of ordinary common sense. This is absolutely an extreme and particular expression of a broader American phenomenon.
Richard Hofstadter's great book from a half century ago, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, I think is still very much, you know, relevant to our context. And he, in that book focuses to a large degree on Christianity, but really, it's a broader story. It's a broader story of the ebb and flow of kind of Jacksonian, anti-elite populist sentiment then, you know, in some other periods in American history, I might cite the, rise of the, brain trust, under FDR or, you know, later under JFK, periods where you can maybe point to more prestige and broader mainstream respect for university expertise.
But the two were always intertwined. In any given era, you can find expressions of both. I think it's one of the driving tensions of American sociology and history. I think it goes back to the colonial period, and the revolution, and this distrust of power, and the seductive mythology that grows up in the late 18th century. And the early Republic of the autonomy that ought to belong to the kind of white yeoman farmer who ought to be able to create his own reality, regardless of what the elites want to tell him to do.
It's a mythology and there's so many communities to whom it never applied. But it remains very seductive.
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This is our interview with Dr. Molly Worthen. Coming up, we'll hear more from Molly about the history concerning the relationship between American Evangelicalism, reason, and politics, as well as her thoughts on particular practices that may facilitate mutual understanding between those who have fundamental disagreements.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Dr. Molly Worthen.
I know the historians don't like to make value judgements, but, but I'm wanting to ask you some value judgments. And I guess as a historian, you can say, no, I don't want to do that but, I guess I'm asking you personally, as you look at the history, who were some people that you see in the tradition that you think, oh, no, that was pretty unhelpful in what you contributed and then who are some that you look upon and you think, well, from my perspective, what you contributed was a pretty life-giving helpful thing to give to American evangelicalism.
Molly: I'm probably more comfortable with value judgments than most historians, because I, I'm a journalist too. And my editor has no patience for holding back from history. Maybe I'll answer your question by citing someone whose legacy I think gives us a little of both and about whom I personally feel a lot of ambivalence and that is Francis Schaffer.
Francis Schaffer might be someone familiar to many listeners. He was a Presbyterian missionary in the 1950s. He came out of a non-believing family, converted at a tent revival. He ends up a missionary in Switzerland in the aftermath of World War II, charged with trying to kind of resuscitate European Christianity and his daughter starts bringing home random people to chat about life's great questions. And over the years, Francis and his wife Edith's home turns into l’abri, French for shelter, this now quite famous evangelical commune in the Swiss Alps, near Geneva. He ladled out wisdom from his perch there for many years.
And then in the 1960s, he began to have this peripatetic, uh, lecturing career around the United States. His lectures were turned into books and rather splashy multi-part film spectaculars. And I think he's remembered now as one of the architects of the culture war of the 1980s and beyond, someone who played a really important role in firing up evangelicals, especially in opposition to abortion. And on the one hand, his legacy has been one of significant intellectual and political polarization and damage, I think, because he was very good in his lectures at giving a neat and tidy whizzbang account of the downfall of Western civilization. You know, starting with, Thomas Aquinas. Inadvertent liberation of human reason from the humility that ought to come with an understanding of human depravity.
And he kind of takes you on this tour de force journey, through the Renaissance and the reformation. And all of a sudden you find you're in the morass of terrible modern art and, you know, Sartre and existentialist nihilism, and lo and behold, here we are, conservative American evangelicals are the last gatekeepers, you know, prepared to keep out the barbarians.
The liberal elites have abandoned Western civilization. It is our job to fight this fight and to do it you need to vote Republican and make the fight against abortion the absolute center of your mission, separate it from a kind of broader ethic of life. And I think many progressive, more moderate evangelicals, see Schaefer as someone who really, mobilized a quite limited and, you know, politically, incomplete vision of Christianity, but that's not the whole story of Schaefer.
And I was really struck in my conversations with evangelical scholars about Schaffer, by two things, one was their understanding. Those who've kind of grown up with him and read a lot of his books and first discovered him early on in his career in the sixties and seventies of early Schaefer and his early, somewhat forgotten writings on environmentalism and creation care. His incredible patients with diverse opinions and identities.
For those who went to l’abri in the early years, I think he became kind of a little bit more intellectually authoritarian in his style later on, really not as interested in back and forth and a dialogue. But early on he was really interested in having wide ranging conversations with every kind of pot-smoking hippie who came through.
It wasn't just good, you know, suburban evangelical kids who were backpacking through and following their parents' instructions. And he modeled, even though he never abandoned his fundamentalist beliefs, early on he really modeled that open-minded dialogue, that spirit of Christian hospitality that has been lost in a lot of the kind of culture war tensions today.
And I will say too, that he inspired a whole generation of young Christian students to go on and do PhDs and history and theology and philosophy. And when I interviewed them, you know, when they were well beyond their reading of Schaefer in their own careers, they would quickly say, oh, he got so much wrong.
He missed so many nuances, but I really owe it to him that it occurred to me that someone could be a Christian and an intellectual that this was a combination that was possible, that the church that these folks grew up in did not nurture that sense of identity possibility.
And so, there are aspects of Schaefer that I think are really valuable to hold onto and recover in a kind of broader Shaffer that is lost if we focus only on the quite radicalized, final phase of his career.
Lee: Yeah.
Yeah. That reminds me of, I remember, as I was going through seminary years and beginning to question, a lot of the doctrines that I had been handed as kind of, you know, you gotta accept all these things. X, Y, and Z. And I remember having this conversation with my dad one day. And my dad was always a very good dialogue partner and would listen to me and ask me questions and his able to discuss things with me was a great help to me.
But I remember one day I said some things that I was thinking, and they kind of were concerning to him and, I replied and I said, well, you know what the preachers always told us when we were growing up was they said, don't believe me, you got to read the Bible for yourself. And I said, I'm just doing what they said. I'm just doing what y'all taught us. And he laughed. And he said, you know they didn't mean that.
And so, it's, there is this sort of irony of. And of course, there's all sorts of problems from my perspective, with the individualistic autonomy in Protestantism and all sorts of problems, but it also elicits a sort of openness to ideas and in exploration of things.
So, it's almost like, the tradition itself has within it a commitment that necessarily is going to make it uncomfortable as it unfolds. You're always going to have people that are going to keep pushing it and challenging it in various ways. But another question I wanted to ask was, when you look at the story with Schaefer, what do you think caused the move from this sort of hospitable openness to dialogue, to more authoritarian restriction upon the kinds of conversations he would have?
Molly: Schaefer's transformation took place both in a personal context and in a broader political context. I think that his son, Frank Shaffer played a huge role in radicalizing him. Frank Shaffer himself will say this, has said it many times, in fact, as maybe inclined to inflate his role, but still, I think the history bears out that, he played a huge role in persuading his father to start doing these, kind of, Ken Clark civilization style films to reach a broader audience and to really give his lectures and his films a political sharpness that they had lacked before.
But it's also true that the political context in the 1970s and the early eighties Shaffer died in 1984 was becoming much more polarized on both the left and the right. So, on the right, you have, with Nixon, the emergence of this quite explicit Southern strategy to really mobilize Southern white voters and play to this narrower understanding of evangelical political identity.
But you also have a significant polarization on the left, especially if you look at the abortion questions, there was a time when it was possible to be an influential Democrat who was pro-life in an outspoken way, if a way that accepted Roe vs. Wade. But the left radicalized on the question of choice and legal abortion and made this into a litmus test. You know, those Progressive pro-life politically inclined Americans, whether Protestant or Catholic, I think have a very hard time finding a home in the American party system because the abortion question has become such a litmus test.
Lee: Yeah. So far, our conversation has pretty much presumed the prevalence of enlightenment norms, right? So, you've got secular enlightenment norms of epistemology and knowing, and then you have evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism arguing about what implications of that are for Christian faith and them taking their different approaches to that.
But of course, by the time we get to the early 21st century with the rise of post-modernity and so forth, the landscape has changed drastically. Right? So, it doesn't seem that there really is such a thing as accepted norms. We still have good modernist and good enlightenment folks who are trying to do what they're trying to do. But then we have the obviously postmodernism is a very broad sort of category, but we have lots of people who are questioning, who are insisting always upon the subjectivity of all of our truth claims, right?
And the sociological nature of our knowing. And then this has had a broad impact upon the Christian world as well. So, you have post evangelicals. You have post liberals indebted to people at George Lindbeck at Yale who were saying very different kinds of descriptions of what Christian doctrine is and what the whole endeavor is about. So, has that move been something that has liberated evangelicalism in certain ways? Or do you think that it has further deepened the hostility of evangelicalism or both?
Molly: American conservative evangelicals were ready for post-modernity because of the development in really the decades before post-modernity had seeped into popular consciousness, the idea of truth being relative and perspectival. Because of the development before all of this, of the theology of presuppositionalism, which is a long word for a pretty simple idea. That Christians should stop bothering so much with natural theology with trying to make the case to nonbelievers using evidence out in the world that such evidence bears out the truth of the gospels, but rather Christians need to face the fact that the presupposition of the Bibles and inerrancy has to be the starting point for any understanding of reality.
And every worldview is grounded in presuppositions, likely presuppositions that are mutually incompatible and in its extreme form this worldview says that you can't even have a fruitful conversation with a non-believer or a Muslim or someone from a different worldview because of that set of incompatible presuppositions.
Furthermore, to the extent that secular people are able to move through the world in a more or less successful way and deal with reality in a way that works. It's because they are functioning on the basis of Christian presuppositions, even if they don't know it. They're not actually acting on the basis of their nihilistic, totally selfish, amoral worldview.
They're actually using Christian moral assumptions and there using a Christian idea of free will, even if they won’t admit it. And so armed with that, American evangelicals were ready for the subjective turn, were ready for talking about America in terms of a set of totally incompatible worldviews that produces its own set of facts and anything that comes from a secular humanist worldview is, fake news.
Lee: So are you suggesting then that post-modern turn was agreeable to evangelicals because it makes more ready at hand, a dismissal of having to take seriously conversations with others? Because you can just say, well, they've started from their presuppositions.
And I don't presuppose the same things they presuppose. So, there's really not much point in continuing this conversation.
Molly: That's right. The postmodern term, I think, brought to the surface dimensions of the secular liberal establishment that conservative American evangelicals were already inclined to suspect.
And I think secular liberals have not made things better, from the perspective of a mainstream university, where I teach, what I see is that for the vast majority of working scholars, certainly in my field history, most of us are functionally good modernists. We're pragmatists. And I find, pragmatism to be the most sustainable epistemology. And the basic idea of pragmatism is that you assume that you do not have possession of the whole truth, but that there is a truth out there. There is a reality that is there outside your own consciousness, and it is one you can access with evidence and you should continue developing theories about that reality and gathering evidence and revising your theory about reality and treat truth as this asymptote, which you will get closer and closer to, but you cannot reach.
So, the function of a modern university of modern intellectual culture of democracy depends on us all agreeing to operate by those norms. And I think we have in mainstream American intellectual life, a very vocal minority that has taken this subjective experiential correction to the maybe overly confident claims of the empiricist pragmatist method too far. And we're in a situation where in many intellectual circles you are really only allowed to speak to a particular political or social situation if you have firsthand experience of it. And the assumption is that, you know, certain, very narrow aspects of your identity shape in a fixed way, your presuppositions in your worldview. And I don't actually think that people who believe that are as numerous as it may seem, but they have gained a real control over public conversation over university culture.
And to have that radicalization happening at the same time as you have these currents on the right leaves us with this very polarized and paralyzed public sphere.
Lee: Yeah. I was talking to a, a well-known scholar from an Ivy League school last night and he was talking about how he feels like suddenly he's somewhat on the outside because he wants to have conversations with people not because he agrees with them. He very much disagrees with them, but he thinks that it's incumbent upon him as a Christian theologian to have conversations with people that he disagrees with. And that, that has then put him on the outs with several people on the other end of the spectrum. And so, it's remarkable to me of how we see, I think, both on the left and the right, this sort of polarization where having these sorts of substantive engagements is seen as a threat because of these narrow ways of construing possibilities.
So, do you think, let me put that just a touch, more pointedly, what do you make of the phrase that often will get thrown about, about there being a sort of secular fundamentalism? I think that's a fair sort of connotation. Is there such a phenomenon is that you think in American universities?
Molly: Yes. If we apply such an epithet carefully and narrowly, I do think there is. And the trouble we're in is that it has become easier, more convenient, much cheaper. And I mean that literally in terms of the financial costs for institutions to pay lip service to some of the vague catchphrases of that secular fundamentalism than it is to get serious about more nuanced ways of addressing socioeconomic injustice. And I understand, I understand that these problems in American society are deeply rooted. And, it is very tempting to go for bandaid solutions, especially those that allow us to signal our own moral superiority.
I worry about my students growing up in this context, complicated by the omnipresence of social media, what we find when we survey college students.
And this is true, both nationally, you can find surveys done by outfits like the Knight Foundation, as well as surveys my own campus, UNC, has done of our student population. What you find when you ask them, do you feel you can openly disagree in a classroom discussion? A huge proportion of students say no, and they are, a few of them, a significant minority of them are concerned about backlash from faculty if they perceive that their political views are different from faculty.
But by far, their biggest worry is judgment from their peers, that they will be labeled a bigot of some kind or another. And this will be plastered all over social media. This will become something that they have to live with and go on the job market with.
So, in our current environment, when everyone is carrying in their pocket a recorder and a video camera, you can't have an argument where you're willing to take risks and maybe make a mistake, play with ways of wording something, wade into difficult issues. And so, I think we have to get serious on college campuses about helping our students learn how to disagree in a serious civil way.
Lee: Yeah. That's certainly a, I was having a conversation just in the last month or two with some of my colleagues. And they were noting comparing their teaching experience of undergraduates 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago with their current situation in which that reticence seems to be very dominant in the classroom these days.
And I agree it's, quite troubling,
Moving toward our close. Why personally, have you given your vocation or a large part of your vocation to asking these sorts of questions, what's at stake for you in your inquiry?
Molly: That's a very interesting way of putting the question. What is at stake for me in this line of inquiry? I don't think I'm a very complicated person and I find other people's minds to be very interesting.
And I have had since my undergraduate days, an impulse to try as much as possible to view the world from perspectives other than my own. And recognizing that one can never execute that perfectly. I didn't grow up in a religious context at all. And so, it was a revelation to me in college to take some history classes and realize how important the religious framework has been for such a huge proportion of the human species over the millennia.
And I am as interested as any thoughtful person in the big questions, the existential questions. And so, I suppose I'm particularly driven toward trying to learn about people who can help me see other ways of answering or, perhaps at least asking those questions. And I'm interested in the broader question of intellectual authority in modern culture in which authority is, is not easy.
And we're all in a, an angsty state whenever we actually pause and ponder our situations. So, my study of evangelicals has kind of led me to a broader study of American history. And I'm currently preoccupied with writing a book about the history of the idea of charisma in American politics and culture since roughly 1600.
And I'm interested in the evolution of the idea of charisma from the New Testament sense of God's anointing and gifts of the spirit into, and alongside, the more modern connotation of that word that we get from Max Weber of, you know, this leader who has this grip on people, we can't quite understand because, the decline, the erosion of the authority of traditional religion is, is a real thing.
And yet that doesn't mean that our religious impulses and instincts as humans are eroding, but I think scholars are struggling now, now that we can no longer rely so, I don't know, naively on church attendance rates, to indicate the true spiritual state, if we ever could of American people. How do we study that impulse?
What sense do we make of these people who say they're a none, right? That's what I'm interested in broadly.
Lee: Last question then, reflecting back upon your students, out of the sort of research that you've done, give us maybe, I don't know, 2, 3, 4 virtues that you think might be particularly needful at the time in which we find ourselves.
Molly: I certainly see teaching history as a way to help form citizens. It's not just about filling your mind with obscure facts. And when I talk to my students about the virtues, we should be trying to cultivate, I talk about critical empathy.
So, putting aside your assumptions about a person with whom you might disagree or historical figure, you've learned to see as reprehensible.
And making your first task as clear as possible and elucidation of their way of seeing the world, but not totally tossing aside your responsibility to make critical moral judgments. Once you have done that, the two things can go hand in hand. And to me, that's the point of studying history is to get better at that and to learn where we come from and gain some humility.
And that is related to a very simple, practical thing that I think we all need to get better at. And that is learning how to listen without letting your mind become preoccupied with what you are going to say next.
It's a really hard thing to do. To really give yourself to a conversation and put aside your ego.
And I'm continually working on that. And, I think that one thing, it sounds very simple. If we all got better at that. We would have a lot more luck understanding one another.
Lee: Been talking to Dr. Molly Worthen, associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Thank you, Molly, for the wonderful conversation today.
Molly: Thank you for having me.
Lee: Yeah.
It's great to have you.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
If you would like to hear more about American Evangelicalism and its relationship to politics, then check out our episodes with Randall Balmer on the rise of the moral majority, Kristin Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne, or Bill Cavanaugh on the Republican Party, Roe v. Wade, and a competing pro-life Catholic perspective.
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Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
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