Friday Interview: Puncturing Myths About Evangelical Christians | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post was created by the staff for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

UNC-CH historian Worthen shares key ideas from book 'Apostles of Reason'

    RALEIGH     Some political pundits talk about a monolithic group called the Christian Right, social conservatives who march in lockstep behind a standard set of socially conservative political views. Dr. Molly Worthen, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, disputes that characterization in the book Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. Worthen shared key themes from the book during a conversation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: I understand that one thing that your book does is challenge this notion that the Christian Right or social conservatives are all a unified mass who all believe the same things and are a monolithic group. You really kind of take that idea and take it apart in some respects.

    Worthen: That's right. I think that's been a misconception that the nonevangelical media has had, not only in the past 20 years, but really going back to the beginning of the century. You can find the same mistake. And it's true, once you dig into the world of conservative Protestantism, you quickly find that these folks disagree about almost everything except perhaps the divinity of Christ. I mean they really - once you get into the nitty-gritty of what a born-again experience is, or what the nature of the Bible's authority truly is, how you ought to worship God, and all of these questions, they disagree. And those disagreements have implications for how they think Christians should position themselves toward culture and politics.

    Kokai: Part of the misconception I understand that the book [addresses] is that people have been focusing too much on the politics and where these folks stand on politics, and not really why these folks are evangelical in the first place, and that if they really shifted gears, they might get a better understanding.

    Worthen: I think the intellectual history and the theology really precede the politics. I mean of course you can't understand the rise of organizations like the Moral Majority without paying close attention to the political clashes in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and that whole narrative, the reaction to communism abroad - these are all very important.

    But to really understand the role of Christianity, I think you actually have to go back several centuries, frankly, and tease out the particular way in which American evangelicals have come to interpret the authority of scripture, and why a small, particular group of evangelical theologians - who really have never spoken for every single conservative Protestant - came to really represent the public political face of evangelicalism in a way that can be a bit misleading if what you want is to really get a sense of what evangelicals across the country believe.

    Kokai: You mentioned going back several centuries, and I understand that one of the purposes of Apostles of Reason is to really kind of tell this history. Is that right?

    Worthen: That's right. When I went into this, I was interested in figuring out why it is the case that a subculture within evangelicalism that I'll loosely call the reformed evangelicals, those who draw their heritage from John Calvin and their colleagues, might affiliate with churches like the Presbyterian Church or several varieties of Baptist church. But if you really count heads, we're talking about a fairly small subset of all the orthodox Protestants across the country.

    Why is it that these particular evangelicals have come to wield really outsized, disproportionate influence on how evangelicals ranging from Mennonites to Pentecostals have come to talk about the Bible, talk about culture? I was interested in the origins of ideas like biblical inerrancy, this particular way of talking about the perfection of the Bible, and the phrase "the Christian world-view," which you encounter everywhere if you read conservative Christian literature. But that phrase actually has a history, and that was a story I was interested in telling.

    Kokai: So in investigating that story, did you find some things that were quite surprising?

    Worthen: Well, I did. I found really two narratives; a long narrative and a short narrative. The long narrative is a story that, for my purposes, begins in the 17th century at a time when a fairly small number of Protestant theologians were really trying to raise up some defenses against two very different challenges.

    On the one hand, they were trying to fend off the attacks of Catholic scholastic theologians who were busy picking apart Protestant arguments with an annoyingly Jesuitical technique. On the other hand, they were concerned with Enlightenment philosophers, secular rationalists who were busy trying to debunk the miracles of Christ as recorded in the Gospels.

    So these Protestant theologians essentially tried to turn the weapons of their enemies back upon them. And they developed a very rationalistic, we almost might say scientistic, way of talking about the authority of the Bible that is really the ancestor idea of the trend among many evangelicals today to really view the Bible as the best science textbook, the best history textbook, a book that is inerrant not just in matters of faith, but in matters of science and history.

    So that was a story I was interested in teasing out because that's one tradition that is a bit at odds with how some other evangelicals have come to understand the authority of scripture, whether it's in the Anabaptist tradition or the Wesleyan tradition.

    On the other hand, I wanted to tease out the role as institution builders that I found among Billy Graham and his circle of evangelists and intellectuals in the aftermath of really World War II and the early years of the Cold War. The rise of organizations that they built like the magazine Christianity Today, the seminary Fuller Theological Seminary, and how the institutions and the sort of ideological thought world that they constructed - even though we're talking about a fairly small number of individuals - really took this long, centuries-long, stream of theology and remodeled it in a way that was particularly potent for the years of the post-war era and the early Cold War, the age of ideology.

    Kokai: In the time that we have remaining, is there one thing or one strand of thought about these evangelical groups that people ought to know that they really don't if they haven't done the type of study that you have?

    Worthen: My basic conclusion when I came to the end of this book was that this notion that many secular observers have that conservative evangelicals are slaves to authority - mindless, obedient servants to their pastor or to one simple way of reading the Bible, and they don't think for themselves - this is completely wrong. If there is anything that helps secular outsiders understand why it is that many evangelicals resist reinterpreting the Bible to make room for modern notions of sexuality or resist Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, it's because in fact they take human reason just as seriously as they take the authority of the Bible.

    They take the authority of their community just as seriously as really the respect of the public sphere. And they find themselves at really the center of what I characterize as kind of a crisis of authority in which they're seeking to obey all these different conflicting authorities at once. And that to me is the framework in which it's most helpful to understand evangelicals in the public square.