On the “The Volokh Conspiracy” (a blog) Todd cites data (p. 12) indicating that 53% of academics have negative views of evangelical Christians, the religious group most disliked by the academic community. He theorizes that these negative views are an expression of “bigotry” based on “stereotypes and ignorance.”

This data and commentary are interesting on a number of levels. First, I’m an aspiring academic (doing graduate work in astronomy) and a former evangelical, thus I know many evangelicals and academics well. Second, this issue requires us to think about the difference (if any) between bigotry and having negative views of a group of people.

From my experience with evangelicals, there seems to be a disproportionately large number of evangelicals that have negative views of a subset of academic disciplines. I stress “subset” because there are many intelligent well educated evangelicals out there who respect (and work in) many academic fields. However, many evangelicals strongly disagree with the findings of one or more of the following academic disciplines: evolution, geology, cosmology/astronomy, feminist studies, and biblical studies. It’s probably not too hard to find evangelicals who are comfortable with the scientific findings that conflict with a literal interpretations of Genesis, or who believe that women are equal. However, virtually all evangelicals will disagree with the idea of studying the Bible critically, using reason and evidence and literary analysis.

Assuming that most academics have made the same observations as those listed above, my guess is that academics dislike evangelicals simply because most evangelicals selectively apply the idea of academic freedom/free thought in study. Evangelicals are singled out compared to other groups that are against free thought (e.g. conservative Jews) due to the group’s immense political power in the US. So I think it’s safe to disagree with Todd and say that academics don’t negatively view evangelicals based on ignorance.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll opines that academics dislike evangelicals because evangelicals dislike academia. However, most evangelicals have a high respect for academia, which is why there are many excellent evangelical institutions of higher learning (e.g. Baylor University and Wheaton College). Nonetheless, at most evangelical colleges/universities (including the one I attended as an undergraduate) there are certain taboo subjects such as biblical studies. A weaker reason to disagree with Sean is that most of western academia was created by people who were as religiously conservative or more than evangelical Christians (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge, University of Paris). In fact Sean’s alma mater, Harvard, is named after a Puritan minister.

As for Todd’s accusation of bigotry and stereotyping, I’m still puzzled. My gut instinct is that academic dislike of evangelicals is not bigotry, but I’m not sure what bigotry is. Regarding stereotyping, perhaps not all sterotyping is bad. This is especially true if the stereotype is virtually one of the identifying characteristics of a group. Still, I’ll have to think more about this level of the issue…

Update:

My girlfriend directed my attention to an error in my post: it turns out that bible studies (the historical-critical method) is a valid discipline at many evangelical colleges (including my alma mater), but certain topics within bible studies are still off limits. Thus there remains a restriction on free inquiry.

http://betadecay.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/academics-v-evangelicals/