Do truth and facts matter in Christianity? In a recent article published in The New Yorker, titled The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind, Michael Luo provides a review of the history that led to the evangelical movement and how that history explains evangelical attitudes today.  Of course, Luo has in mind, like many observers today, the events of January 6 which are frankly a high point for the misuse of the Christian faith.  He points out, in particular, the anti-intellectualism that seems to characterize many evangelicals and leads to disregarding truth and facts and embracing lies and conspiracy theories.  It is interesting that in my book, Grace and Truth: How the Biblical Narrative Affirms that Christ Is Supreme and Parts of the Bible Are Obsolete, I felt compelled to include two chapters on the History of Western Christianity to help readers understand how that history, along with the way Christians read the Bible, helped mold Christian attitudes today.  However, for the purposes of this post, I am only interested in discussing some of the ideas presented in the above-mentioned article. Luo, at the beginning of it, reproduces the prayer offered to God by one of the insurrectionists:

“Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down,” he said. “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ.”

It is not surprising that true followers of Jesus have been appalled that their Savior’s name is being associated with such behavior.  Luo, like many in the media, seems to tie the insurrectionists to evangelicalism.  However, the prayer itself indicates that Christian nationalism is to blame, as I discussed in previous posts (see Understanding Christian Nationalism and its Impact on American Attitudes and Evangelical Leaders React to Christian Nationalism and the Attack on the Capitol).  But given that a majority of white evangelicals identify as Christian nationalists, Luo’s perspective remains valid in many respects.  He writes:

“The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.”

He then lists some examples that point to the observation that Christian nationalists fail to exercise their minds by embracing ideas that have no basis in reality:

• The QAnon conspiracy theory that Donald Trump has been secretly battling “a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.”
• Nearly three-quarters of white evangelical Republicans believe widespread voter fraud took place in the 2020 election, compared with fifty-four per cent of non-evangelical Republicans.
• Sixty per cent of white evangelical Republicans believe that Antifa, the antifascist group, was mostly responsible for the violence in the Capitol riot, compared with forty-two per cent of non-evangelical Republicans.
• White evangelicals are much more skeptical of the covid-19 vaccine and think, more than other Americans, they are not likely to get it, potentially jeopardizing the country’s recovery from the pandemic.

He then asks the obvious question: “How did the church in America––particularly, its white Protestant evangelical manifestation––end up here?”  Of course, many people who denounce religions tend to associate them with superstitious beliefs held by people with limited thinking ability.  But that in itself reflects ignorance of history and the contributions made by Christianity (and other religions such as Islam for that matter) to human knowledge.  What is surprising is that evangelicalism, which is a particular expression of Protestantism, is now accused of anti-intellectualism even though Protestantism was, from its beginning, linked to intense intellectual activity.

Luo reminds his readers that monasteries, in the Middle Ages, were centers of learning that produced great minds such as Thomas Aquinas, and that the Protestant Reformation was initiated by Martin Luther, an “early advocate of universal education” who believed that “educating needy youth was vital ‘in order that a city might enjoy temporal peace and prosperity.’”  He also mentions Jonathan Edwards, one of the early evangelicals, known as a thinker who “grappled with metaphysics and epistemology in his writings and sermons.”

Luo draws from a book written by historian Richard Hofstadter in the nineteen-sixties, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and one written by historian Mark Noll in 1994, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” and writes:

“The English Puritans who settled throughout New England had a deep scholarly tradition, which led to the founding of Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Puritan clergy were expected to be paragons of both learning and piety. American Christianity took a decisive shift, however, toward religious ‘enthusiasm,’ as Hofstadter puts it, during revivals that swept the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, a period that came to be known as the First Great Awakening. Believers’ direct connection to God became the primary focus. Ministers who believed in the importance of learning and rationality in religion found themselves increasingly under threat. ‘The awakeners were not the first to disparage the virtues of mind, but they quickened anti-intellectualism; and they gave to American anti-intellectualism its first brief moment of militant success,’ Hofstadter writes.”

The revivals associated with the Great Awakenings led to growth in church memberships, but also changed Protestantism in various ways. Ministers, who had been previously “intellectual and educational leaders,” became “popular crusaders and exhorters.” Immediate religious experience (often expressed in the form of trances during conversions at revivals) became more important than institutional knowledge held by recognized authorities.  Winning converts became more important than reflecting on the meaning of the faith as applied to God’s entire creation.

Fundamentalism arose in the nineteenth century as a reaction to advances in science, the theory of evolution, and literary criticism applied to the Bible.  The fundamentalists maintained that the Bible was the ultimate source of knowledge for all aspects of life, and advocated for concepts such as Biblical Inerrancy and a literal reading of the Bible.  They also put a new focus on biblical prophecy and the ability to determine the future by interpreting biblical texts.  Accordingly, they became preoccupied with the ideas of Rapture and God’s future intervention (premillennial dispensationalism) while at the same time disengaging from the present life.

Fundamentalism had an impact on evangelicalism as it is known today.  As Luo puts it,

“The modern evangelical movement emerged as a response to fundamentalism, particularly its lack of engagement with the social problems of the day. The evangelist Billy Graham and other conservative Protestant leaders aspired to a more culturally engaged brand of Christianity that disavowed fundamentalism’s separatism but maintained a commitment to historic Christian creeds. They called their effort New Evangelicalism. The movement, which began to take shape in the late nineteen-forties, came to displace mainline Protestantism as the dominant religious force in the United States. But fundamentalism’s habits of mind lingered, like an undertow.”

This brings us back to the situation prevailing today: the low priority assigned to endeavors related to the life of the mind at least partially explains the low emphasis on discerning what is factual and what is not.

In national life, it is obviously difficult to have a meaningful debate on an important matter if participants cannot agree on a set of objective facts.  Today, misinformation has become a normal operating mode not only for politicians, but for citizens debating matters that are important to them.  Persuasion is nearly impossible because some choose to reject conventional sources of factual information, and prefer to believe leaders who, they think, represent their interests, even when it is clear that these leaders have no respect for truth.  When it comes to Christian nationalists, the situation is aggravated by their belief that their causes are backed by God himself, which means they are no longer bound by the need to make a common-sense argument based on verifiable facts.

However, it turns out the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees and the teachers of the law often revolved around such matters.  Jesus condemned the hypocrisy and deceitfulness of the Pharisees, not their ignorance.  For example, it was common belief that miracles such as the ones he performed were only possible through divine power.  Therefore, the fact that the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who should have known better, witnessed such miracles and still chose to not only reject him, but accuse him of performing them by the power of the devil, and even plotted to kill him, is the reason why he had his harshest words against them.

Truth was an essential part of Jesus’ ministry.  As he told Pilate in John 18:37, “In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth.  Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”  In other words, he came to bring to mankind the truth about who God is and what God’s expectations are of his creation.  Only those who are genuine truth seekers will have the ability to see that he is who he says he is.  Within the Pharisees’ own belief system, they had all the evidence they would have needed to accept Jesus as a divine messenger.  But they chose to suppress the truth and plot to kill him.  In so doing, they showed that they, not him, were of the devil:

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.  Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!  Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me?  Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” (John 8:44-47)

As we evaluate those interactions between Jesus and the Pharisees and teachers of the law, as reported in the Bible, we frankly have no difficulty determining who is on God’s side.  Jesus never proposed to harm anybody, but was healing people.  That is godly.  Furthermore, the supernatural nature of the healing, recognized by his adversaries, showed there was a power at work.  Divine power.  The Pharisees and teachers of the law, on the other hand, did not show in any way that they were pursuing any interest other than the preservation of their own credibility, their own traditions, their own authority.  In so doing, they denied what everybody could see. Even the uneducated blind man in John 9 could see clearly that they were not on God’s side.

In Jesus’ kingdom of God, truth matters.  It is actually the foundation upon which the kingdom is built.