Apostles of Reason

Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen, 265 pages

American Evangelicalism, an amorphous movement that is notoriously difficult to define, has long struggled with many tensions, few as deep-seated as that between the high value evangelicals place on education and their distrust of secular learning.  Apostles of Reason is an attempt to follow the intellectual and anti-intellectual currents in evangelicalism from its emergence out of the fundamentalist movement of the early 20th century.  Indeed, according to Worthen's account, the struggles over intellectualism are the direct product of the fundamentalist-modernist battles, which left evangelicalism with a lack of strong authority and a tradition of fragmentation over doctrinal issues, and as a result committed to an interpretation of sola scriptura which necessitated a strong defense of biblical inerrancy.

Unfortunately, Apostles of Reason is hopelessly muddled.  While there can be no doubt as to the breadth or depth of Worthen's knowledge on the subject, she is unable to bring the pieces together to form a coherent picture.  She jumps back and forth between decades in a manner which makes it very difficult to discern developments or patterns.  Long digressions into evangelical political activism on both the left and right, while serving the laudable purpose of demonstrating the diversity of evangelicalism, do not seem to contribute much to the primary theme of the book.  Although Worthen clearly makes an effort to be fair to all parties, problems repeatedly arise as she habitually slips into the cliches of elite journalism.  The opponents of conservatives are generally described as moderates rather than liberals or progressives, while conservative groups are tagged as "shadowy" and conservative activists as "infiltrators".  In the same vein, Worthen generally tends to conflate intellectualism and progressivism, a quirk that occasionally crosses over into silliness - at one point she seems to imply that intellectual seriousness is served by employing an art teacher whose work involves plaster casts of his wife's genitalia.

Therein lies the central paradox, which Worthen seems to at least suspect.  Evangelicals are upbraided for their rejection of reason due to their rejection of the elite intellectual consensus, a consensus which itself rejects reason.  They are faulted for their resistance to dialogue with opposing viewpoints by a modern mindset utterly uninterested in meaningful engagement with opposing viewpoints.  For evangelicalism, far from being a reactionary throwback to a premodern era, is itself a thoroughly modern phenomenon.