Over at the Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter points to a piece in Religion & Politics in which Molly Worthen examines a curious phenomenon among American evangelical Christians: Anglophilia. Worthen notes that, in addition to the late John Stott, evangelicals seem to naturally gravitate toward theologians from British Isles. Though these persons of interest are genuinely important thinkers, and more than worthy as apologists, philosophers, and fiction writers, there does seem to be a certain additional mystique attached to their nationality:
American evangelicals’ fondness Stott is part of a larger pattern, a special affection for Christian gurus of British extraction. Droves of American evangelicals stock their shelves with books by British Christian scholars such as N.T. Wright, a professor of New Testament and the former bishop of Durham, and J.I. Packer, a British-born theologian at Regent College in Vancouver. Despite ancient hostility toward Roman Catholicism, American evangelicals lionize the British Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton and raise their children on Catholic J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Carter agrees with the diagnosis, but pushes back about the cause. Calling the trope of intellectual inferiority a “cliché,” he suggests a national/cultural affinity may be more helpful in explaining the connection:
Worthen raises an intriguing question—why do we American Evangelicals have such a fondness for the British?—but provides an unsatisfactory answer. Her claim that American Evangelicals have an “intellectual inferiority complex” isn’t completely unwarranted, but it’s a dated and clichéd critique. (Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind was published 17 years ago. A lot has changed since then.)
I suspect a more likely explanation for why American Evangelicals love the Brits is related to the reason we love the Jews: We believe that we share with these groups a historical and theological imagination.
You’ll find Carter’s commentary (and a link to the original piece) here.
May 7th, 2012 | 11:52 am
Or, maybe it’s just that they don’t read French and German.
May 7th, 2012 | 11:59 am
Calvin, Luther, and Bonhoeffer are widely available in translation, as is every influential German Protestant theologian. France since the Reformation period is a little thin on the ground for Protestant theologians that would appeal to evangelicals. Granted American evangelicals go for Catholics like Chesterton and Tolkien, but neither of them argue explicitly for Catholicism in most of their more popular work.
May 7th, 2012 | 2:41 pm
I think Carter hits the nail on the head: it’s all about maintaining a connection with one’s roots. Religiously, Christians are descendents of Abraham and Moses. Culturally, all English-speakers are British descendents. Worthen acknowledges but understates this when she says “Britain represents high culture and class…”. I would argue that this applies to more than just Evangelical Americans.
Culture and language, and a sense of history of one’s culture, are very closely bound (incidentally, this view is strongly expressed in Tolkien’s non-fiction). My ancestors pre-1930s didn’t speak English, but because English is my mother tongue, I feel a connection and a sense of continuity with English thought and history. England and Britain remain the cultural home of the English language.
Worthen goes on to say “…—but which Britain? Many evangelicals seem to idealize a long lost arcadia where professor-clergymen praise theology as queen of the sciences and manly Livingstonian missionaries conquer Africa in the name of Christendom—rather than Britannia as she truly is, secularist, multi-cultural warts and all. This is Anglophilia’s dark side. When it drives evangelicals to study in a grey Oxford tower because there no professor will force them to read books that challenge their preexisting ideas, or when it fetishizes sherry and tweed jackets as a highbrow varnish on small-minded prejudices, it becomes mere pretense.”
That’s just bigoted and inaccurate. It’s credible that American Evangelicals would find it less politically charged to study in Britain, but it’s ludicrous to suggest that the curriculum in the land of Richard Dawkins would allow Evangelicals to avoid books that challenge their preexisting ideas.
Sadly, Britain has been among the leaders in embracing the dictatorship of relativism, so Worthen is correct that Evangelical Anglophilia may be based on an idealization that no longer exists. However, this is nothing new. Recall that Lewis was an atheist at first. Also, for example, Tolkien strongly criticized scholars of medieval literature who couldn’t imagine that, for example, the author of Beowulf could be both Christian and intelligent. “Britannia as she truly is..” was well on her way there in Tolkien and Lewis’ time. That’s part of what makes Christian scholars like them so admirable. Not only do they represent impeccable intellectual credentials from the fount of all British-derived cultures, they did so in an academic environment that was already hostile to Christianity.
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