Alan Jacobs


my response to Douthat's response to my answer to Douthat's question

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Ross Douthat, responding in part to this post of mine, writes:

But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. It could be that the Trump-era crisis of the evangelical mind is a parochial phenomenon, confined to theologians and academics and pundits and a few outlier congregations — and that it is this group, not the cultural Christians who voted enthusiastically for Trump, who represent the real evangelical penumbra, which could float away and leave evangelicalism less intellectual, more partisan, more racially segregated … but as a cultural phenomenon, not all that greatly changed.
Typical NYT columnist! — interested in evangelicalism only in terms of “sociological success,” as a “cultural phenomenon.” SMH.

Slightly more seriously:

One more thing, in relation to that move of many young evangelicals to older ways of being Christian: there’s a new book by Kenneth Stewart called In Search of Ancient Roots: The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis. Andrew Wilson comments on it here.