This is great, Joel. I think most of this falls under the category of "wisdom", which I think is something evangelicals have replaced with legalism: the preference of a simplified subculture. Your point about stewardship is interesting. I really, really like the word stewardship as a helpful concept in general. But I can see how the middle class mindset reinterprets that.
Thanks, Nicholas! Yes, I like contrasting prudence with morality. Evangelicalism, and then the extremes like the IBLP, tried to reduce all areas governed by prudence down to morality. And it produces, as you say, “a simplified subculture.”
It’s interesting, because Jesus models of stewardship are a dishonest, self-interested, steward, and investors with large amounts of capital doubling that capital. None of that is low risk! Jesus also teaches us humility and meekness, but apparently that can’t be read as undermining ambition.
I was thinking of your writing and stuff about conversational strategies in section one of this piece as well. Thanks for your recent series! I’m loving it.
Perhaps this is tied to your first point about ideological thinking, but I think Evangelicals also express reluctance towards formal education. Risk-aversion may also play a role as college can be viewed as a risky investment, especially with higher level degrees (PhD, JD, etc.)
To add some colour on the “ideological” point, evangelicals can also be very narrowly factional. Even in completely secular endeavours we often find it easier to cooperate with unbelievers than with an evangelical who is on the other side of a big intra-evangelical debate to us. We “other” our opponents within evangelicalism (e.g. “prosperity gospel”, “charismatic”, “fundamentalist”) so much that we lack the ability to cooperate on issues of mutual interest and agreement.
Very true. I think it's good to get ourselves back in discussion with non-believers. In those contexts, we begin to see that many of our intra-Christian differences cease to be important. Though some of these differences magnify in importance, like the difference between intellectual and anti-intellectual Christianity, or between Pharisaical and non-Pharisaical forms. Welcome, and thanks for reading and commenting!
Outstanding, and this stood out to me: 'Why don’t evangelicals view stewardship as giving them even more of a license to think big, compared to Elon Musk? Why not see vocation and the distribution of talents as a divine right to take a higher risk strategy in the investment of our time, abilities, and resources?' Completely agree; also, the problematic way of thinking you have outlined has been very dire in the world of Arts (as we've often seen). If you get a chance, you might like "Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts" by Turner which I think aligns well with your work. Well done!
Really interesting loved the piece. You expressed several ideas I've been thinking about since leaving evangelicalism three years ago, especially the valuing of "Christian" over competence. It's not wonder that anything with the label "Christian" tends to be light years behind the secular counterpart.
It's fascinating how the evangelical church has lost it's ability to see as valuable anything outside of its own small world.
How do we change that? How do we open the doors to a broader understanding of what actually creates value in the world?
Thanks for reading, Thomas! Would you mind sharing what you left evangelicalism for? Another form of Christianity? Something else?
"How do we open the doors to a broader understanding of what actually creates value in the world?" Yes! That's the question. I think we need to fully develop a Christian Epicureanism that embraces the world - the founder of Opus Dei called it "Christian materialism."
Bonhoeffer called it the penultimate things - and he saw it in Nazi Germany. Worldly political order, basic justice, culture, etc. are not saving, but they are all of supreme value. We need to see human beings' natural good as a foundation for their supernatural good, and as something ultimately included in salvation - the resurrection of the body and renovation of the earth.
I think escaping the evangelical sub-culture and becoming a mere Christian is one element of this. That's my path, rather than Catholicism/Orthodoxy. Leave aside the Puritanism/legalism/world-denying prejudices of the evangelical/fundamentalist culture.
I really do believe that this philosophical work, to see the value of this world even in light of eternity, is crucial and foundational. True Christianity isn't believing things that make you "of no earthly good"; it's to do things of real earthly effect in this life: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." Worldliness and otherworldliness bound up together there.
What did we leave evangelicalism for? That's a good question. I don't think I can say that we left it for anything it was more that we could no longer stay. I identify with what you said about escaping the evangelical sub-culture and becoming a mere Christian.
I can offer hope that it may not be as dire as you think. There are indeed evangelicals in startup, VC, PE, and publicly traded company executives doing great things. As you know, there can be exceptions to some of these generalities you are laying out, but I wonder if you may not be aware of these individuals because they are not overtly sharing their Evangelical worldview. Check out https://www.scetfs.com/.
Thanks, Paul! I love hearing about these exceptions. You've described the strategy of "business as mission" to me before, and I view that as a way of breaking out of the evangelical mindset in a good way. I think the mindsets that evangelicals favor tend to demean those activities as worldly or secular, and only becoming sacred when they give to missions/charity, or if a business person switches to running finances for a ministry. What if our "secular" activities in the world are actually (in some cases) the sacred work of God? :) Thanks for reading!
I have a number of thoughts on this, but one quick one:
Coming from the business world, I'd say that, while evangelicals are underrepresented in high-powered business roles as a share of the population, I don't think the underrepresentation is nearly as large as in other certain domains like elite law or academia, nor does it stand in all that stark and obvious contrast to pious Catholic representation in business, particularly once you account for regional differences (i.e. Southerners being both more evangelical and more distant and less plugged into most of America's centers of commerce; Catholics being geographically closer to those places).
Thinking on it, there's a lot that could be done with the neglected Southerner vs. Yankee dimension in yours and Aaron's analysis.
There is still pretty good evangelical representation among students at SEC schools, for example, and plenty of kids at SEC schools are successful in business. Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, went to an SEC school for example. He's gay and obviously not an evangelical but was brought up and baptized as a Baptist.
Thomas, that's helpful - Aaron and I are both Northern/Midwestern, areas in which Christianity has declined. I would still maintain that the evangelical view of such success in business is primarily that it is only instrumentally good - it gives you money to support churches, ministries, and missionaries, and might lead you to commit idolatry. There is a lack of a positive vision for "business *as* mission," the secular *as* sacred.
I just used entrepreneurship as an example, but I think choosing elite law or academia could only illustrate the point further. And that is the case even though we are a generation out from Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." I think some evangelicals get the idea of doing something higher-brow, and they do so having to fight the evangelical forces that would keep them down. I wish the Christian vision were more like that of the Catholics' "Opus Dei," seeing competent professional and creative work as a divine calling, even if it is not instrumentalized to explicitly Christian ends.
Thanks Joel, just getting around to responding to this. I agree with many of your points on a broad level -- that evangelical culture could do more to emphasize doing our work in a godly way.
I have a strong distaste for Catholic sacerdotalism (it is probably the largest single reason I rejected Catholicism, cf. Matthew 23), but I think there's a strong argument that Opus Dei is largely a byproduct of that sacerdotalism. Catholic laity, being farther removed from the clergy than in Protestantism (and also outnumbering the clergy to a greater degree), need a unique sense of mission of their own, whereas Protestant laity are more often seen as sharing in the same general mission as the clergy, except on a part-time basis.
There is some subset of Catholics that probably WOULD join the clergy if they were Protestant, but being Catholic, they don't want to take the vows so instead they choose to direct that energy to some lay effort. My guess is that this sort of person is one that you really want on your side if you're trying to start a Catholic lay group.
But the other question I wanted to say more about is: how much of the lack of influence is related to choice of undergrad college? People are shaped both by the opportunities elite schools open up, and by what they see their peers doing. The dominant emphasis of all undergrad schools is some combination of "having a good time" and "getting a good job afterwards", but elite schools are more likely to plug a highly-intelligent and intellectually curious kid into networks where he contemplates joining elite academia, law, politics, journalism, etc., and helps him launch a career in those domains. The idea "I could one day be a Supreme Court justice" starts to make a lot more sense if you're at Harvard undergrad than if you're at UGA, even if your LSAT scores are comparable.
I don't think this bias is Harvard adding points to your resume because you're in Massachusetts. It's some combination of:
1. Concerns about the practicalities of getting to and from college, not wanting to be too far from home, not even knowing that much about faraway schools and the scholarships available at them, etc.
2. The level of competition in high school and being in social networks that are aware of the "admissions dance" of getting into these schools in the first place (including personally knowing people who have gotten in).
These factors tend to weigh against places that have lots of evangelicals, and in favor of places that have fewer evangelicals.
Also evangelicals don't really have an equivalent to Notre Dame. Which, in terms of SAT scores, would be comparable to a low-level Ivy. Maybe a place like Hillsdale could become that, but today it's less selective than Notre Dame and has 1/4 as many undergrads.
I think your general push towards encouraging Christians to be proactive is ostensibly a good thing. But we must remain mindful of scripture as we consider how business executives are successful. For instance, the warning in the book of James about how we must not say confidently that we will do something. We need to humbly seek God’s blessing, knowing that things may turn out very differently than what we imagined.
Also, as a read what you wrote, what was foremost in my mind was how readily this idea can be perverted into a convenient excuse to morph God’s truth into Satan’s lies. That we need to be accommodating to those who have already done so.
I was reminded of the analysis of the different mentalities of the lower class, middle class, and upper class in one small section of "Ideas Have Consequences" by Richard Weaver. He observed that the poor know what it means to live on the edge, and the rich have often made and lost fortunes and taken risks, so they know what risk and insecurity mean. The middle class seeks to be secure above all else and does not have the same spiritual development that comes to those who know what risk and living on the edge are.
That's it! Of course, there's an important interplay with the biblical teaching that God has not chosen those who are wise in the world's eyes. The problem is that we should, at the same time, be seekers of true wisdom, at least as much as the world. "For the sons of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light."
I wasn't criticizing whether evangelicals are "entrepreneurial," but whether they have secular enterprises aimed at the broad public good as valid forms of Christian service. Building institutions with a Christian label that only appeal to members of a sub-set of the American evangelical subculture (like Liberty) is characteristically evangelical, and seems to me to *lack* ambition - it's just grifting on the base.
But yes, I think the loss of centrality and status by Protestants in America has led to subcultural cul-de-sacs in which social status only decreases further. I think there's got to be a higher-ambition and higher-status way of engaging in the world. Status isn't the measure, but it is a measure of *something* - being "thought well of by outsiders, so as not to fall into disgrace." (1 Tim 3:7)
This is great, Joel. I think most of this falls under the category of "wisdom", which I think is something evangelicals have replaced with legalism: the preference of a simplified subculture. Your point about stewardship is interesting. I really, really like the word stewardship as a helpful concept in general. But I can see how the middle class mindset reinterprets that.
Thanks, Nicholas! Yes, I like contrasting prudence with morality. Evangelicalism, and then the extremes like the IBLP, tried to reduce all areas governed by prudence down to morality. And it produces, as you say, “a simplified subculture.”
It’s interesting, because Jesus models of stewardship are a dishonest, self-interested, steward, and investors with large amounts of capital doubling that capital. None of that is low risk! Jesus also teaches us humility and meekness, but apparently that can’t be read as undermining ambition.
I was thinking of your writing and stuff about conversational strategies in section one of this piece as well. Thanks for your recent series! I’m loving it.
Perhaps this is tied to your first point about ideological thinking, but I think Evangelicals also express reluctance towards formal education. Risk-aversion may also play a role as college can be viewed as a risky investment, especially with higher level degrees (PhD, JD, etc.)
To add some colour on the “ideological” point, evangelicals can also be very narrowly factional. Even in completely secular endeavours we often find it easier to cooperate with unbelievers than with an evangelical who is on the other side of a big intra-evangelical debate to us. We “other” our opponents within evangelicalism (e.g. “prosperity gospel”, “charismatic”, “fundamentalist”) so much that we lack the ability to cooperate on issues of mutual interest and agreement.
Very true. I think it's good to get ourselves back in discussion with non-believers. In those contexts, we begin to see that many of our intra-Christian differences cease to be important. Though some of these differences magnify in importance, like the difference between intellectual and anti-intellectual Christianity, or between Pharisaical and non-Pharisaical forms. Welcome, and thanks for reading and commenting!
Outstanding, and this stood out to me: 'Why don’t evangelicals view stewardship as giving them even more of a license to think big, compared to Elon Musk? Why not see vocation and the distribution of talents as a divine right to take a higher risk strategy in the investment of our time, abilities, and resources?' Completely agree; also, the problematic way of thinking you have outlined has been very dire in the world of Arts (as we've often seen). If you get a chance, you might like "Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts" by Turner which I think aligns well with your work. Well done!
Really interesting loved the piece. You expressed several ideas I've been thinking about since leaving evangelicalism three years ago, especially the valuing of "Christian" over competence. It's not wonder that anything with the label "Christian" tends to be light years behind the secular counterpart.
It's fascinating how the evangelical church has lost it's ability to see as valuable anything outside of its own small world.
How do we change that? How do we open the doors to a broader understanding of what actually creates value in the world?
Thanks for reading, Thomas! Would you mind sharing what you left evangelicalism for? Another form of Christianity? Something else?
"How do we open the doors to a broader understanding of what actually creates value in the world?" Yes! That's the question. I think we need to fully develop a Christian Epicureanism that embraces the world - the founder of Opus Dei called it "Christian materialism."
Bonhoeffer called it the penultimate things - and he saw it in Nazi Germany. Worldly political order, basic justice, culture, etc. are not saving, but they are all of supreme value. We need to see human beings' natural good as a foundation for their supernatural good, and as something ultimately included in salvation - the resurrection of the body and renovation of the earth.
I think escaping the evangelical sub-culture and becoming a mere Christian is one element of this. That's my path, rather than Catholicism/Orthodoxy. Leave aside the Puritanism/legalism/world-denying prejudices of the evangelical/fundamentalist culture.
I really do believe that this philosophical work, to see the value of this world even in light of eternity, is crucial and foundational. True Christianity isn't believing things that make you "of no earthly good"; it's to do things of real earthly effect in this life: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." Worldliness and otherworldliness bound up together there.
Thanks for reading!
What did we leave evangelicalism for? That's a good question. I don't think I can say that we left it for anything it was more that we could no longer stay. I identify with what you said about escaping the evangelical sub-culture and becoming a mere Christian.
Thanks for writing.
I can offer hope that it may not be as dire as you think. There are indeed evangelicals in startup, VC, PE, and publicly traded company executives doing great things. As you know, there can be exceptions to some of these generalities you are laying out, but I wonder if you may not be aware of these individuals because they are not overtly sharing their Evangelical worldview. Check out https://www.scetfs.com/.
Thanks, Paul! I love hearing about these exceptions. You've described the strategy of "business as mission" to me before, and I view that as a way of breaking out of the evangelical mindset in a good way. I think the mindsets that evangelicals favor tend to demean those activities as worldly or secular, and only becoming sacred when they give to missions/charity, or if a business person switches to running finances for a ministry. What if our "secular" activities in the world are actually (in some cases) the sacred work of God? :) Thanks for reading!
I have a number of thoughts on this, but one quick one:
Coming from the business world, I'd say that, while evangelicals are underrepresented in high-powered business roles as a share of the population, I don't think the underrepresentation is nearly as large as in other certain domains like elite law or academia, nor does it stand in all that stark and obvious contrast to pious Catholic representation in business, particularly once you account for regional differences (i.e. Southerners being both more evangelical and more distant and less plugged into most of America's centers of commerce; Catholics being geographically closer to those places).
Thinking on it, there's a lot that could be done with the neglected Southerner vs. Yankee dimension in yours and Aaron's analysis.
There is still pretty good evangelical representation among students at SEC schools, for example, and plenty of kids at SEC schools are successful in business. Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, went to an SEC school for example. He's gay and obviously not an evangelical but was brought up and baptized as a Baptist.
Thomas, that's helpful - Aaron and I are both Northern/Midwestern, areas in which Christianity has declined. I would still maintain that the evangelical view of such success in business is primarily that it is only instrumentally good - it gives you money to support churches, ministries, and missionaries, and might lead you to commit idolatry. There is a lack of a positive vision for "business *as* mission," the secular *as* sacred.
I just used entrepreneurship as an example, but I think choosing elite law or academia could only illustrate the point further. And that is the case even though we are a generation out from Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." I think some evangelicals get the idea of doing something higher-brow, and they do so having to fight the evangelical forces that would keep them down. I wish the Christian vision were more like that of the Catholics' "Opus Dei," seeing competent professional and creative work as a divine calling, even if it is not instrumentalized to explicitly Christian ends.
Thanks Joel, just getting around to responding to this. I agree with many of your points on a broad level -- that evangelical culture could do more to emphasize doing our work in a godly way.
I have a strong distaste for Catholic sacerdotalism (it is probably the largest single reason I rejected Catholicism, cf. Matthew 23), but I think there's a strong argument that Opus Dei is largely a byproduct of that sacerdotalism. Catholic laity, being farther removed from the clergy than in Protestantism (and also outnumbering the clergy to a greater degree), need a unique sense of mission of their own, whereas Protestant laity are more often seen as sharing in the same general mission as the clergy, except on a part-time basis.
There is some subset of Catholics that probably WOULD join the clergy if they were Protestant, but being Catholic, they don't want to take the vows so instead they choose to direct that energy to some lay effort. My guess is that this sort of person is one that you really want on your side if you're trying to start a Catholic lay group.
But the other question I wanted to say more about is: how much of the lack of influence is related to choice of undergrad college? People are shaped both by the opportunities elite schools open up, and by what they see their peers doing. The dominant emphasis of all undergrad schools is some combination of "having a good time" and "getting a good job afterwards", but elite schools are more likely to plug a highly-intelligent and intellectually curious kid into networks where he contemplates joining elite academia, law, politics, journalism, etc., and helps him launch a career in those domains. The idea "I could one day be a Supreme Court justice" starts to make a lot more sense if you're at Harvard undergrad than if you're at UGA, even if your LSAT scores are comparable.
I recall reading once that white boys in flyover country were the group most likely to be academically qualified for elite colleges while not bothering to apply to them. To my knowledge, there's still a heavy northeastern bias to the elite northeastern schools (looking it up, you can see it here here: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/student-life/diversity/chart-geographic-diversity.html).
I don't think this bias is Harvard adding points to your resume because you're in Massachusetts. It's some combination of:
1. Concerns about the practicalities of getting to and from college, not wanting to be too far from home, not even knowing that much about faraway schools and the scholarships available at them, etc.
2. The level of competition in high school and being in social networks that are aware of the "admissions dance" of getting into these schools in the first place (including personally knowing people who have gotten in).
These factors tend to weigh against places that have lots of evangelicals, and in favor of places that have fewer evangelicals.
Also evangelicals don't really have an equivalent to Notre Dame. Which, in terms of SAT scores, would be comparable to a low-level Ivy. Maybe a place like Hillsdale could become that, but today it's less selective than Notre Dame and has 1/4 as many undergrads.
Joel,
I think your general push towards encouraging Christians to be proactive is ostensibly a good thing. But we must remain mindful of scripture as we consider how business executives are successful. For instance, the warning in the book of James about how we must not say confidently that we will do something. We need to humbly seek God’s blessing, knowing that things may turn out very differently than what we imagined.
Also, as a read what you wrote, what was foremost in my mind was how readily this idea can be perverted into a convenient excuse to morph God’s truth into Satan’s lies. That we need to be accommodating to those who have already done so.
I was reminded of the analysis of the different mentalities of the lower class, middle class, and upper class in one small section of "Ideas Have Consequences" by Richard Weaver. He observed that the poor know what it means to live on the edge, and the rich have often made and lost fortunes and taken risks, so they know what risk and insecurity mean. The middle class seeks to be secure above all else and does not have the same spiritual development that comes to those who know what risk and living on the edge are.
That's it! Of course, there's an important interplay with the biblical teaching that God has not chosen those who are wise in the world's eyes. The problem is that we should, at the same time, be seekers of true wisdom, at least as much as the world. "For the sons of this world are more shrewd than the sons of light."
I wasn't criticizing whether evangelicals are "entrepreneurial," but whether they have secular enterprises aimed at the broad public good as valid forms of Christian service. Building institutions with a Christian label that only appeal to members of a sub-set of the American evangelical subculture (like Liberty) is characteristically evangelical, and seems to me to *lack* ambition - it's just grifting on the base.
But yes, I think the loss of centrality and status by Protestants in America has led to subcultural cul-de-sacs in which social status only decreases further. I think there's got to be a higher-ambition and higher-status way of engaging in the world. Status isn't the measure, but it is a measure of *something* - being "thought well of by outsiders, so as not to fall into disgrace." (1 Tim 3:7)