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THE EVANGELICAL MIND IN A SECULAR AGE

Review products

MollyWorthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Randall J. Stephens and KarlGiberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)
Edward J.Blum and PaulHarvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

MATTHEW S. HEDSTROM
MATTHEW S. HEDSTROM*
Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies, Program in American Studies, University of Virginia E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

“Secular intellectuals have not been kind to the evangelical mind,” writes historian Molly Worthen in the opening sentence of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Her history of evangelical thought after World War II is an extended effort to understand why. The answers, it turns out, entail not only specific and important critiques of evangelical theology, but also much larger trajectories in the modern intellectual history of the United States. Theology, after all, was once “the queen of the sciences,” the very foundation of all other intellectual labor, and remained central to American academic and intellectual culture well into the nineteenth century. Beginning at least with Thomas Jefferson in the United States, however, main currents in Protestant theology and elite intellectual life began their slow and steady divergence, a process that reached critical mass early in the twentieth century. Nowhere has this divergence been more evident, or created more crisis and drama, than among evangelicals.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 805 - 817
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Butler, Jon, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90/4 (March 2004), 1357–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 May, Henry F., “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Historical Review 70/1 (Oct. 1964), 79–92, at 79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York, 1950), ix Google Scholar.

4 Paul Boyer's When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1992) was a notable exception, a work that took evangelical and fundamentalist ideas seriously as cultural and intellectual history.

5 Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, ix.

6 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, As I See Religion (New York, 1932), 150–51Google Scholar.