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But, second, Schmalzbauer also suggests that evangelicals who have entered élite levels of the academy or journalism regularly adopt strategies that obscure the character of their evangelical profession. For some it is a self-conscious choice to translate the explicit theological convictions of the church into more general frameworks of cultural analysis for the general marketplace. For others, it is a less self-conscious move, as Schmalzbauer puts it, "to combine 'mutually irreconcilable realities' into protean selves." Or, in translation, to function simultaneously with several different centers of personal value while not worrying about integrating those different centers into a self-consciously religious whole. In either case, however, the result is to mask the religious identities or convictions of those who are active in public intellectual life. Even granting the under-representation of born-again Christians in the élite media, Schmalzbauer is saying to Kristof that maybe he knows more evangelical Christians than he thinks he does, but because of deliberate choice or protean practice, Kristof does not realize that these evangelicals are evangelical.
In response to provocative sallies like Kristof's recent column, the wrong evangelical response—whether on the media front or in the groves of academe—is to gird up loins for cultural warfare. Practicing the innocence of serpents alongside the wisdom of doves has proven self-destructive many times over for evangelicals in the last century of American history. More appropriate are guidelines implicit in Schmalzbauer's work, which begins by careful analysis of why existing conditions actually exist, but which also goes on to challenge evangelicals not only to do more in the élite media but to do it more self-consciously and to do it better. Not belligerence for the sake of belligerence, but savvy for the sake of the kingdom of Christ is one solution that John Schmalzbauer's book opens to Nicholas Kristof's problem.
Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College.
Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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