Resisting Anti-Intellectualism In Christianity

The most revealing thing I heard in church recently did not come from the pulpit. It came during an adult Sunday School class, where a room full of grown Christians had gathered to discuss what they believed — and, as it turned out, whether they needed to understand it.

Being one who enjoys some spirited discussion, I decided that I would get involved in the class in order to see what all the fuss was about. The discussion was led by one of the elders, with the pastor occasionally jumping in.

The discussion centred around one of those thin Christian books in the U.S. that serves as an introduction to what Christians should believe or know about the Bible or doctrine. I have read a good number of these books over my lifetime.

The books are not my cup of tea because they are almost never written by someone who is well informed on scholarship, theology or other topics, but instead are written by some guy with a sweater vest, glasses and a smile I associate with untrustworthy car salesmen.

In this chapter, the sweater vest guy was talking about the idea of justification. Like many sweater vest guys before him, his explanation sounded very much like a sermon and very little like someone who researches the New Testament.

The discussion started with a lot of people sharing opinions and patterns of their lives. One lady had an issue because the neighbour's cat was wandering in her yard, and her daughter is allergic to cats.

Another lady was so tired from work that she sometimes fell asleep when she was trying to read the Bible. A third lady spoke about how her grandkids listen to music that she could not possibly understand.

With the confidence that only a man in a church could have, one of the deacons stood up and informed everyone that it wasn’t about intelligence, but rather, it was about obedience and being humble before God.

This left me a bit underwhelmed because, well, it turns out that intelligent people are not necessarily any more or less humble before God than anyone else is. Also, standing up during a meeting and telling everyone what to believe or what to get out of the whole class doesn’t scream humility to me.

A beacon of hope, however, occurred when a lady asked for a concise definition of justification, or at least a place in the Bible which she could go to in order to understand more about what it was.

Silence fell over the class as everyone’s eyes collectively moved to the elder who was located at the front of the classroom. He had that overly spiritual look on his face that always struck me as somewhere on the spectrum between about to cry and about to burp and quickly answered:

“I don’t understand it. But I don’t have to understand it to believe it.”

That was news to me. Imagine if the Christians who had created doctrines just said “I don’t get it, but I believe it.”

That might have created an opening few lines of the Nicene Creed that goes like this:

I believe in one God, although God is also three persons, because REASONS. The three are therefore one, which is something that I don’t understand, but I believe. God is surely male, which is why I call him “he”, although he is also a spirit, which again I don’t understand. Also, he’s a person, but he’s definitely not a person. No, I will not ask God what his pronouns are, for I am afraid of the answer. I would rather just call him “Father”, if that’s ok with everyone else. I believe that he made heaven and earth, although I have no idea how old the world is, so don’t ask me. I think that he made everything that is both visible and invisible, although obviously I can’t confirm or deny the existence of things that I can’t see. But also, faith is both the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, so maybe I do affirm the invisible things.

Thankfully, none of us will be asked to sign off on that creed. Not having the answers is not the problem, but shutting down any subsequent conversations is. Shutting down conversation allows Christians to hold beliefs that are at odds with the facts without any further examination of their conclusions.

So, why do Christians argue with the facts? Why does the culture of anti-intellectualism have such a hold on Christianity? Let’s take a look at some possibilities:

Human Wisdom/Understanding vs. God’s Wisdom

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews ask for signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, and not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to abolish things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. In contrast, God is why you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” 1 Corinthians 1:18–31 NRSV

This passage has become one of my least favourite ones to hear quoted because of how much weight it pulls in discussions about anti-intellectualism. It evidently prevents people from applying the understanding of man to the Bible.

The obvious issue with this one is that everyone is bringing human understanding, or the understanding of man, to bear on the Bible. Unless someone is claiming to be a divine being, I am pretty sure that everyone has a human understanding.

Of course, people do claim that they have the understanding of the Holy Spirit, whereas other people actually only have their human understanding. But this just serves as a way of ending a conversation.

I don’t think there is a single time that I have witnessed someone telling a group Bible study that the Holy Spirit told them the meaning of a verse that did not immediately shut down the conversation.

As a matter of fact, most times that I have seen that happen, the teacher just says something like "Wow", and everyone awkwardly shuffles onto the next point in the Bible study. Invoking the Holy Spirit is a conversation ender for sure.

Of course, the Holy Spirit, interestingly enough, is not the teacher of pastors who are trained for the ministry. Therefore, even most ministers end up with human understanding in the end, so there’s that.

When Paul wrote the above passage, he was giving a reason why some things seem to be counterintuitive, such as a crucified Messiah. In that particular instance, he emphasised how a seeming contradiction could still be used by God.

People often apply these verses to every situation, as if Paul wanted to teach a series of counterintuitive ideas and contradictions within his letters in the name of sticking it to wise people.

Imagine Paul going around to churches, bragging, "What I say never makes sense, so hopefully you are lowly enough and haven’t become too educated; otherwise what I am saying won’t make sense.”

Speaking of which...

Scepticism of Higher Learning

There is, in some conservative Christian circles, a distrust of higher learning. This is reflective of a larger trend that has emerged since the first half of the twentieth century, when conservatives started to call people to leave the public universities.

This was supposed to be a way of allowing Christians to separate themselves from the wider world around them, but it actually is something that I think backfired because it blurs the lines between sacred and secular spheres.

Let me explain what I mean. Would you agree that the model of a number of churches in recent years has been criticised for being too consumerist? Given the emergence of megachurches, I would think you would agree.

That is not to say that churches have never been greedy in the past, but the corporatisation of churches has certainly increased, to the point where some larger ministries have been questioned by the general public.

There is no better place to understand this idea of corporatisation than the university, as this is one place where people get information from. Media/entertainment is another source of information for people.

Christians tend to take in information uncritically just like anyone else in the general population does. Their decisions are driven by identity markers, and they are relentlessly and intentionally targeted by media/entertainment, especially political entertainment (in the U.S.).

However, without the tools that one would learn at a university to recognise when your group is being targeted or the tools to understand how to recognise misinformation, you are left in a difficult spot.

This also leads to a general scepticism of people who know “too much” or have been educated in certain places. The problem can only get exacerbated from there.

I have been challenged on just how anti-intellectual a church community is before, so I developed a way of explaining what I mean.

First, I ask someone what they consider to be an intellectual pursuit that is worthy of a Christian who is trying to grow. Usually, they will respond back with something about sound Biblical teaching or something similar.

Next, I will ask how much time they spent during the week consuming media/entertainment. In these conversations, I often bring up political content because I knew this was something the person consumed a lot of.

After that, I will ask how much time they spent on shopping/entertainment or thinking through things to buy, financial plans or any of those things.

Finally, I ask how much time they feel as though they wasted in front of a screen, scrolling, vegging out, etc.

At the end of all that, I ask whether they think that it is possible, then, to say that the average person who attends their church is more driven by media, shopping, scrolling or other things than they are by the solid Biblical teaching.

This is usually especially effective because the person I am asking overestimates the time that someone else who goes to their church does these things and underestimates the amount of time that they do it.

As a result, they are usually defeated by their own argument. Of course, logic and facts don’t get very far with this group, but at least I try.

Conclusion

It is sad to see that Christians often argue with the facts because the culture of anti-intellectualism has so taken over the church.

I can only imagine that this problem is becoming worse in the day and age of pastors having their sermons broadcast on the internet. I have seen some pretty nasty comments from people exposing pastors who don’t know what they are saying!

Information is readily available to people nowadays, so it is much harder to encourage people not to “think their way out of the faith” or not to be “pastored by AI”.

As AI becomes more and more popular, some people are turning to it for spiritual guidance that they can access at any point in their week, instead of just attending church on Sundays. Anti-intellectualism will only get worse in light of these developments as well.

I do have hope that the amount of information available online will drive pastors to develop more knowledge and think more deeply about the Biblical text. Perhaps this development will allow them to compete with the many available Christian sources that are online.