Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics by Jonathan Dudley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intentional Ignorance and Its Purpose

Where do these neo-Evangelicals come from? Seriously. Are they spawned from some isolated gene pool? Have they been secretly indoctrinated in an arcane philosophy invented by a lost order of medieval clerics? Do they not have access to modern forms of communication like radios, newspapers, and... well novels, which allow them to see just how silly they are? Didn’t they all disappear after the Scopes Monkey Trial and the demise of William Jennings Bryan?

Nothing about these people is familiar, not to say understandable. Could it be that this is their attraction to each other, their internal gravity, their centripetal force of association? They're just so incomprehensible: This being different; this defensive rejection of even the most obvious propositions about the world; this being so bloody awkward. They must cling together for warmth.

There are other people who are also mysteries to me: violent animal rights activists, fluoride opponents, con-trail conspiracy theorists, and religious terrorists. These all have stories to tell, most often ridiculous stories, but nonetheless narratives which can be understood, parsed, and refuted or accepted. But not so with the Evangelicals. The Evangelical, Mark Noll, summed up the uniqueness of evangelicalism when he said about his co-religionists: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind*.… American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.”

Other strange groups have some sort of rationale for why they act the way they do. They give arguments; they engage in public debates using facts and logic, even when these are openly tendentious. But Evangelicals have neither facts nor logic. Instead they have a sort of anti-rationale: a belief in entirely arbitrary interpretations of Scripture which arise from... well, from nowhere they can point to with any confidence. For them this constitutes what they call ‘faith,’ the groundless commitment to a precise interpretation of a somewhat limited ancient literature. That and each other is all they need.

Evangelicals constitute about one third of the American population. Their political power is therefore exceeded only by their apparent religious as well as political irrationality. Their ‘Big Four’ issues of abortion, homosexuality, anti-environmentalism, and creationism require some extreme manipulation of biblical texts to make them priorities in their lives. But their insistence that the rest of the population share these priorities is what seems to define the group more than anything else. Their refusal to compromise means that they inhibit the essential function of democracy itself. This is often their stated intent, namely political interruption. In other words, it is politics not belief which is central to evangelical existence.

Dudley, himself an evangelical, makes this priority of politics clear when he says, “The problem is not so much that evangelicals are generally Republican as that valid perspectives are squelched, while perspectives that are substantially weaker (as I will argue) are held up as defining “orthodoxy” for evangelicals.” Belief literally has to fit the party-line. The obvious tolerance of Evangelicals for Donald Trump’s mendacity, immorality, and criminality is the more public aspect of this primarily political culture. Evangelicals are not merely the Republican Party at prayer, they have become the Republican Party tout court, and consequently a visible paradox of the country that prides itself on the separation of church and state.

The centrality of politics rather than religious beliefs in evangelicalism goes some way in explaining the very odd behaviour of those involved. It conforms for example with the roots of evangelicalism in the Baptist movement and in Pentecostalism within which formal doctrine has traditionally been minimised to the point of irrelevance. The fact that the Big Four issues have nothing at all to do with theology means that they have a potential appeal across all of Christian culture from Catholicism to Mormonism, sects which otherwise have little theologically in common.

Agreement that all four issues are crucial may be necessary for ‘orthodoxy’ but adherence to any one is enough to establish political affiliation. The fact that there are only these four issues that constitute the political platform ensures the simplicity of political recruitment. Purely spiritual issues of Christian love, mercy, justice and submission to the interests of one’s neighbour may be safely neglected as private matters.

Dudley quotes the Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith who observes in his book American Evangelicalism: “American evangelicals believe not only that an unchanging and universal Truth exists, but—more audaciously, perhaps—that they are the ones who know it.” Such a stance is not justified by even a sympathetic reading of the Bible. But this attitude creates both political impasse and personal frustration among one’s political opponents. It claims the ground of discussion (what there is of it) as its own. This is a highly effective political not religious strategy. It doesn’t ‘spread the Word’ but it certainly confounds the opposition who have no effective way to counter a Know Nothing political gambit.

As a political party, Evangelicals want to achieve something. And this is not the salvation of their own souls, much less of mine. For most of them, salvation is an already determined outcome which has nothing to do with their behaviour much less their political success. Dudley’s conclusion is important:

“On the ethical front, neo-evangelicals have failed to confront social injustice in America, ignoring the civil rights movement, opposing the feminist movement, and dragging its feet for far too long in the face of environmental destruction. It has evinced prejudice and disgust toward gays and lesbians and shown no willingness to engage in dialogue with those who disagree on the matter. On the scientific front, the neo-evangelical movement has been in the forefront of crusades against evolution, supported untenable and destructive ideas about the nature of homosexuality, and demonstrated unwarranted skepticism about global warming and other environmental matters. It has exuded both ignorance and arrogance in the broader culture. In the process, it has made itself despised among the very people it seeks to convert to faith. It has also triggered a movement against itself—the new atheists—which argues, in effect, that if this is what Christianity looks like, we will all be better off when it goes extinct.”

What, therefore, is it that constitutes evangelical success? What are they really after if not the metanoia, the conversion, of the hearts of their fellows? On the face of it, it seems they want a return to the legal condition of the United States in the 1950’s, that is, before the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, legalisation of same-sex marriage and gay sex, concern about global warming, and the more or less universal teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. But such a legal reversal, quite apart from its unlikelihood, would not restore either the prevailing middle class mores of the period, or the global dominance of the United States which allowed their casual maintenance. So, while ostensibly about ‘culture,’ some other agenda, perhaps only implicit and possibly unconscious, seems to be in play.

It seems to me that the real evangelical intention is to be found on the inside pages not in the bold headlines. The evangelical rejection of exegetical scholarship, of science, and rational thought in general as reliable sources of knowledge is well known and considered mainly as a sign of ignorance by non-evangelicals. But this anti-intellectualism is logically prior to the evangelical position on the Big Four issues. These ethical conclusions depend upon this anti- rational stance in order to establish their absolute and undebatable status. Suppose, therefore, that this is the transcendent objective, the aim implied by all their actions, namely the elimination of their own educational disadvantage, including their self-acknowledged weakness in intellectual argument.

Faith for the evangelical can be then seen for what it is: the great equaliser. It becomes the practical means for achieving what John dos Passos recognised as a central tenet of much of the American middle class - that one’s neighbour has absolutely no right to know more than oneself. Evangelical political activity can then be seen to be aimed objectively at the elimination of what can be called tribal, and therefore collectively personal, differential social advantage. Both the educational and social objectives suggest a shared sentiment of inferiority among evangelicals which is their aim to cure. Jeffersonian democracy by other means in an urbanised and technological society.

In other words, what they want is a very different social contract than that of liberal capitalism which presumes and rewards achievement, particularly intellectual achievement. This new social contract is not socialist certainly; but neither is it based on competitive and comparative achievement. In short, Evangelicals want a new Constitution in which the errors made by the mis-guided Deists who wrote the original can be corrected. Enlightenment skepticism has no place in their America. America is a tribal home, the ‘house on the hill’ of Puritan lore. There is 0nly one legitimate political party - God’s. And there is only one historically approved method by which democracy can be exercised - the Congregational consensus of 17th century New England. This, not a vulgar secular free-for-all, is what the American ideal was built on. It is faith which will elect, judge and, if necessary, discipline politicians. We owe it to our country to vote through and with our churches.

Paradoxically, despite their annoying clannishness, Evangelicals appear to recognise the adverse effects of the growing mal-distribution of income and wealth. Progress for them is a group phenomenon - the (local) tribe is the unit of prosperity. We, not the state, take care of our own. For the faithful, the elite are defined by the intensity of their public proclamations of rigid belief, not by the academic degrees held or the social or business positions achieved. Evangelicalism is then not an ambition to return to the 1950’s. It is effectively a far more profound Luddite rebellion that would like to reweave most of the social fabric of America manufactured after the Second Great Awakening of the 1790’s.

I have no idea if this political theory of evangelicalism can account for a broader set of facts of which I am ignorant. But it makes more sense to me than any other theological or sociological explanation I have encountered. Of course, such a statement would undoubtedly offend many Evangelicals simply because it purports to find rationality in their otherwise odd behaviour. Perhaps they are just mad after all. It is Dudley’s evangelically-informed opinion that “Christianity has done more harm than good in the political sphere, that it has rallied behind beliefs that are untrue and supported policies that hurt others.” Who am I to argue?

*I can’t find my first edition of Noll’s book, but from uncertain memory i think it read slightly differently: “The problem with the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one.”

Postscript 19Jan19: for more on the political hypothesisnof American evangelicism see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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