THE EMBARRASSMENT REFLEX: Evangelicals and Culture.

One might call this condition of latent discomfort, which tends to manifest as an immediate tendency to distinguish oneself from one’s less enlightened evangelical peers when pressed, the embarrassment reflex. As professor Stephen Dilley explained in First Things in 2014:

In my experience, evangelical schools are particularly deft at self-loathing. . . . In two decades and four schools—ranging from conservative to liberal, private to public, pious to secular—I have never encountered the sheer volume of self-loathing that I experienced as a student (and professor) at an evangelical college. While my experience is anecdotal, I doubt if it’s unique. Why do so many students at evangelical colleges look with disdain upon their own institution—and, in a sense, upon themselves?[4]

Dilley had few answers to the question he posed, but the situation has not improved in the years since. For an obvious case of this embarrassment reflex at work, consider a recent set of claims by conservative evangelical writer David French. . . .

Perhaps the price of elite evangelical respectability in the modern academy is adoption of the embarrassment reflex—understood as, in its deepest sense, a willingness to allow the idea of the “social” to displace that of the classically theological at the taproot of intellectual life. Such a displacement demands that evangelicals norm their theological claims against the conclusions of the social sciences, rather than vice versa—or else be tarred with the dreaded label of fundamentalist.

Well, I’m not an evangelical, or a theologian, just a former preacher’s kid, but I’ve never understood the core of Christianity as being about ensuring that elites feel comfortable with themselves. But I am aware that there’s always a market for such.

Related: We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about. We can’t afford any fancy preachin’.

I mean, seriously.