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A more significant supporter of think tanks friendly to evangelical Christianity is the Maclellan Foundation. It was organized in 1952 by the heirs of a Scottish immigrant who became wealthy providing insurance to people whom other insurers would not touch—men who worked in mines, sawmills, and blast furnaces. Most of its giving is channeled into traditional projects in evangelism and religious education. But recently the family has started to think that the kingdom of God can be advanced by supporting research-and-advocacy scholarship. The Discovery Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Barna Research Group, the Rockford Institute, and the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity are just some of Maclellan's beneficiaries.

With that, the list of evangelical foundations supporting scholarly research is just about exhausted. Other philanthropies that support evangelical higher education—Murdock, Mustard Seed, DeVos—have shown little interest in supporting serious scholarship by evangelicals.

While foundation support has given evangelical scholarship a big boost, it would be a mistake to think that it brought evangelical scholarship into being. Before foundations could fund evangelical scholars, there had to be evangelical scholars. What foundations have done is accelerate the pace of work on a few key topics—philosophy of religion and metaphysics, the history of Christianity, the sociological and political impact of Christianity, and the consequences of Christianity in the non-Western world.

They have also sponsored significant bodies of work on how Christian ideas could improve political thinking—by recovering the Christian contexts in which many of our political ideas originated and by defining how religious ideas ought to influence political thinking. A few foundations—Pew especially—have also sponsored a host of workshops, seminars, and collaborative groups for graduate students and senior scholars. What has made these especially significant are the personal networks between Christian scholars that they've helped establish.

As measured by scholarly productivity, foundations supporting evangelical scholarship have received an unusually high return on their investment. A study by the National Endowment for the Humanities found that 45 percent of their grant recipients had published books within six years of receiving their grants. By contrast, a study of scholars receiving grants from the Pew Evangelical Scholars Program found that 90 percent had finished their books within six years.

Nevertheless, the future of foundation support for evangelical scholarship is uncertain. Wealthy evangelicals may never understand how important scholarly research is, and foundations that sponsor scholarship may lose interest in

evangelicals. But even if it proves to be a passing phenomenon, foundation funding has already been a big help. It has pushed evangelical scholarship to a higher level of quality and visibility. Most important, it has helped bring evangelicals' experiences and perspectives into the marketplace of ideas. That, we like to think, has been good for everybody.

Michael S. Hamilton is a historian of American religion at Seattle Pacific University, and former coordinator of the Pew Evangelical Scholars Program at the University of Notre Dame. Johanna Yngvason, who helped gather data for this article, is a graduate student at the University of Iceland.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Websites for foundations and organizations referenced in the article include:

• Lilly Endowment
• Pew Charitable Trusts
• John Templeton Foundation
• The Maclellan Foundation
• Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals

In May, Christianity Today profiled 2002 Templeton Prize winner the Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne.

Michael S. Hamilton wrote "We're in the Money!How did evangelicals get so wealthy, and what has it done to us?" for Christianity Today in 2000.

Hamilton has also written "The Dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer" and "The Triumph of the Praise Songs" for Christianity Today.

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July 8 2002, Vol. 46, No. 8