Autumn 2011

God’s Experts

by Kevin M. Schultz

THE ANOINTED:Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.
By Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson.
Belknap/Harvard.
356 pp. $29.95

To those on the outside, America’s evangelical community might look like an uneducated mass of people who subscribe to beliefs that defy common sense. And we know very little about who has done the spadework for these ideas—including the notion that America has a Christian mission to fulfill and the belief that the Earth was created in six days.

In The Anointed, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, professors at evangelical Eastern Nazarene College near Boston, draw a fascinating group portrait of today’s most popular intellectual leaders among evangelicals and attempt to explain why so many of the faithful buy their arguments. While it is clear that the authors are baffled and even frustrated by many of their cobelievers, they strive to be dispassionate and fair. Most of the time they succeed.

To read the rest of this article, please consider becoming a WQ subscriber, which allows online access to the current WQ issue as well as archive content. Other access options are below.

Research, browse, and discover more than 35 years of articles, essays, and reviews by preeminent scholars and writers. Our searchable archive of back issues is free for WQ subscribers.

Subscribe today
to the WQ Online
and receive immediate access
to the WQ archive for a full year.
Subscribe Now

Kevin M. Schultz, an assistant professor of history and Catholic studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, is the author of Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise, published earlier this year.
more from this author >>

God’s Experts

Animals Are Us

Where the Writers Live

China’s Great Leader