If we cannot imagine [Marilynne] Robinson being invited to preach at a big-box Bible church somewhere in suburbia, that may say less about her than about the anti-intellectual and artistically indifferent culture of much of today’s evangelicalism; but then, those developments may have been exacerbated by Christian intellectuals’ neglect of their responsibilities to the life of their churches. At some point in the past sixty years or so a perverse and destructive feedback loop engaged, and I cannot see how to disengage it.
Ahhh … phooey.
This thoughtful piece, The Watchmen: What became of the Christian intellectuals?, seems to me like many of the writings of Karl Marx — an astute diagnosis coupled to a prescription grounded on nonsense. Darwin annihilated Christian metaphysics with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, just to make sure nobody could say with a straight face that “Maybe it’s not true, but the teachings are good,” Nietzsche put Christian ethics through the wood-chipper soon afterward. Christianity is finished as a respectable, intellectually serious enterprise; that is why there are no name-brand Christian intellectuals.