Harvard University Press Blog

Anti-Intellectual Populism and Evangelical Self-Understanding

We’re soon to publish The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. The book is an exploration of intellectual authority within evangelicalism, a seemingly insular world in which, according to Stephens and Giberson, the teachings of dubiously credentialed leaders are favored over the word of secular experts in the arts and sciences. We invited Stephens and Giberson, who each have roots in evangelicalism, to answer a few questions about evangelical truth and its place in American life. 

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Q: Recent observers, including Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, regard statements like Michele Bachmann’s endorsement of evangelical historian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer as anomalous or bizarre. But you argue that huge numbers of Americans embrace ideas like these. Can you explain how beliefs that appear extreme to outside observers can seem mainstream to their Evangelical adherents?

Many of the extreme and puzzling beliefs of evangelicals—like dinosaurs being contemporary with humans—are beliefs that they are raised with. Trusted but uninformed authorities in evangelical churches and religious schools present these ideas to laypeople and ministers so often and so convincingly that many grow up accepting them as obviously true.

Q: In The Anointed, you discuss knowledge authorities in diverse fields—history, evolutionary science, and psychology, among other domains. What threads connect these figures?

There are two threads that run through our Anointed authorities. The first is an appealing “Christianizing” of the ideas. David Barton “Christianizes” American history; Ken Ham “Christianizes” the science of our origins; James Dobson “Christianizes” social science, including the definition of the family. The “Christianizing” of these ideas, by default, undermines the credibility of secular ideas that might challenge the positions promoted by the Anointed leaders.

The second thread is old-fashioned American anti-intellectual populism. Barton, Ham, Dobson, and other Anointed leaders tend to make no effort to engage the fields they claim to represent. Barton never subjects his claims about American history to peer review in a journal. Ken Ham and James Dobson do no scientific research. In the secular world ideas get vetted in the academy through peer review in technical journals; then they appear in serious but more popular outlets; and then finally they might get discussed on the radio. The ideas of the Anointed cut out all these middlemen and appear immediately on the radio or television.

Daniel Lieberman on The Fastest Human Ever

We publish books on such a wide variety of topics that it can often feel like experts on everything are just an email away. We’ll see news stories and wonder, by reflex, what this or that author might have to say about them. “Oh, that’s an interesting take. Let’s get Dr. X on the line for some context.” Or, “That story makes no sense, let’s see if Professor Y can explain.”

That’s exactly what happened the other day when I saw this Chuck Klosterman story on Grantland asking “Is The Fastest Human Ever Already Alive?” The story begins with Usain Bolt, the dominating Jamaican sprinter, Olympic gold medalist, and holder of multiple world records. Klosterman notes the incredible downward trend of sprint times over the last two decades and speculates that, superhuman as they seem now, Bolt’s times could look pedestrian in as few as ten years.

These downward trends can’t continue forever though, because, as Klosterman notes, we can’t expect that a human will eventually run 100 meters in 0 seconds flat. So, working from the assumption that we’ll eventually hit the limit of what’s possible for human speed, Klosterman tries to figure out how close we’ve gotten to the limit, and whether the fastest human ever could possibly already be alive. Not quite as Klostermany as a few weeks back when he tried to apply the sports metric “value over replacement player” to rock musicians, but still pretty Klostermany.

So, anyway, three paragraphs into the article I’m wondering what Daniel Lieberman would have to say about this line of inquiry. Lieberman is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and author of The Evolution of the Human Head, which we published earlier this year. This is right up his alley, let’s send him an email.

But then I kept reading and—look at that—Lieberman pops up towards the end of the story. Way to go, media! And, unsurprisingly to people familiar with his work, Lieberman seems to demur on the question of the upper limits of human speed, because speed just isn’t what we’re built for:

“It’s useful to keep in mind that we should not be too impressed by Bolt and other speedsters. By mammalian standards, they are comparatively slow. Most decent quadrupeds out there—dogs, horses, zebra, lions—can run about 20 meters per second, twice as fast as Bolt, and they can do so for much longer (up to a few minutes). No Olympic sprinter could ever outrun a lion. We humans gave up the ability to run fast by mammalian standards many millions of years ago when we became bipeds and lost the ability to gallop. Instead, what humans excel at is endurance, especially on a hot day.”

In other words: “Think you’re fast? Go race a lion.” Sobering perspective from an expert.

And Lieberman’s very much the expert. We somehow seem to have not shared this video here before, so take a look now. Daniel Lieberman on barefoot running: