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Given the usual media treatment of things evangelical, it was stunning to see the cover story in this month's Atlantic Monthly, "The Opening of the Evangelical Mind," by Boston College's Alan Wolfe: a substantial, fair-minded article by a sympathetic yet not uncritical outsider, the like of which I can't recall. Wolfe's essay includes a brief but generous mention of Books & Culture, and for some readers that will disqualify me from further comment. Never mind. In any case what interests me here is not the details of the essay, provocative as those are; rather, should we regard its appearance as heralding a significant change in the way evangelicalism figures in what is wistfully called "the national conversation," or is Wolfe's thoughtful engagement with the evangelical mind merely an anomaly?

In the early responses to Wolfe's essay, alas, there are signs that we may be returning to business as usual. Consider, for example, Judith Shulevitz's Slate essay, "Alan Wolfe Turns Evangelical." Shulevitz notes that Wolfe's article does not discuss the Intelligent Design movement. But she doesn't simply note this omission: she charges Wolfe with flagrant intellectual dishonesty, claiming that he deliberately suppressed any mention of the Intelligent Design movement because he wanted to make evangelical thought "seem better than it is."

The idea is that Intelligent Design is a skeleton in the closet, a terrible embarrassment to evangelicals, who haven't progressed so far after all from the days of the Scopes trial. If Wolfe had acknowledged the existence of this embarrassment, you see, his carefully constructed case for the newly found intellectual respectability of evangelicalism would fall apart.

Oddly, while charging Wolfe with one of the cardinal sins of scholarship and journalism alike, Shulevitz's short essay is riddled with errors that bespeak a casual contempt for her subject. She hasn't bothered to do her homework. She refers to "theologian Mark Noll," though minimal research would confirm that he is a historian, not a theologian. (Evidently she was misled by Noll's title at Wheaton and his stint at Harvard Divinity School, reported in Wolfe's essay.) She calls Baylor University one of the "top evangelical schools," basing that description on Wolfe's own brief references to Baylor. Perhaps if Baylor President Robert Sloan is able to continue on his course of recruiting leading evangelical scholars and reconnecting Baylor with its Baptist heritage, that description may someday be true. Today it is not.

More seriously, Shulevitz's account of the reception of the Intelligent Design movement within evangelicalism is grossly misleading. "The precepts of the movement," Shulevitz writes, "are taught at Wheaton and Fuller Seminary Theological Seminary in California and Baylor University in Texas." How the ID movement wishes that were substantially true! In fact, the science faculties at most evangelical institutions are resolutely opposed to ID, a matter of great frustration to the movement's proponents. Fuller Seminary's most prominent voice on this subject is the philosopher of science Nancey Murphy, a harsh critic of Phillip Johnson and of the ID movement more generally. At Baylor University, in a flap nationally reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other places (including Wolfe's essay), the science faculty sought to oust a newly established think-tank headed by ID leader William Dembski.

The subject Shulevitz identifies is indeed an interesting aspect of the evangelical intellectual revival—but it is interesting in part because of the conflicts it reveals. A majority of Christians in the sciences, including evangelicals (and evangelicals are much more heavily represented in the natural sciences at secular colleges and universities than in the humanities or the social sciences), accept so-called methodological naturalism. Whether they are right to do so is a matter of often contentious debate within the evangelical community.

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October (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44