It was 25 years ago that historian Mark Noll wrote a book entitled The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
The scandal, he said, was that in fact ‘there is not much of an evangelical mind’. According to Noll, evangelicals had failed to develop ‘attitudes that treat the worlds of science, the arts, politics, and social analysis with the seriousness that God intends’.
While writing particularly with a North American context in mind, it was clear that much of Noll’s criticisms could have been applied to the UK and Ireland also. And a quarter of a century on, we do well to ask ourselves whether much has changed.
