In Apostles of Reason, UNC history professor Molly Worthen tracks the intellectual history of modern American evangelicalism, which for her is defined by a “crisis of authority.” “Three questions unite evangelicals,” she writes:

how to reconcile faith and reason; how to know Jesus; and how to act publicly on faith after the rupture of Christendom.
Worthen begins her story in 1942, with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in St. Louis, “a self-aware intellectual movement of pastors, scholars, and evangelists within the conservative Protestant community.” These neo-evangelicals sought to establish that, in Carl Henry’s words, “the Christian world-life view is not only intellectually tenable, but … also explains reality and life more logically and comprehensively than do modern alternatives.” Following his teacher Gordon Clark, who worried that evangelicals were neglecting “the philosophical, scientific, social, and political problems that agitate” the 20th century, Henry called for Christians to engage secularism at a specifically ideological level.


Worthen traces the ripples of the resulting evangelical offensive in ever-widening circles that eventually encompass the highest reaches of American power. Along the way, intra- and interdenominational battle lines are meticulously redrawn—Mennonites and Wesleyans vs. the Reformed tradition, Presbyterians vs. Pentecostals, Southern Baptists vs. Southern Baptists. Worthen’s a beguiling portraitist, especially as she recounts the intergenerational frictions that arose among evangelicals in the ’60s. Here’s a young Wes Craven being removed as editor-in-chief from Wheaton College’s student magazine for publishing “disturbing and morally complex stories.” Here’s the president of Biola University assuring angry alumni that “we do not endorse … left-wing folksingers, nor do we endorse the visiting of breweries at any time, especially on a Sunday afternoon.” One comes away from Worthen’s book with an impression of slapstick chaos on a sinking vessel, all hands knocking into one another in clashing attempts to bail water and plug holes (at least until the Christian Right decided to abandon ship and hijack the Republican Party’s passing yacht).

The key to understanding the anxieties that led conservative evangelicalism to such frantic action lies in Henry’s phrase “world-life view,” an awkward translation of Weltanschauung, a word that, in Worthen’s telling, obsessed the neo-evangelicals: “They intoned it whenever they wrote of the decline of Christendom, the decoupling of faith and reason, and the needful pinprick of the gospel in every corner of thought and action.” They picked up the term not from Kant but from Reformed theologians, and it came to represent a set of shared premises and guidelines that, once discovered and articulated, would reknit the dispersed body of faithful into a new Church Militant.

Apostles of Reason, then, is a chapter in the broader history of secularization, and as such it makes an interesting companion to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I happened to be reading alongside it. “It’s a commonplace that something that deserves” the title of secularization “has taken place in our civilization,” Taylor writes. “The problem is defining exactly what it is that has happened.” (The vulgar popular version has it that science in some sense proved religion to be false; this is simply another way of saying that scientism is the faith proper to late capitalism.) Regardless of the precise content of secularization, Worthen’s neo-evangelicals saw that a coherent picture of the world, a shared presumption of the truth of the Christian religion, had disappeared. And they set about trying to figure out how to restore it.