The SBC presidential election victory of вЂњmoderateвЂќ Ed Litton over conservative hardliner Mike Stone (as well as longtime SBC fixture Al Mohler) was widely perceived as a referendum on the denominationвЂ™s alignment with ex-President Donald Trump, but the issues in play transcend any single figure.

Indeed, the recent 2021 General Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention exposed publicly what had already been obvious to many observers for some time: an ugly and deepening rift between these post- Scandal вЂњelite evangelicalsвЂќ and the rank-and-file members who fill evangelical church pews across the country.

Nor has it seemingly engendered a healthier and more unified evangelicalism. The rise of such a class, however, has not led to much of a rapprochement between AmericaвЂ™s evangelicals and an increasingly secular mainstream. Above all, he is proficient in the use of the word вЂњwinsomeness.вЂќ He reads Christianity Today, listens to Tim Keller sermons, and tends to know far more about J.R.R. The elite evangelical was educated at top-flight institutions and largely eschews the вЂњculture warвЂќ language of Moral Majority forerunners like Jerry Falwell. By virtually any metric, the landscape of evangelical intellectual thought is materially more developed than it was in 1994.ДЄnd over those years this matrix of institutions has incubated a new sort of public figure: the elite evangelical. And at the K-12 level, the classical education movement has promoted thoroughgoing engagement with the philosophical and spiritual wisdom of generations past. A complex of parachurch groups like the Gospel Coalition, with thoughtful evangelical content ranging from popular to scholarly, has sprung up online. The catalogs of publishers like Crossway Academic and InterVarsity Press overflow with interdisciplinary efforts to place the evangelical tradition into conversation with topics of current interest. New colleges and universities explicitly interested in cultivating the вЂњlife of the mindвЂќ have been founded. Over the decades since, a much more comprehensive evangelical intellectual ecosystem has emerged, partially in response to NollвЂ™s critique. Nearly thirty years ago, Notre Dame historian Mark Noll fired a resounding shot across the bow of his own tradition, declaring boldly that вЂњhe scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.вЂќ Ever since its publication, few books have loomed over evangelical intellectual life more powerfully than The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which laid out what Noll viewed as a devastating indictment of evangelicalismвЂ™s incapacity for meaningful engagement with disciplines beyond its boundaries.

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