Pearcy: Roots of anti-intellectualism among Evangelicals
Nancy Pearcy argues that Evangelical Christians need to break with their tradition of anti-intellectualism in order to argue their case in today’s public square. Pearcy writes of how the suspicion of intellectualism grew, right along with the growth of our nation, in Total Truth:
“Evangelical preachers broke with the older pattern of using sermons to instruct, and began to use their sermons to press hearers to the point of crisis, in order to produce a conversion experience. Instead of talking about a gradual growth in faith through participation in a church, evangelicals began to treat a one-time conversion event as the only sufficient basis for claiming to be a Christian.”
Pearcy writes specifically about George Whitefield, a pre-revolutionary war revivalist:
“Historian Harry Stout sums up Whitefield [as] America’s “first modern celebrity”… his claim to influence did not rest on institutional validation, things like degrees and ordination, by which a church or denomination qualifies a person to represent it. Instead his claim to credibility rested on personality and popularity, the sheer ability to move a crowd. Unlike local pastors, revivalists like Whitefield did not address regular congregations who knew them personally. Instead they drew mass audiences made up of strangers who had no way of knowing them personally, and who therefore could only be attracted by publicity and advertising.
“… A distrust of passions as “forces that interfere with reason” “reflected the Enlightenment view (revived from classical Greek culture) that humans are preeminently rational creatures… The critics often charged that the revivalists were subverting the social order by rousing the passions of the ignorant rabble.
“The emphasis on emotion was perhaps inevitable, given that most people in the colonial era were at least nominally Christian, which meant that the primary goal of the awakenings was to counter spiritual coldness and indifference. With few outright atheists to address, the revivalists did not seek to convert people to chritistinity so much as to what they called “experimental religion” – the idea that religious truth should not merely believed but also experienced.
… “The emphasis on making Christianity “a felt thing” did not mean evangelicals were outright anti-intellectual, not in the early stages, at least. What they opposed was a merely intellectual knowledge of God.
… “The revivalists of the first Awakening engaged in an attack on church authority that tended to undercut, in the long run, even the natural authority of learning and scholarship.”