The Loss of Intellectualism

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:27 am

The following is a persuasive speech that I gave to my basic Speech 1 class at Ozark Christian College. It was asked of us to turn in a manuscript form as well, so I decided that I would just use it here as well. Enjoy.

We are having a revival of feelings but not of the knowledge of God. The church today is guided more by feelings than by convictions. We value enthusiasm more than informed commitment. This is a quote from a 1980 Gallup poll on religion. In our society, feelings have replaced logic and reasoning. If you can make someone feel like it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not it really is, people are going to do it. I guess today, in a sense, I am going to be giving a persuasive speech about persuasive speaking, and not just any persuasive speaking but particularly about evangelistic speaking. There is a problem that is running rampant today among American society, and especially among American Christians. I don’t know if it is something that we have forgotten how to do or if we just stopped doing it because it isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to do. Whatever the reason, I do know that we have stopped thinking logically and reasonably about our faith. This is a problem and it needs to change. And it isn’t just that we have stopped thinking about our faith, we have stopped thinking about things very hard at all. Because of the mindlessness of our culture, people do not persuade others of their views (religious or otherwise) on the basis of argument and reason, but rather, by expressing emotional rhetoric and politically correct buzzwords. Reason has given way to rhetoric, evidence to emotion, substance to slogan, the speech writer to the makeup man, and rational authority (the right to command compliance and to be believed) to social power (the ability to coerce compliance and outward conformance). We must retrain ourselves and teach those around us to think and know things for themselves and know why they believe what they believe. Today I want to trace how we got to this stage of mental lackadaisicalness, what it has done to the church and our culture and how we can fix it.

At the arrival of the Pilgrims, Protestant believers prized the intellectual life and its contribution to the Christian journey. The literacy rate among men in early Massachusetts and Connecticut was between 89 and 95%, this is according to Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death . These are the people who founded our first colleges, who studied art, literature, science, philosophy and other fields as a way of loving God with their minds. However, in the middle of the 1800 things began to change dramatically. Preachers like George Whitefield from the first Great Awakening began planting the seeds through popularized, rhetorically powerful and emotionally directed preaching. Please don’t misunderstand me, these Great Awakenings were a great thing and many people were saved because of them. The problem I have with them is that immediate personal conversion to Christ was overemphasized and there was no time for a period of reflection and conviction. Sermons shifted focus from intellectually careful and doctrinally precise sermons to emotional, simple ones. Personal feelings and a relationship to Christ were pushed instead of a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas. As historian George Marsden said “anti-intellectualism was a feature of American revivalism.” I don’t want to come off as that person who is completely against anything that has to do with the emotional side of our faith. I put a lot of stock in emotions but almost tend to put more stock in the logistical side of it. History has proved me right. Because of this focus on emotion and not on why what we believe there arose two “factions” of Christianity from the Burned Over District of New York City. These are, of course, Mormonism, which arose in 1830 and the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1884.

The emerging anti-intellectualism in the church created a lack of readiness for the full-scale intellectual assault on Christianity that reached its head in the late 1800s. These attacks came from the philosophical ideas of men like David Hume, from German higher criticism that brought the historical reliability of the Bible into question, and from Darwinian evolution that emerged to make the “world a safe place for atheists,” as one contemporary Darwinian atheist has put it. Instead of responding to these attack with an intense intellectual counter punch, most believers became suspicious of any kind of intellectual of issue. Obviously, Christians must rely on the Holy Spirit in our intellectual pursuits, but this does not give us a free pass. We still need to be willing to expend some of our own mental sweat as we learn to defend our faith. Because believers in the late 1800 and early 1900s were not willing to put this energy toward fighting the rise of the non-believers, we are now facing a huge number of militant atheists in our society who give Christians no credit at all. What kind of impact has this had on the church as a whole? Let’s look and see.

J.P. Moreland defines five major characteristics that capture the essence of the impact of anti-intellectualism on today’s evangelicalism. I want to spend the next couple of minutes going over these.
The first of these is a misunderstanding of faith’s relationship to reason. Faith is now defined as an act of blind will, a decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the lack of evidence for what is believed. In contrast to the secular idea of faith, the Bible defines faith as a power or skill to act in accordance with the nature of the kingdom of God, a trust in what we have reason to believe is true. When we look at it this way, we can see that faith is built on reason. If this is the case, if our faith really is built on reason, sermons should target people’s thinking as much as their wills and feelings. Apologetics should be a regular part of every discipleship group. Local church after local church should be raising up and training a group of people who serve as apologists for the entire congregation. We sing, “In my heart, Lord be glorified,” but when was the last time you heard someone sing, “In my intellectual life, Lord be glorified”? This misunderstanding of the relationship between faith and reason has led to an even more sinister trend among modern evangelicals.

A lack of intellectualism has also brought about a separation of the secular and the sacred. The withdrawal of the corporate body of Christ from the public sphere of ideas is mirrored by our understanding of what is required to produce an individual discipleship. Religion has become personal, private, and too often simply a matter of “how I feel about things.” In contrast the culture encourages me to invoke my intellect in my secular, public life. The weakening of world missions is also a major form of fallout from the lack of intellectualism in our society.

Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we primarily share the gospel as a means of addressing felt needs. We give testimonies of changed lives and say to people that if they want to become better parents or overcome depression or loneliness, then Christ is the answer for them. This is a very true statement and we are right in presenting it that way, but it is inadequate for two reasons, It does not reach people who may be out of touch with their feelings and it invites the response, “Sorry, but I don’t have a need.” If truth and reasonableness are not uppermost in the presentation of the gospel to a pagan culture already predisposed to regarding religion as a set of private feelings, then we will consistently hear this response: “Well, that’s fine for you if having those feelings helps you.” Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch precisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers.

Lastly, anti-intellectualism has led to a loss of boldness in confronting the idea structures in our culture with effective Christian witness. It has drained the church of its boldness in witnessing and speaking out about important issues in the places where ideas are generated. And for those who do have such courage, anti-intellectualism has created a context in which we Christians often come off as shallow, defensive and reactionary instead of thoughtful, confident and articulate. This is because we are unfamiliar with the things that people want to talk about. We live in our own little box and when we try to stick our heads out and get involved in our world, one of two things will happen. Either we will be completely ignorant about the topic at hand, but continue to try and debate, thus making ourselves and Christians in general look bad, or we will have no clue whats going on and will keep our mouths shut for fear of turning out like the first example. This second option is only marginally better than the first. When people learn what they believe and why, they become bold in their witness and attractive in the way that they engage other in debate or dialog.

How then can we make a change and start to once again think in deeper ways? We must train our minds to think again. The spiritually mature person is a wise person, And a wise person has the savvy and skill necessary to lead an exemplary life and to address the issues of the day in a responsible, attractive way that brings honor to God. We must familiarize ourselves, not only, with the issues that affect us and that are pertinent to our faith, we must also be familiar with the arguments and ideas of those who would come against us. This means not only reading intellectually engaging books that support and confirm what we believe, we also have to read and understand things that go in stark contradiction with what we believe. If we are to debate and defend our faith, we must understand what our adversaries believe and be familiar enough with their ideas to deconstruct them. We have to teach ourselves to read again, to listen to and critique debates, to think and know and act, but always in ways that bring honor to God.

Anti-intellectualism is a disease of complacency that has spread into the very heart of the American Church. Since the mid-1800s the mind of the American Christian has dwindled away, giving rise to Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and today’s militant atheists. Through the attacks of these militant atheists our society has become one ruled by complacency instead of compassion, who is affected more by the pursuit of a flat stomach that by the pursuit of a robust mind. We, as students here at Ozark Christian College, are in a unique position to make huge steps in changing this grisly trend. We have the chance to make huge steps to fight this continued rise of anti-intellectualism. We are the leaders of tomorrow. While we are here, we must train ourselves to think much deeper about the heavy stuff of our faith. We need to think about things like the duality of Christ’s nature, the Trinity, the Historical Jesus and His resurrection. I would ask that you invest time every week to talk with others, people older and wiser than yourself, about things that you normally would not think about. Doing so, being able to think and know and understand things about our faith will ultimately give you respect among your peers and lead to a more successful ministry. One of my personal favorite songs by the O.C. Supertones called “Grounded” puts it like this: “There are kids in universities drowning in an ocean of apostate philosophy. We need apologetic instruction, mental reconstruction to stop the mass abduction of evangelical minds. Wisdom and truth have been vandalized by the unevangelized. No truth in a world that is randomized. Expose their lies no matter how they are disguised.” We must rededicate ourselves to being deeply spiritual people of whom it can truly be said that “Christ is formed” (Galatians 4:19). And, given the times in which we live, we must also obey Jesus’ admonition to be as wise as serpents and and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16).

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