While not a dominant factor in this conversation, I think we should also consider evangelical and evangelical-adjacent universities as case studies in this discussion. I will consider the 3 highest-ranked institutions according to USNWR as illustrative tales.
Pepperdine: As recently as 8-9 years ago, Pepperdine was a top 50 institution and seemed more poised to unite many of the conversational partners in this project (evangelical, Catholic, mainline, Anabaptist, even Jewish and Mormon) than anyone else. Then its current administration took over, looked at the collapse of many of those streams, and went all-in on its evangelical orientation in a neoliberal market grab that was revenue-focused, not influence-focused. Whereas the university's marketing material was once dominated by its reach and commitment to academic excellence, it is now peppered with photos of hand-raising at worship summits and is much less about educational excellence. Perhaps not shockingly, the university has dropped nearly 50 spots in USNWR rankings, and its peer assessment score has fallen. Twenty years ago, it was a university that unsuccessfully courted both Patrick Deneen and Michael Lindsay; it would not do so today, and it certainly wouldn't be more likely to succeed. The university seems to have explicitly neutered its academic ambition.
Wheaton: I am less familiar with Wheaton than I am with Pepperdine or Baylor, but the Hochschild incident, fairly or not, still informs its brand. It is a very strong liberal arts college, and one I would encourage many students to consider, but it seems comfortable being what it has always been, which is a college by evangelicals for evangelicals, which even given its location will limit its ability to cultivate leadership pipelines outside its existing networks.
Baylor: Perhaps Baylor is the most interesting evangelical protestant university today; it makes no apology for its national and global ambitions (its Texan DNA helps here), and it seems to want to compete on all the levels that elite institutions currently play (athletics, research productivity, etc.). From a distance, it has also remained quite faithful to its theological orientation, though more conservative Baptists would reasonably disagree.
I currently work in academic administration at a Midwestern land grant university after spending much of my career in evangelical higher education circles, and I attribute much of the lack of an evangelical elite structure to an inability for its institutions to get out of their own way and stop much of the self-defeating navel-gazing that seems not to happen at places like Notre Dame or among members of the AJCU.
I want to echo Kevin’s comment, which Aaron highlighted, because I found myself in a very similar situation during college.
Like Kevin, I attended a secular university and later took a job in government. When I was part of an evangelical, non-denominational church (I’ve since become Presbyterian, as a side note), nearly every young man in the congregation skipped college altogether. Instead, they pursued working-class jobs or “interned” at the church with the goal of becoming a “media pastor” (good grief). As a result, the majority lived in poverty.
The contrast with my current Presbyterian church is striking. Among the young men in our congregation, for example, you’ll find a nuclear engineer, several seminarians, aspiring professors, business owners, and an attorney.
I’m not entirely sure what accounts for the difference, but to be frank, in my experience, non-denominational churches simply do not attract talented or ambitious people—at least not in significant numbers. There are notable exceptions, of course, but they tend to prove the rule rather than disprove it.
This is going to sound hollow to the average evangelical but the evangelical “elite” problem is an aesthetic problem. It is in our association (or maybe better said non-association) with beauty that evangelicals fail the most. To be an elite you must live in beauty, work in beauty, educate in beauty, leisure in beauty and worship in beauty. Fail in any of these categories and YOU ARE NOT ELITE. The evangelical needs to recapture the beautiful to make any progress at all.
The inner ring of cities is not more beautiful than the outer ring of suburbs, most elites aren't living in classic houses, boutique stores are pretentious rather than beautiful, elites don't go to cathedrals, and modern art is not more beautiful than Thomas Kinkade, it's just less kitschy.
Just to throw my $0.02 in as a late 20s evangelical who currently feels the tension between the truly elite track to success and the evangelical alternative.
I am currently a PhD student at an evangelical seminary under a well-respected New Testament scholar. Perhaps this gives me a bit of a insider perspective on the quality of evangelical institutions, higher education more broadly, and the life and interests of evangelical churches.
First, evangelical seminaries/colleges are not on the same level as an elite institution (obviously). However, few institutions are. At some level, expecting evangelical institutions to compete with elite ones is a bit of comparing apples and oranges. What state university, even flagship ones, can compete with Harvard, Yale, or U Chicago? They are the some of the best educational institutions in the entire world, and they draw students and professors from a worldwide talent base. It’s brutal for even bright, well-educated non-evangelical Americans to be admitted to elite institutions, even harder to be admitted into their PhD programs, and even harder still to land a professorship at an elite institution, or even an R1 university. There is a major surplus of PhD students and a shrinking demand for professors in every field. Tenure-track positions routinely receive hundreds of applications for a single job opening. If your resume suggests that you lean evangelical, it is almost a guarantee for your resume to be tossed in the trash without a second thought. Why even consider an evangelical for a top-tier role when you can pick from a couple hundred others who don’t have that baggage?
What I’m trying to say is that evangelicals in America face an uphill battle to landing jobs at elite universities, partly 1) because they are American, and have to compete against the talent of the world (not to mention DEI thinking still in effect) and 2) because they are evangelical, and research universities are deeply hostile to evangelicals in a way they are not to any other religious expression. While some evangelical beliefs are certainly low-brow and off-putting to elite tastes, many elite institutions find the beliefs of evangelicals morally repugnant, reprehensible, and outright evil. There’s more to the story than simply “evangelicals are rednecks.”
Second, evangelicals have had limited success in forming elites because, at the most basic level, most of us simply don’t care about forming elites. It’s not even on the radar. The priorities of most evangelicals and evangelical churches is something like: evangelize, help people understand the Bible and follow Jesus, teach them the rudiments of a normal life (get married, have kids, work a steady job, buy a house), avoid sin, serve the church, and stay faithful until the 2nd coming of Christ. To put it bluntly, all of those things are incredibly important to orthodox Christianity. Elite formation starts to look optional when compared to these bedrock priorities. I’m not saying it should look that way, but it is understandable. When you crack open your Bible, what jumps out at you: how to become someone who shapes culture at the highest level, or how to follow Jesus in normal, mundane life? Evangelicalism is a religious tradition drawn from the people, and so it is built for them. The overwhelming majority of people have exactly a 0% chance of becoming a mover and a shaker, so evangelical churches don’t prioritize that goal.
Third, I’ll conclude this already too-long post with an anecdote. I was in a seminar last year with a bunch of other PhD students. One of the books we had to read for the seminar was George Marsden’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I found myself agreeing with a lot of Marsden’s critiques of evangelicalism, but a student from the Netherlands did not. He said something to the effect of, “The Netherlands doesn’t have any of the problems Marsden lists. We don’t deal with anti-intellectualism, fundamentalist schisms, separation from broader culture, or a lack of rigorous scholarship. You know what else the Netherlands doesn’t have? Christians.”
He had a point. For all the flaws of evangelicals, we still care deeply about converting and discipling people. Episcopalians and Catholics have done a better job of producing elites, granted. But their conversion numbers and baptisms are dropping like its October,1929. It will be increasingly hard for them to produce elites when they don’t have any candidates for elite tracks.
One, Anthony Bradley had a 5th bullet that was left off. "If we want conservative Protestant elites, they will only emerge through denominations such as the OPC, LCMS, PCA, and others. The culture of non-denominationalism cannot produce the elites that Renn describes. It is structurally impossible." I agree that non-denominationalism/independency, as distinct from congregationalist associations, is a fundamentally flawed system.
Second, re: YEC, the exact same arguments can be levied to much greater effect about the bodily resurrection of Christ or countless miracles in the Old and New Testaments. Bodies literally start to grow cold FAST and they don't just come back to life, especially not ones brutally executed like Jesus was. No one in the Greco-Roman world would have cared if all Christianity taught was that there was some spiritual resurrection and it's a perfectly safe, if sentimental teaching for our skeptical world. There's far worse stumbling blocks than YEC within Christianity orthodoxy that keep someone from being elite, and I don't think someone has to hold to YEC to be orthodox.
This topic has been of strong interest to me because of my faith and work. I'm a member of "elite institutions" (background: senior management/corporate/academia -- top-tier institutions). A few observations over many years of reflection:
- I identify with evangelicalism and have no desire to become, say, Catholic. But I came to terms with the fact that the evangelical church does not have much to offer in terms of ministry to professional vocations. So I'm happy to worship, serve, and participate in church life, and live in a somewhat bifurcated world.
- In the rare occasions that I have been able to, I have gone to other believers in similar situations or just non-believers with knowledge/wisdom for advice.
- Keller and other evangelical elites have done good work to build up believers in their faith. They, however, do not have much to offer to many professionals in the workplace. The paradigmatic story of a manager who shows grace by not firing an underperformer, who then becomes a model employee, has limited value. Anyone who has managed in performance environments knows that stories like that are inspiring, but devoid of details and not the norm.
- For discussions on the theology of vocation, the best discussions are invisible in evangelicalism. Two examples: Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation; and Paul Helm, The Callings (an outstanding and accessible book, which highly influenced me as a young believer).
- Catholics have intellectual firepower, which can be important in some professions. If you're an academically-inclined lawyer, for instance, you can refer to John Finnis or Robert George. There are also prestigious Catholic universities. For a number of reasons, evangelicals don't have equivalent examples.
- My particular fields are not informed by "Christian" scholarship (and whatever evangelicals say, typically seminary professors, tends to be rudimentary). If references are helpful, I'm happy to resort to Catholics -- and am happy to have some very good Catholic peers.
- The idea of cultivating networks is a great one--as long as they're not sponsored by pastoral/seminary evangelical elites. They need to be legitimized by practitioners or people with first-hand experience (successful entrepreneur, academic of some standing, senior manager in top-tier corporate environment, high-level lawyer, engineer, or economist, etc.).
Growing up in a rural Evangelical setting, we were taught repeatedly that good Christians should "be in the world but not of the world." We were a persecuted group, at war with the secular world. That perspective could not have been more consistently reinforced, and this was also paired with active disdain for the kinds of pathways that produce cultural or intellectual elites. The "acceptable" pathways for ambition, at least for boys, were 1) ministry, 2) military/police, 3) athletics, and 4) business, and the latter mostly meant businesses that coded a certain way culturally. Construction, trucking, oil and gas, farming, real estate, etc. All legitimate and important businesses, but not ones that tend to produce elites who shape the broader social and political fabric of American society. At least in my high school, even going to a secular college was viewed with a certain level of suspicion (I was in fact the ONLY one of my high school graduating class who attended a secular college, and it was the local state university, not a flagship).
The other serious problem, if I'm being frank, is that the kind of education provided to Evangelical children in these settings is not sufficient to compete in the broader world. I'm lucky that I read voraciously as a kid on my own, compensating for that absence, but even then my math education for example was woefully inadequate. It took a very intentional effort in college to make up for that gap. The history we were taught was a caricature of real history, the science education was a joke (compare the experience at a small Evangelical parochial school to the kind of science education they get at even ordinary Catholic schools), and our "government/civics" classes were in effect Republican party talking points puffed out to fill a high school textbook. Essentially our curriculum was a structured as a blend of Abeka, BJU, and homebrew stuff cooked up by friends of our school administrators.
I know that the majority of Evangelical children don't go to schools like the one I did, so formal education barriers alone don't explain the dearth of Evangelical elites. I mention these experiences because I found that they represent an extreme form of broader tendencies I've observed in rural Evangelical culture. Most of my broader social circle did not attend my particular school, but shared some of these values nonetheless. These include suspicion of education/intellectualism, hostility to those who aspire to positions of secular leadership and influence, and the notion that a kid who wanted these things was betraying family, faith, and heritage.
My own two sense as an outsider to Evangelicalism, it seems that part of the issue is a low set of expectations. I met many an evangelical who was incredibly impressed by students who attended evangelical institutions of higher learning which were by no means exceptional.
If the best the an Evangelical can strive for and be respected within the culture is a Baylor U, a Biola, a Westmont, I think this problem will never be solved. Say what you will about the Catholics, but they have a bevy of options that are perceived to be superior in both the liberal arts and R1 fields.
A comment in response to "[w]hen you identify as catholic that does not commit you to catholic doctrine, it’s more of an ethnic, cultural, and sacramental identifier (you were baptized)."
The phrase "does not commit" is doing a lot of work there. There is a difference perhaps between whether someone can "identify" as a Catholic socially or on a government form and to be a Catholic in good standing. The former is ambiguous but the latter is not. You are also required to profess and to believe a long list of theological positions at least every single week in public.
I think there are a few large reasons why secular elites do not penalize Catholics as much socially for our retrograde beliefs.
One is that American progressives descend from disparate strains of Evangelicals and Baptists, who were arrayed in opposition to the (literally, pre-14th Amendment and various state constitutional amendments) established state churches of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Progressives see Evangelicals as the shadow version of themselves.
They are two kinds of frog that eats the same kind of thing living in the same swamp. To the progressive an evangelical is defective because they direct all of their spiritual force towards the religion instead of building the political machine that will either make the world perfect or destroy it entirely. We all know what happened to the established protestant religions: they crumbled; but Catholics supplanted them in roughly the same geography.
The second reason is that progressives fervently believe that through prayer, bribery, and propaganda, they can basically erode Catholic resistance to theological and cultural change. They see individual Catholics as prisoners of the institution, but they do not really see them as responsible for the beliefs. Kicking such a person for being a mind-controlled slave of the Vatican does not seem sporting to progressives.
I would especially highlight Anthony Bradley's comment #1. Because Evangelicalism is not an actual ecclesial body (what Catholics and Orthodox call Churches as in "the Church in Corinth" with identifiable leadership and organizational structure), it tends to fragment much more quickly and hamstrings efforts to build networks and coordinate action in the secular sphere. This also makes institutional renewal much more difficult, because they are constantly starting from scratch instead of working from within a larger organization. Granted, that organization may suppress you for a time, but holiness usually wins in the end, because persecuting their own people delegitimizes bishops in the eyes of the faithful.
Jabster also makes a great point. If you can't even present a remotely viable path to reconciling the age of the earth with Scripture, then you will lose most of you engineers and scientists. Catholics are light years ahead of Protestants in this regard (e.g., Stanley Jaki's book, The Savior of Science).
Regarding Greg Scalise's comment, "My Christian fellowship in college was put on probation basically for being evangelical. And you can find plenty of parallel news stories like that about evangelical groups, but I’ve never come across that happening to a catholic group."
This actually has happened. The Thomas More society has lots of examples of this, but it is usually a broader ecumenical founded by Catholics that gets banned by universities. When Catholics organize on controversial topics in the public sphere, they are usually ecumenical in nature. Sometimes you can have both Catholic and Protestant pro-life groups on campus, but usually there is just one, for instance.
Far more common, though, is when a bishop goes after students. At the University of New Mexico, Catholic students were banned by the local bishop from passing out fliers on Christian marriage pre-Obergefell, so they instead founded a group under the local Byzantine Catholic bishop to get out from under his thumb. This persecution of faithful Catholics by their local bishop is rather common in the West. The bishops themselves are divided quite starkly with several clearly lacking faith in basic Catholic dogma. Certainly, my own bishop lacks faith. He is about as corrupt as they come (not the same guy who banned the fliers, and nameless for reasons of retaliation).
There are simply so many Americans who just want to, or have to, live simple lives about work and family -- they lack the smarts, resources, skills, contacts, and inside knowledge to be or do anything different. Moreover, there's a fierce pride in the US among these common people. It's part of what defines our nation, in my opinion. I think evangelicalism and other so-called low-status Christian traditions (e.g., pentecostalism) draw heavily from these common people.
Maybe evangelicals ARE the culture they want. Maybe resisting elite formation is, if not the point, an embraced side effect (the bug that became a feature).
I grew up working-class. My parents pushed my brother and me to college - me to Rose-Hulman, him to Notre Dame. They succeeded in moving us up economically. But by the end of their lives, we couldn't even discuss Donald Trump with them. They were pro-Trump, we were horrified. The cultural gulf had become unbridgeable.
This is the mechanism that prevents evangelical elite formation. The very process of becoming elite changes you. To succeed at Harvard or in elite institutions, you must absorb elite values and ways of thinking. You can't operate in those spaces while maintaining the worldview of the people you came from. By the time you have the credentials and access to represent your community's interests, you've become someone who no longer fully understands or shares their concerns. You haven't sold out - you've just become a different person through immersion in a different world.
This might be why the evangelical elite you're calling for is structurally impossible. The path to elite status is also the path away from the community. My parents' sacrifice got us economic security, but the cost was losing their sons culturally. That's the trade-off, and I'm not sure there's a way around it.
A brief note on the Kruptos article: he's not wrong about how evangelicalism is perceived by others and how many in the evangelical fold behave and think, but I question whether or not the perception of a lack of evangelical intellectual seriousness among the elites is grounded in reality rather than prejudice.
Nearly every single critique he levels at evangelicals I could level at any other group in American society, from not liking nuance to lacking groundedness in history or tradition (because let's be real here, once you get offline how many people are actually integralists, distributists, or neo-Kuyperians?), and I have not been altogether impressed by the quality of legal thought provided by America's "elite" institutions.
While not a dominant factor in this conversation, I think we should also consider evangelical and evangelical-adjacent universities as case studies in this discussion. I will consider the 3 highest-ranked institutions according to USNWR as illustrative tales.
Pepperdine: As recently as 8-9 years ago, Pepperdine was a top 50 institution and seemed more poised to unite many of the conversational partners in this project (evangelical, Catholic, mainline, Anabaptist, even Jewish and Mormon) than anyone else. Then its current administration took over, looked at the collapse of many of those streams, and went all-in on its evangelical orientation in a neoliberal market grab that was revenue-focused, not influence-focused. Whereas the university's marketing material was once dominated by its reach and commitment to academic excellence, it is now peppered with photos of hand-raising at worship summits and is much less about educational excellence. Perhaps not shockingly, the university has dropped nearly 50 spots in USNWR rankings, and its peer assessment score has fallen. Twenty years ago, it was a university that unsuccessfully courted both Patrick Deneen and Michael Lindsay; it would not do so today, and it certainly wouldn't be more likely to succeed. The university seems to have explicitly neutered its academic ambition.
Wheaton: I am less familiar with Wheaton than I am with Pepperdine or Baylor, but the Hochschild incident, fairly or not, still informs its brand. It is a very strong liberal arts college, and one I would encourage many students to consider, but it seems comfortable being what it has always been, which is a college by evangelicals for evangelicals, which even given its location will limit its ability to cultivate leadership pipelines outside its existing networks.
Baylor: Perhaps Baylor is the most interesting evangelical protestant university today; it makes no apology for its national and global ambitions (its Texan DNA helps here), and it seems to want to compete on all the levels that elite institutions currently play (athletics, research productivity, etc.). From a distance, it has also remained quite faithful to its theological orientation, though more conservative Baptists would reasonably disagree.
I currently work in academic administration at a Midwestern land grant university after spending much of my career in evangelical higher education circles, and I attribute much of the lack of an evangelical elite structure to an inability for its institutions to get out of their own way and stop much of the self-defeating navel-gazing that seems not to happen at places like Notre Dame or among members of the AJCU.
I want to echo Kevin’s comment, which Aaron highlighted, because I found myself in a very similar situation during college.
Like Kevin, I attended a secular university and later took a job in government. When I was part of an evangelical, non-denominational church (I’ve since become Presbyterian, as a side note), nearly every young man in the congregation skipped college altogether. Instead, they pursued working-class jobs or “interned” at the church with the goal of becoming a “media pastor” (good grief). As a result, the majority lived in poverty.
The contrast with my current Presbyterian church is striking. Among the young men in our congregation, for example, you’ll find a nuclear engineer, several seminarians, aspiring professors, business owners, and an attorney.
I’m not entirely sure what accounts for the difference, but to be frank, in my experience, non-denominational churches simply do not attract talented or ambitious people—at least not in significant numbers. There are notable exceptions, of course, but they tend to prove the rule rather than disprove it.
This is going to sound hollow to the average evangelical but the evangelical “elite” problem is an aesthetic problem. It is in our association (or maybe better said non-association) with beauty that evangelicals fail the most. To be an elite you must live in beauty, work in beauty, educate in beauty, leisure in beauty and worship in beauty. Fail in any of these categories and YOU ARE NOT ELITE. The evangelical needs to recapture the beautiful to make any progress at all.
"To be an elite you must live in beauty, work in beauty, educate in beauty, leisure in beauty and worship in beauty"
Please explain to me what is beautiful about the current elites of our society, their milieu, and their tastes that evangelicals don't have.
If you did a survey that gave you an average of elites and evangelicals this is my guess:
Elites- inner ring of cities-------------outer ring suburbs Evangelicals
classic houses----------------MacMansions
boutique stores--------------chain stores
Michelin restaurant-----------chain restaurant
Trader Joes---------------------Walmart
Rosemary Beach--------------Branson
Cathedral (stained glass)-----------mega church (light show)
modern art-----------------------Thomas Kinkade
sublime-------------------------pretty
The inner ring of cities is not more beautiful than the outer ring of suburbs, most elites aren't living in classic houses, boutique stores are pretentious rather than beautiful, elites don't go to cathedrals, and modern art is not more beautiful than Thomas Kinkade, it's just less kitschy.
Seriously, this comment reeks of snobbery.
Here is the question then… is beauty subjective or objective? It seems to me you are saying “ beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
There is an objective standard of beauty. I simply don't think that yours--or mine, for that matter--matches up with it.
lol
Just to throw my $0.02 in as a late 20s evangelical who currently feels the tension between the truly elite track to success and the evangelical alternative.
I am currently a PhD student at an evangelical seminary under a well-respected New Testament scholar. Perhaps this gives me a bit of a insider perspective on the quality of evangelical institutions, higher education more broadly, and the life and interests of evangelical churches.
First, evangelical seminaries/colleges are not on the same level as an elite institution (obviously). However, few institutions are. At some level, expecting evangelical institutions to compete with elite ones is a bit of comparing apples and oranges. What state university, even flagship ones, can compete with Harvard, Yale, or U Chicago? They are the some of the best educational institutions in the entire world, and they draw students and professors from a worldwide talent base. It’s brutal for even bright, well-educated non-evangelical Americans to be admitted to elite institutions, even harder to be admitted into their PhD programs, and even harder still to land a professorship at an elite institution, or even an R1 university. There is a major surplus of PhD students and a shrinking demand for professors in every field. Tenure-track positions routinely receive hundreds of applications for a single job opening. If your resume suggests that you lean evangelical, it is almost a guarantee for your resume to be tossed in the trash without a second thought. Why even consider an evangelical for a top-tier role when you can pick from a couple hundred others who don’t have that baggage?
What I’m trying to say is that evangelicals in America face an uphill battle to landing jobs at elite universities, partly 1) because they are American, and have to compete against the talent of the world (not to mention DEI thinking still in effect) and 2) because they are evangelical, and research universities are deeply hostile to evangelicals in a way they are not to any other religious expression. While some evangelical beliefs are certainly low-brow and off-putting to elite tastes, many elite institutions find the beliefs of evangelicals morally repugnant, reprehensible, and outright evil. There’s more to the story than simply “evangelicals are rednecks.”
Second, evangelicals have had limited success in forming elites because, at the most basic level, most of us simply don’t care about forming elites. It’s not even on the radar. The priorities of most evangelicals and evangelical churches is something like: evangelize, help people understand the Bible and follow Jesus, teach them the rudiments of a normal life (get married, have kids, work a steady job, buy a house), avoid sin, serve the church, and stay faithful until the 2nd coming of Christ. To put it bluntly, all of those things are incredibly important to orthodox Christianity. Elite formation starts to look optional when compared to these bedrock priorities. I’m not saying it should look that way, but it is understandable. When you crack open your Bible, what jumps out at you: how to become someone who shapes culture at the highest level, or how to follow Jesus in normal, mundane life? Evangelicalism is a religious tradition drawn from the people, and so it is built for them. The overwhelming majority of people have exactly a 0% chance of becoming a mover and a shaker, so evangelical churches don’t prioritize that goal.
Third, I’ll conclude this already too-long post with an anecdote. I was in a seminar last year with a bunch of other PhD students. One of the books we had to read for the seminar was George Marsden’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I found myself agreeing with a lot of Marsden’s critiques of evangelicalism, but a student from the Netherlands did not. He said something to the effect of, “The Netherlands doesn’t have any of the problems Marsden lists. We don’t deal with anti-intellectualism, fundamentalist schisms, separation from broader culture, or a lack of rigorous scholarship. You know what else the Netherlands doesn’t have? Christians.”
He had a point. For all the flaws of evangelicals, we still care deeply about converting and discipling people. Episcopalians and Catholics have done a better job of producing elites, granted. But their conversion numbers and baptisms are dropping like its October,1929. It will be increasingly hard for them to produce elites when they don’t have any candidates for elite tracks.
A couple of thoughts here.
One, Anthony Bradley had a 5th bullet that was left off. "If we want conservative Protestant elites, they will only emerge through denominations such as the OPC, LCMS, PCA, and others. The culture of non-denominationalism cannot produce the elites that Renn describes. It is structurally impossible." I agree that non-denominationalism/independency, as distinct from congregationalist associations, is a fundamentally flawed system.
Second, re: YEC, the exact same arguments can be levied to much greater effect about the bodily resurrection of Christ or countless miracles in the Old and New Testaments. Bodies literally start to grow cold FAST and they don't just come back to life, especially not ones brutally executed like Jesus was. No one in the Greco-Roman world would have cared if all Christianity taught was that there was some spiritual resurrection and it's a perfectly safe, if sentimental teaching for our skeptical world. There's far worse stumbling blocks than YEC within Christianity orthodoxy that keep someone from being elite, and I don't think someone has to hold to YEC to be orthodox.
This topic has been of strong interest to me because of my faith and work. I'm a member of "elite institutions" (background: senior management/corporate/academia -- top-tier institutions). A few observations over many years of reflection:
- I identify with evangelicalism and have no desire to become, say, Catholic. But I came to terms with the fact that the evangelical church does not have much to offer in terms of ministry to professional vocations. So I'm happy to worship, serve, and participate in church life, and live in a somewhat bifurcated world.
- In the rare occasions that I have been able to, I have gone to other believers in similar situations or just non-believers with knowledge/wisdom for advice.
- Keller and other evangelical elites have done good work to build up believers in their faith. They, however, do not have much to offer to many professionals in the workplace. The paradigmatic story of a manager who shows grace by not firing an underperformer, who then becomes a model employee, has limited value. Anyone who has managed in performance environments knows that stories like that are inspiring, but devoid of details and not the norm.
- For discussions on the theology of vocation, the best discussions are invisible in evangelicalism. Two examples: Gustaf Wingren, Luther on Vocation; and Paul Helm, The Callings (an outstanding and accessible book, which highly influenced me as a young believer).
- Catholics have intellectual firepower, which can be important in some professions. If you're an academically-inclined lawyer, for instance, you can refer to John Finnis or Robert George. There are also prestigious Catholic universities. For a number of reasons, evangelicals don't have equivalent examples.
- My particular fields are not informed by "Christian" scholarship (and whatever evangelicals say, typically seminary professors, tends to be rudimentary). If references are helpful, I'm happy to resort to Catholics -- and am happy to have some very good Catholic peers.
- The idea of cultivating networks is a great one--as long as they're not sponsored by pastoral/seminary evangelical elites. They need to be legitimized by practitioners or people with first-hand experience (successful entrepreneur, academic of some standing, senior manager in top-tier corporate environment, high-level lawyer, engineer, or economist, etc.).
Growing up in a rural Evangelical setting, we were taught repeatedly that good Christians should "be in the world but not of the world." We were a persecuted group, at war with the secular world. That perspective could not have been more consistently reinforced, and this was also paired with active disdain for the kinds of pathways that produce cultural or intellectual elites. The "acceptable" pathways for ambition, at least for boys, were 1) ministry, 2) military/police, 3) athletics, and 4) business, and the latter mostly meant businesses that coded a certain way culturally. Construction, trucking, oil and gas, farming, real estate, etc. All legitimate and important businesses, but not ones that tend to produce elites who shape the broader social and political fabric of American society. At least in my high school, even going to a secular college was viewed with a certain level of suspicion (I was in fact the ONLY one of my high school graduating class who attended a secular college, and it was the local state university, not a flagship).
The other serious problem, if I'm being frank, is that the kind of education provided to Evangelical children in these settings is not sufficient to compete in the broader world. I'm lucky that I read voraciously as a kid on my own, compensating for that absence, but even then my math education for example was woefully inadequate. It took a very intentional effort in college to make up for that gap. The history we were taught was a caricature of real history, the science education was a joke (compare the experience at a small Evangelical parochial school to the kind of science education they get at even ordinary Catholic schools), and our "government/civics" classes were in effect Republican party talking points puffed out to fill a high school textbook. Essentially our curriculum was a structured as a blend of Abeka, BJU, and homebrew stuff cooked up by friends of our school administrators.
I know that the majority of Evangelical children don't go to schools like the one I did, so formal education barriers alone don't explain the dearth of Evangelical elites. I mention these experiences because I found that they represent an extreme form of broader tendencies I've observed in rural Evangelical culture. Most of my broader social circle did not attend my particular school, but shared some of these values nonetheless. These include suspicion of education/intellectualism, hostility to those who aspire to positions of secular leadership and influence, and the notion that a kid who wanted these things was betraying family, faith, and heritage.
My own two sense as an outsider to Evangelicalism, it seems that part of the issue is a low set of expectations. I met many an evangelical who was incredibly impressed by students who attended evangelical institutions of higher learning which were by no means exceptional.
If the best the an Evangelical can strive for and be respected within the culture is a Baylor U, a Biola, a Westmont, I think this problem will never be solved. Say what you will about the Catholics, but they have a bevy of options that are perceived to be superior in both the liberal arts and R1 fields.
A comment in response to "[w]hen you identify as catholic that does not commit you to catholic doctrine, it’s more of an ethnic, cultural, and sacramental identifier (you were baptized)."
The phrase "does not commit" is doing a lot of work there. There is a difference perhaps between whether someone can "identify" as a Catholic socially or on a government form and to be a Catholic in good standing. The former is ambiguous but the latter is not. You are also required to profess and to believe a long list of theological positions at least every single week in public.
I think there are a few large reasons why secular elites do not penalize Catholics as much socially for our retrograde beliefs.
One is that American progressives descend from disparate strains of Evangelicals and Baptists, who were arrayed in opposition to the (literally, pre-14th Amendment and various state constitutional amendments) established state churches of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Progressives see Evangelicals as the shadow version of themselves.
They are two kinds of frog that eats the same kind of thing living in the same swamp. To the progressive an evangelical is defective because they direct all of their spiritual force towards the religion instead of building the political machine that will either make the world perfect or destroy it entirely. We all know what happened to the established protestant religions: they crumbled; but Catholics supplanted them in roughly the same geography.
The second reason is that progressives fervently believe that through prayer, bribery, and propaganda, they can basically erode Catholic resistance to theological and cultural change. They see individual Catholics as prisoners of the institution, but they do not really see them as responsible for the beliefs. Kicking such a person for being a mind-controlled slave of the Vatican does not seem sporting to progressives.
Lots of great comments.
I would especially highlight Anthony Bradley's comment #1. Because Evangelicalism is not an actual ecclesial body (what Catholics and Orthodox call Churches as in "the Church in Corinth" with identifiable leadership and organizational structure), it tends to fragment much more quickly and hamstrings efforts to build networks and coordinate action in the secular sphere. This also makes institutional renewal much more difficult, because they are constantly starting from scratch instead of working from within a larger organization. Granted, that organization may suppress you for a time, but holiness usually wins in the end, because persecuting their own people delegitimizes bishops in the eyes of the faithful.
Jabster also makes a great point. If you can't even present a remotely viable path to reconciling the age of the earth with Scripture, then you will lose most of you engineers and scientists. Catholics are light years ahead of Protestants in this regard (e.g., Stanley Jaki's book, The Savior of Science).
Regarding Greg Scalise's comment, "My Christian fellowship in college was put on probation basically for being evangelical. And you can find plenty of parallel news stories like that about evangelical groups, but I’ve never come across that happening to a catholic group."
This actually has happened. The Thomas More society has lots of examples of this, but it is usually a broader ecumenical founded by Catholics that gets banned by universities. When Catholics organize on controversial topics in the public sphere, they are usually ecumenical in nature. Sometimes you can have both Catholic and Protestant pro-life groups on campus, but usually there is just one, for instance.
Far more common, though, is when a bishop goes after students. At the University of New Mexico, Catholic students were banned by the local bishop from passing out fliers on Christian marriage pre-Obergefell, so they instead founded a group under the local Byzantine Catholic bishop to get out from under his thumb. This persecution of faithful Catholics by their local bishop is rather common in the West. The bishops themselves are divided quite starkly with several clearly lacking faith in basic Catholic dogma. Certainly, my own bishop lacks faith. He is about as corrupt as they come (not the same guy who banned the fliers, and nameless for reasons of retaliation).
There are simply so many Americans who just want to, or have to, live simple lives about work and family -- they lack the smarts, resources, skills, contacts, and inside knowledge to be or do anything different. Moreover, there's a fierce pride in the US among these common people. It's part of what defines our nation, in my opinion. I think evangelicalism and other so-called low-status Christian traditions (e.g., pentecostalism) draw heavily from these common people.
Maybe evangelicals ARE the culture they want. Maybe resisting elite formation is, if not the point, an embraced side effect (the bug that became a feature).
I grew up working-class. My parents pushed my brother and me to college - me to Rose-Hulman, him to Notre Dame. They succeeded in moving us up economically. But by the end of their lives, we couldn't even discuss Donald Trump with them. They were pro-Trump, we were horrified. The cultural gulf had become unbridgeable.
This is the mechanism that prevents evangelical elite formation. The very process of becoming elite changes you. To succeed at Harvard or in elite institutions, you must absorb elite values and ways of thinking. You can't operate in those spaces while maintaining the worldview of the people you came from. By the time you have the credentials and access to represent your community's interests, you've become someone who no longer fully understands or shares their concerns. You haven't sold out - you've just become a different person through immersion in a different world.
This might be why the evangelical elite you're calling for is structurally impossible. The path to elite status is also the path away from the community. My parents' sacrifice got us economic security, but the cost was losing their sons culturally. That's the trade-off, and I'm not sure there's a way around it.
A brief note on the Kruptos article: he's not wrong about how evangelicalism is perceived by others and how many in the evangelical fold behave and think, but I question whether or not the perception of a lack of evangelical intellectual seriousness among the elites is grounded in reality rather than prejudice.
Nearly every single critique he levels at evangelicals I could level at any other group in American society, from not liking nuance to lacking groundedness in history or tradition (because let's be real here, once you get offline how many people are actually integralists, distributists, or neo-Kuyperians?), and I have not been altogether impressed by the quality of legal thought provided by America's "elite" institutions.