links for the weekend: a thread of Aaron Renn and Anthony Bradley on the lack of an evangelical elite, the failures of the YRR; and some links on alt-right publishing

Prepare for a bit of a weekend sprawl known as the links for the weekend.

Daniel Kleven recommends a couple of treatises on the evangelial left/progressive evangelicalism

https://biblioskolex.wordpress.com/2023/07/16/progressive-evangelicals-and-or-the-evangelical-left/

At Mere Orthodoxy Jake Meador tells fellow evangelicals "Critical Race Theory Isn't Going to Get You"--Alan Jacobs on provocateurs who think they're illuminators

There have been commenters at Mere Orthodoxy in the last few years who seem to think the folks at Mere O have gone woke and sold out to progressivism.  I would be hard-pressed to imagine how an evangelical online magazine that resembles National Review or the defunct Weekly Standard far more than Current Affairs or Slate or Salon/Alternet could possibly have gone "woke".

Showing the John Birchers and the Ayn Rand-roids the door was something Buckley did generations ago.  In our era their equivalents might just be self-identified evangelicals of the sort who believe critical race theory is out to conquer their kids.

https://blogs.mereorthodoxy.com/jake/crt-evangelicals/

...

I have spent my entire life in the white evangelical world, which means I am now old enough to have seen this exact dynamic play out many times over in our movement, as every 3-5 years we (or our professional class, at least) identify a new Big Bad that is supposedly destroying the church. (In recent years, the speed with which we cycle through trends has accelerated, no doubt due in large part to the way that social media makes it far easier to distribute propaganda.)

Thus: “Ah, postmodernism is going to get me!” (1995-2005) “Ah, secular humanism is going to get me!” (2005-2010) “Ah, cultural marxism (remember that one?) is gonna get me!” (2015-2019) Or, most recently, “Ah, critical race theory is gonna get me!” (2019-present)

Here’s the thing: I’ve known dozens of people who have left the faith. Probably 85% of the people I grew up with have apostatized. A good percentage of the folks from my megachurch youth group that I attended briefly in high school have done the same and, so too, have some of my peers from my campus ministry days, though thankfully not nearly so many. I’ve heard so many stories of apostatizing. You know how many times I’ve heard someone attribute their loss of faith to any of the fabricated villains supposedly threatening Christianity?

Zero.  ...

John Fea on the wasting of the evangelical mind (assuming there has been one in the US)

https://thewayofimprovement.com/2021/03/04/what-is-happening-to-the-evangelical-mind/https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-wasting-of-the-evangelical-mind

Fea linked to a paltry entry in The New Yorker but then I haven't been able to take The New Yorker all that seriously in the last eight years. Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind opened bluntly by saying that there has never been much of an evangelical mind in the United States.  Perhaps to be more specific, the neo-evangelicalism that emerged in the Cold War era has not produced scholars, humanists, artists or writers of any long-term distinction.  

I wonder, though, if another way to put things is to say that white evangelicals have contributed little to civic life that isn't about the topics of gaining and wielding political power and, of course, family life and sexuality.  There may be contributions toward, say, American civic religion a la Billy Graham, but that hour has passed.  Whether or not Christians should contribute to American civic religions is another topic I don't want to get into too very much ... but I noticed Pliable over at On an Overgrown Path noted a juxtaposition between a young poet's words and the Biden administrations actions recently.  It's possible that when an American poet writes using the first person plural there's an implicitly or explicitly American civic religious impulse at work.  

But since some folks who are in the broadly evangelical or conservative low church Protestant scene have been lamenting critical race theory let me try to provide a specific example of what I think can be said about the wasting of the evangelical mind, if we're going to assume for the sake of conversation that American conservative evangelicalism has any serious intellectual capital to invest in cultural activity to begin with .... which ... you may infer from that I have doubts about this from time to time even though I would say I'm an evangelical and a moderately conservative one.

so ...