As I found while working through a book for Mind & Media, reviewing a book takes a long time. This is especially true if the book is a bad one – as my recent undertaking certainly was. So, rather than try to analyze or review another book immediately, I thought I would glean a few books from time to time: hopefully this will provide you with enough information and incentive to buy the book for yourself (I’m only going to do this with good books!).

I am presently reading through J.P. Moreland’s 1997 book Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul. Here’s a sampling of the first chapter, “How We Lost the Christian Mind and Why We Must Recover It.”

The Loss of the Christian Mind
in American Christianity

Historical Overview

1. The emergence of anti-intellectualism. [F]rom the arrival of the Pilgrims to the middle of the nineteenth centruy, American believers prized the intellectual life for its contribution to the Christian journey . . . In the middle 1800s, however, things began to change dramatically, though the seeds for the change had already been planted in the popularized, rhetorically powerful, and emotionally directed preaching of George Whitefield in the First Great Awakening in the United States from the 1730s to the 1750s . . . [Marsden:] ‘anti-intellectualism was a feature of American revivalism’. . .

What was a problem . . . was the intellectually shallow, theologically illiterate form of Christianity that came to be part of the populist Christian religion that emerged. One tragic result of this was what happened in the so-called Burned Over District in the state of New York. Thousands of people were ‘converted’ to Christ by revivalist preaching, but they had no real intellectual grasp of Christian teaching. As a result, two of the three major American cults began in the Burned Over District among the unstable, untaught ‘converts’: Mormonism (1830) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses (1884).

2. Evangelical withdrawal began. [T]he widespread intellectual assault on Christianity . . . was part of the war of ideas raging at that time and was launched from three major areas. First, certain philosophical ideas from Europe, especially the views of David Hume (1711-1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), altered people’s understanding of religion . . .

Second, German higher criticism of the Bible called its historical reliability into question . . . Believers grew suspicious of the important of historical study in understanding the Bible and in defending its truthfulness. An increased emphasis was placed on the Holy Spirit in understanding the Bible as opposed to serious historical and grammatical study. Third, Darwinian evolution emerged and ‘made the world safe for atheists,’ as one contemporary Darwinian atheist has put it . . .

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, fundamentalists withdrew from the broader intellectual culture and from the war with liberals that emerged in most mainline denominations at the time . . .

Anti-Intellectualism’s Impact on the Church

1. A misunderstanding of faith’s relationship to reason. [F]aith is now understood as a blind act of will, a decision to believe something that is either independent of reason or that is a simple choice to believe while ignoring the paltry lack of evidence for what is believed . . . For many, religion is identified with subjective feelings, sincere motives, personal piety, and blind faith . . .

2. The separation of the secular and the sacred. Religion has become personal, private, and too often, simply a matter of ‘how I feel about things.’

3. Weakened world missions. I once attended a meeting of missionaries from around the world, at which a national Christian leader from Central America stood up and passionately exhorted North American mission agencies to stop sending evangelists to his country because their efforts were producing Marxists bent on overthrowing the government . . . Evangelical missionaries would lead people to Christ, but the liberals were attracting the thinking leaders among the converts and training them in Marxist ideology . . . The leader pleaded with North Americans to send more theologians and Bible teachers and to help set up more seminaries and training centers in his country . . .

4. Anti-intellectualism has spawned an irrelevant gospel. Today, we share the gospel primarily as a means of addressing felt needs . . . [Paul] based his preaching on the fact that the gospel is true and reasonable to believe . . . Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch precisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers . . .

5. A loss of boldness in confronting the idea structures in our culture with effective Christian witness. [W]hen people learn what they believe and why, they become bold in their witness and attractive in the way they engage others in debate or dialogue…

Culture Is Secular

Modern American culture is largely secular in this sense: most people have little or no understanding of a Christian way of seeing the world, nor is a Chrstian worldview an important participant in the way we as a society frame and debate issues in the public square…

Secularism Is Primarily a View About Knowledge

The primary characteristic of modern secularism is its view of the nature and limits of knowledge. It is critical to understand this because if knowledge gives one power . . . then those with the cultural say-so about who does and doesn’t have knowledge will be in a position to marginalize and silence groups judged to have mere belief and private opinion . . .

Happiness (Greek: eudaimonia) was understood as a life of virtue, and the successful person was one who knew how to live life well according to what we are by nature due to the creative design of God . . .

Freedom was traditionally understood as the power to do what one ought to do . . .

Traditionally, tolerance of other viewpoints meant that even though I think those viewpoints are dead wrong and will argue against them fervently, nevertheless, I will defend your right to argue your own case . . .

What Mayr and Hull are saying is that if naturalistic evolution is the story of how we came to be, then there is no human nature answering to a divine blueprint and no good life that expresses that nature . . . According to the modern view, the good life is the satisfaction of any pleasure or desire that someone freely and autonomously chooses for himself or herself. The successful person is the individual who has a life of pleasure and can obtain enough consumer goods to satisfy his or her desires. Freedom is the right to do what I want, not the power to do what I by nature ought to. Community gives way to individualism with the result that narcissism – an inordinate sense of self-love and self-centered involvement – is an accurate description of many people’s lives . . .

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant . . .

More than ever before, we need what the Old Testament calls wisdom . . . 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 . . . wisdom is the fruit of a life of study and a developed mind. Wisdom is the application of knowledge gained from studying both God’s written Word and His revealed truth in creation.


2 Cor 1:13