Last week evangelical blogger Samuel James wrote a post in which he compared the anti-vaccine movement’s rejection of medical authority and expertise with progressive Christianity’s rejection of church authority and theological expertise.
I’m sympathetic with James’ warnings against anti-intellectualism and rejection of authority, but I’m disturbed that he only identifies those tendencies in groups he disagrees with. Such characteristics cut across cultural and theological boundaries, and while the progressive Christian movement has shortcomings that merit examination, the intellectual problems of evangelical Christianity are far more pervasive.
Evangelicalism has always had an uneasy relationship with intellectual pursuits. There’s a very good reason Mark Noll titled his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and not The Scandal of the Progressive Christian Mind. There’s a very good reason we aren’t reading about measles outbreaks in mainline Christian churches, but yet the anti-vaccine movement continues to find a foothold in conservative religious communities.
Samuel James’ own evangelical background and his ties to the Southern Baptist Convention undermine virtually every word he writes in critique of progressive Christianity. Southern Baptists widely reject scientific expertise, especially in the form of evolutionary biology, and widely reject the consensus of mainstream biblical scholarship when it comes to biblical issues such as the inerrancy… [Read more…] about Progressive Christianity won't give you measles
