Cornell philosophy professor Andrew Chignell has just written a fascinating article that lifts up the hood on some of the institutional politics at Wheaton College, his alma mater and the flagship school of American evangelicalism. It definitely has the voice of an immanent critic, one who writes motivated more by love than bile. But it is not the story of a jilted lover as much as an impatient one. The dynamics he reveals have been getting old for a long time, and one can hear that in his tone. Furthermore, the murky backstory of the squelching of the article that required it to be published online, as opposed to in Books and Culture, only serves to advance his point.
Read the article here, at the SOMA Review
As it is not possible to post extended comments in an unbroken fashion at the SOMA website, I will re-post my comments on the article here.
This stuff is so disappointing. I often struggle to believe that it is actually possible for such things go down, but indeed they do, and Andrew Chignell has chronicled them brilliantly here. What is more, if there was any remaining doubt about the backdoor skullduggery that he names, his "Story Behind The Story" at whitherwheaton.org confirms it with relentless clarity. In my view, this is yet another reason why trying to defend the name "Evangelical" in America is, at present, a unilateral waste of time for believers who hope to remain faithful and in the camp of historic orthodoxy. Even articulations of the core social and religious commitments of "historic Evangelicalism" are totally undermined by this kind of double-speak from the people who aim to uphold the tradition.
As one who studies American Religious History, I wonder how Evangelicalism got to this ironic point where the preservation of integrity looks like subversion and anti-Catholicism requires magisterial regulation. Is this "mere" sin and will to power, or are there other social and spiritual dynamics at work that need to be grasped and interrogated from the inside? Naturally, I believe that there are systemic issues here that must be addressed.
Until there is a serious moral reckoning about the deeply-rooted protectionism and politicking that makes the socially conservative crypto-Fundamentalist evangelical system work, there can be nothing approaching a renaissance of evangelical intellectual life. In its absence, and perhaps long after, evangelicals will continue to see their young fleeing in droves to Orthodoxy or Canterbury or Rome or the Mainline or any number of Emergent church projects. While such transitions are not (in my view) such bad things in and of themselves, it would be a real shame if this was the manner of death that the evangelicalism of Edwards, Blanchard, Henry, and Noll was forced to suffer.
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