The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism As a Local Strategy
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Volume 4 Number 1 Article 1 2020 “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy Mark Ward Sr. University of Houston-Victoria, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Organizational Communication Commons Recommended Citation Ward, Mark Sr.. "“Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy." Sermon Studies 4.1 (2020) : 1-21. https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol4/iss1/1 Copyright 2020 by Mark Ward Sr. This Original Article is brought to you by Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact the editor at [email protected] “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy Cover Page Footnote Mark Ward Sr. is an associate professor of communication at the University of Houston-Victoria This article is available in Sermon Studies: https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol4/iss1/1 Ward Sr.: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism as a Local Strategy1 Mark Ward Sr. “Knowledge [does] what?” asked Pastor Lonnie,2 stepping to the side of his pulpit and cupping his hand to his ear to elicit a response from the audience. “Puffs up!” answered the 140 souls gathered for the Sunday morning service at Riverside Bible Church, a nondenominational and evangelical congregation located in a midsized city of the southwestern United States. Seated in my usual pew that morning, I was not surprised that Lonnie’s flock could so easily fill in the phrase taken from 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that ‘We all possess knowledge.’ But knowledge puffs up while love builds up” (NIV). Though taken out of its context, the simple catchphrase “Knowledge puffs up” served Lonnie’s purpose, as will be seen, of devaluing the head to privilege the heart. As an ethnographer of religious communication, I observed weekly worship services at Riverside Bible Church for thirty-nine months, starting in September 2013 when Lonnie was installed as pastor. In July 2016, shortly before his third anniversary, I interviewed him about the overall approach to his sermons: Under [the previous pastor] Riverside was “heady.” He was propositional and logic-driven, while I like to anchor propositions in images. You can’t overlook the emotional for the cerebral. So, there’s been a change in communication. The church had a stable “black- and-white” situation, which gave people clarity. But we didn’t have much “color,” which brings life. So, I had to go slow and first set up changes through my preaching . to bridge the gap between “up here” and the people. When my fieldwork concluded, I had taken fieldnotes on 213 sermons from Pastor Lonnie. In reviewing those notes, I was struck by how frequently he had, in fact, referenced the presumed dangers of intellectualizing biblical instructions and admonitions. Just as he related in our 2016 interview, Lonnie in his preaching had normalized a privileging of the emotional over the cerebral. In the parlance of American evangelicalism, he had raised heart knowledge3 over head knowledge.4 The anti-intellectual strain of American evangelicalism has drawn journalistic and scholarly attention at least since the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, the nation’s first nationally broadcast news event.5 In the aftermath of the trial—in which the American Civil Liberties Union defended a public schoolteacher prosecuted for teaching evolution—journalist H. L. Mencken 1 The study described in this article was approved by the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects, University of Houston-Victoria. 2 All names have been changed. 3 Words and phrases used in the argot of the evangelical subculture are italicized throughout this study. 4 Mark Ward Sr., “‘Head Knowledge Isn’t Enough’: Bible Visualization and Congregational Culture in an Evangelical Church,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 14, no. 11 (2018): 1-33. 5 Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Published by the Center for Sermon Studies, 2020 1 Sermon Studies, Vol. 4 [2020], No. 1, Art. 1 excoriated religious fundamentalists as homo neanderthalensis.6 At midcentury, Richard Hofstad- ter won a Pulitzer Prize for Anti-intellectualism in American Life, in which he described the “evangelical spirit” as a “religion of the heart.”7 In the current century, numerous studies ponder why evangelicals spurn conventionally credentialed experts to embrace young-earth creationism over evolution,8 reject manmade climate change as a hoax,9 claim America is a Christian nation,10 portray Islam as a violent religion11 and practice a rhetoric that privileges values over facts.12 These studies touch on vital public issues, ranging from science education and environ- mental policy to interfaith dialogue. The implications for civic discourse are great, as evangelical Protestantism is the nation’s single largest religious tradition13 and can claim the allegiance of one in four Americans.14 Yet these studies, though valuable, focus on the preachments of national evangelical leaders and media celebrities—from those well known to the American public, such as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Jerry Falwell Jr., to those with high profiles only within the evangelical subculture, such as Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, David Barton of Wallbuilders, and an army of religious radio talk show hosts heard nationally over vast “electronic church” conglomerates created since 2000 by media deregulation.15 By contrast, what I heard at Riverside Bible Church over thirty-nine months was unique in the literature. This was not the anti-intellectual discourse of the evangelical movement at the national level with its tropes about “liberal professors” and “so-called experts” that express the movement’s general cultural resentments.16 Rather, I observed an animus against intellectual elites that functioned as a local strategy for constructing evangelical identity. 6 H. L. Mencken, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House, 2006). 7 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), 53, 55. 8 Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 9 Wylie Carr, Michael Patterson, Laurie Yung, and Daniel Spencer, “The Faithful Skeptics: Evangelical Religious Beliefs and Perceptions of Climate Change,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture 6, no. 3 (2012): 276-99; Robin Globus Veldman, The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Bernard Daley Zaleha and Andrew Szasz, “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 5 (2015): 19-30. 10 Sean Connable, “The ‘Christian Nation’ Thesis and the Evangelical Echo Chamber,” in The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, ed. Mark Ward Sr. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 183-203. 11 Eric Gormly, “Peering beneath the Veil: An Ethnographic Content Analysis of Islam as Portrayed on The 700 Club following the September 11th Attacks,” Journal of Media and Religion 3, no. 4 (2004): 219-38; Shaheen Pasha, “American Apocalypse: Portrayals of Islam and Judaism in the Post-9/11 Electronic Church,” in The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, ed. Mark Ward Sr. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 227-51. 12 Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 13 Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 14 America’s Changing Religious Landscape (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2015). 15 John Sumser, “Conservative Talk Radio, Religious Style: When You Need Some Moral Outrage,” in The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 2, ed. Mark Ward Sr. (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 105-129; Mark Ward Sr., “A New Kind of Church: The Religious Media Conglomerate as a ‘Denomination,’” Journal of Media and Religion 17, no. 3-4 (2018): 117-33. 16 Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol4/iss1/1 2 Ward Sr.: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism The present study thus argues that an animus against intellectual elites works not only from the top down as a broad norm of the American evangelical subculture. The norm also trickles up from the grass roots, where casting intellectual elites as “other” is an effective strategy at the local congregational level for constructing a satisfying self-identity and organizational identification. Any assessment of why evangelicals reject expert consensus on climate change, evolution, and other issues must therefore take into consideration the dynamic interplay between anti-intellectual