Peter Berger concedes that the term "evangelical intelligentsia" will sound oxymoronic to many. And since the esteemed Boston University sociologist is a self-described "theologically very liberal Lutheran," you would be within your rights to expect that he dismisses all evangelicals as yahoos.
You would also be wrong.
Spurred by scattered contacts with evangelical scholars, he has launched a two-year research project on the "Emerging Evangelical Intelligentsia," recruiting Timothy Shah, a Washington foreign policy maven and evangelical, as principal researcher. The second weekend in December, evangelicals from across the country and various academic disciplines - law, history, philosophy - flocked to BU's law school for a conference kicking off the project.
"This is an enormously significant phenomenon . . . and there's remarkably little information about it," Berger said during an interview. "You're dealing with at least 60 million [evangelical] Americans and possibly as much as 100 million Americans, and if that large a community is considered . . . not respectable in public discourse by academics, media people, and the broader educated public, that's very bad."
As an example of the influence of these thinking-person's evangelicals, Shah and Berger point to the fact that "intelligent design" has entered the vernacular. Shah is not sure he buys the concept, and Berger labels it theology, not science.
"Science depends on falsification [of inaccurate hypotheses], and you can't falsify God," Berger said.
But both call intelligent design a more sophisticated response to Darwin than evangelicals' traditional, literal belief in the Genesis account of creation.
Tossing overboard the term "creation science" demonstrates a defining trait of this faith-based intelligentsia.
While fundamentalist theology was first constructed by Princeton Theological Seminary professors - "They were not ditch-diggers," noted Berger - today, biblical literalism is disdained by evangelical intellectuals, he said, because "no person with any degree of education can believe that."
The rise of fundamentalism as a rejection of evolution and other modern ideas at the turn of the 20th century sent evangelicals careering away from intellectualism, according to Shah. The exemplar in his view was the wildly popular preacher Billy Sunday, "notorious for his hostility to learning and scholarship."
Beginning around the 1940s, there was a backlash, as evangelicals such as the Rev. Harold Ockenga, pastor of Boston's Park Street Church, grew fed up with both anti-intellectualism and fundamentalists' opposition to engaging the world, which the rebels saw as a betrayal of the gospel. The postwar boom also raised living standards, and hence access to higher education, of evangelical Christians, who historically had usually been poor, Berger said.
If fundamentalism is not part of the new intellectuals' theology, what is? The BU researchers spot several essential beliefs: the Bible as God's word and the sole authority for Christian belief; Jesus' redemptive death on the cross and the need for a personal relationship with him; public witnessing to one's faith; and a generally conservative moral code. In other areas, Shah sees a diversity in the intellectuals' thinking similar to other Americans. They differ, for example, over whether non-Christians can make it to heaven.
"What unifies the class is their intellectual seriousness, not the content of their theology," he said by phone.
Some who attended the conference say their faith maps the contours of their professional perspective.
In an e-mail, David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, cites his belief "that God is both good and just, and that there is a moral order to the universe" to counter what he calls one view in legal scholarship that truth is unknowable. Mark Noll, a widely respected historian of American politics and Christianity at Notre Dame, said in an e-mail that the pillars of his faith, such as the Apostles' Creed, buttress his belief that the history he studies "was made and sustained by God."
The reaction from nonevangelical scholars spans interest to wariness, but Skeel said that most of his colleagues at Penn have been supportive of his views.
A number of commentators have remarked that the political alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, on issues from abortion to same-sex marriage to stem cell research, relies on Catholic thinkers for its intellectual heavy lifting. That's not true outside politics, said Berger, as the numerous evangelicals at his conference demonstrated.
The beginnings of a similar intelligentsia, he said, can be glimpsed in places such as Chile and Brazil, where evangelicals are seeding the culture with a conservative morality that includes the Protestant work ethic. That ethic fuels social mobility, education, and an intellectual class.
"The big question," said Berger, "is will they will continue to [follow that ethic], or will they start drinking and fornicating like the rest of us."
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