Part of an ongoing web serial perhaps inspired by The Screwtape Letters. Unless otherwise noted, “the Ex-CEO” refers to God, “the opposition” to the side of the angels, and so on.
Read the previous installment here.
Preface: As detailed in the introduction, the Ekron Initiative files were found in a leather dossier acquired by confidential methods. Included with these documents was a file titled “Anti-Intellectualism: A Primer” containing scanned copies of an executive summary attached to an office memorandum. As with the other files, footnotes have been added for publication.
Anti-Intellectualism: A Primer
To: Malice, VP of 8th Circle of Hell (Global Initiatives Branch)
From: Doubt, CEO of the Nous Center1 (American Protestant Market, Evangelical Branch)
Subject: Executive Summary
As requested, this is a copy of our recent executive summary discussing the Nous Center’s work in the American market. Should you need supplementary materials, my EA should be able to direct you to the appropriate files.
OVERVIEW
Since 1620,2 the Nous Center has engaged in counter-intellect work on American targets. This office has particularly focused on the evangelicals—a broad term for the successors to the Puritan movement which settled in America, with the Great Awakenings and other revivals aiding their growth until they became the face of American Christianity. In more recent years, evangelical has taken on new relevance as Christians raised in the 1910s-onward fundamentalist movement3 attempt to reframe their reputations. Other departments are currently working on how to exploit this change.
THE PROBLEM
Despite our efforts, as the Puritan market proved resilient. Scattered successes—convincing many to rebrand their views on creativity, sowing division, emphasizing otherworldliness—sometimes led to historic triumphs, as in Salem.4 However, despite limited access to books and pressure to survive, the Puritans still maintained vested interests in worshipping the Ex-CEO with their minds.
The Northampton revivalist5 crossed the generational lines between Puritanism and evangelicalism and presented a particular threat. He had sterling Puritan brains and an evangelical passion. Fortunately for us, he did not live long enough to have much impact on the College of New Jersey, smallpox claiming him before he could raise up a generation following his example.6 The dilemma became how to minimize or misdirect his influence as much as possible in the aftermath.
Two centuries on, we are pleased to announce that the focus groups, blind surveys, and other test measures show we achieved success.
THE SOLUTION
Our strategy focused on the following factors:
- Emphasizing intellectualism without passion, separating it from human feelings or concerns as much as possible.7
- Coordinated Supersaturation. Convincing targets who erred toward passion, using their interest in revivals8 and other charismatic efforts to create a tunnel-vision focus on emotions over mind.
- Business Marketing. Promoting an executive approach where business tactics (particularly self-promotion and dismissal of past solutions over exciting new proposals) are applied to ministry work as much as possible.9
- Specialization Snobbery. Discouraging discussion between seminarians, overseas ministry workers, popular and academic groups, to avoid dialogue that would generate solutions damaging our work.
- Frontier Development. Convincing the “common man settlers” developing America to use the Simple Common Man Faith approach, discouraging any discussion about the difference between simple and simplistic.10
- Bible-Aloneliness. Taking the German monk’s sola scriptura past its intended usage to treat individual readings of the Bible as the only well of knowledge.11
- Simple Futurism. Maximizing the paranoia of pending doom, the normal and plain Scripture technique, and the swift-application-for-your-life elements of Darbyism.12
- Letting Go. Highlighting the “Give Up, Let Go and Let [the Ex-CEO] Do the Work” approach of the Higher Christian Life movement to generate targets disinterested in thinking about their spiritual lives.13
Needless to say, these strategies did not work in isolation from each other.
THE RESULTS
While individual targets have issued warning bells about letting ignorance occupy the desks14 or reclaiming the Christian mind before it surrenders to secular drift,15 these remarks have generally gone ignored. We predict further successes in the second half of the twentieth century, and beyond.
Editor’s Notes
1. Nous is a Greek word for mind or intellect.
2. The first Pilgrims in America set sail on the Mayflower in 1620, followed by the first Puritans in 1630.
3. Started in the 1910s and centered around “the five fundamentals of faith,” the fundamentalist movement reframed American Protestantism in crucial ways. For its impact on intellectual efforts, see chapter 5 of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll.
4. Apparently a reference to the Salem Witch Trials.
5. Apparently a reference to Jonathan Edwards, noted early American pastor. A revival beginning at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts Bay Colony, is considered a milestone event in the First Great Awakening. Conflicts with his congregation in 1748 led Edwards to leave the church.
6. Edwards died from a smallpox inoculation at 54 years old, less than a month after he became president of the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University).
7. Os Guinness argues in chapter 4 of Fit Bodies Fat Minds that Edwards’ successors practiced his intellectual rigor but lacked his piety or passion.
8. Noll argues in chapter 3 of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that American evangelicals’ heavy emphasis on revivals has created obstacles to intellectual efforts.
9. Karen Swallow Prior argues in The Evangelical Imagination that from D.L. Moody onward, an emphasis on applying business executive imagery and solutions to ministry has kept evangelicals from understanding ministry requires leaders who function as shepherds, not proud entrepreneurs.
10. Guinness argues in chapter 4 of Fit Bodies that an emphasis on “simple teachings” and “common sense solutions” to Biblical teaching made it possible for settlers to spread Christianity throughout America, but also generated problems for deeper theological education.
11. Sola scriptura, Latin for “Scripture alone,” was coined by Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers to emphasize the Bible’s primacy over church authority. Various historians have noted that Luther and his colleagues did not mean sola scriptura as a statement that Christians should entirely ignore church tradition, history, or authority.
12. Charles Spurgeon used Darbyism as a term for the dispensationalist teachings of John Darby Nelson in his 1874 article “Darbyism and Its New Bible.” Charles Ryrie argues in chapter 1 of Dispensationalism Today that dispensationalists aim for “plain, normal” Biblical interpretations. For a full discussion of dispensationalism’s consequences for intellectual efforts, read chapter 5 of Scandal.
13. The 1858 book Higher Christian Life by William Boardman kickstarted the Keswick Movement, also known as the Holiness Movement, whose most famous slogan was “Give Up, Let Go and Let God.” Multiple scholars have argued the movement’s teachings on sanctification create obstacles to worshipping the Lord our God with our minds. Biographer Ian H. Murray quotes Lloyd-Jones as saying, “If you teach that sanctification consists of ‘letting go’ and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, don’t blame me if you have no scholars!”
14. In his inaugural sermon at the opening of Andover Seminary, Thomas Dwight, Jonathan Edwards’ grandson, criticized ministers who “declare, both in their language and in their conduct, that the desk ought to be yielded up to the occupancy of Ignorance.”
15. Harry Blamires uses these phrases in chapter 1 of The Christian Mind.
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