Are conservative evangelicals in America ignorant and uneducated? There is a popular stereotype of them being so and as with most stereotypes there are bits of truth and falsehood. It's false that there's no respect for learning among conservative evangelicals; it's true, however, in that the type of learning which is respected is very narrow.

Mark Lilla wrote in The New York Times:

The caricature of American evangelicals as incurious and indifferent to learning is false. Visit any Christian bookstore and you will see that they are gluttons for learning - of a certain kind. They belong to Bible-study groups; they buy works of scriptural interpretation; they sit through tedious courses on cassette, CD or DVD; they take notes during sermons and highlight passages in their Bibles.

If anything, it is their thirst for knowledge that undoes them. Like so many Americans, they know little about history, science, secular literature or, unless they are immigrants, foreign cultures. Yet their thirst for answers to the most urgent moral and existential questions is overwhelming. So they grab for the only glass in the room: God’s revealed Word.

Is this really a “thirst for knowledge,” or is it rather a thirst for confirmation — a thirst for ways to rationalize what people think they already know? Perhaps it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two sometimes, but the fact of the matter is, people with a thirst for knowledge first admit that they don’t know things and then proceed to find source of new information. They seek out new things rather than repeats of old things.

Does this describe the evangelical book stores? Hardly — these stores simply stock the same old books and authors. They don’t admit ignorance; instead, they assert that they already have all the basic answers. All they need is to learn how to best apply those answers (from the Bible) to current circumstances. Conservative evangelicals seek to insulate themselves from outside influences rather than discover ever more influences in order to learn new things.

 

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