A Christian Mind Out of Practice

The hope of ancient faith for a confused politics and culture

Below is my latest essay for Christianity Today.

Unlike most of my columns, this one is explicitly written for a Christian audience. But those outside the faith might be interested to learn a bit of the history of applied Christianity - and where (and why) it’s strayed as of late.

A Christian Mind Out of Practice

By Abby McCloskey

June 10, 2025

I spent the last year working on a book about Christians, American politics, and the challenges of faithful and nuanced Christian engagement that are unique to this moment. But as I wrote, I came to think those challenges are rooted in a larger problem for American evangelicalism that extends well beyond politics: a Christian mind out of practice.

The brain is not literally muscle, but our minds work as if it were. There is no switch to be turned on and off when quandaries present themselves. We must always exercise our minds, or else they atrophy.

And the American evangelical mind is not in good shape. For too many of us, faith is a private affair that exists largely in our own thoughts—yet those thoughts are not particularly deep. As Mark Noll famously charged three decades ago in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, too many American evangelicals have little appetite for exploring with rigor our historic faith or the world around us.

We seem to come by this tendency honestly: Taking from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is what got humanity cast from the Garden (Gen. 3). In the Gospels, Jesus’ antagonists are often the learned religious and political elite. “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed in him?” religious leaders scoff. “No!” (John 7:48–49). And Jesus himself praised a childlike faith (Matt. 18:3).

But faith does not require anti-intellectualism, and indeed anti-intellectualism is a perilous situation for our faith, especially in an era as cloudy and complex as our own. We are living in a time when divisions run deep and dangerous and distraction crowds out serious thought and engagement. As theologian John Stott once quipped, the Devil is “the enemy of all common sense, moderation and balance.” Christian confusion adds to our country’s social and political chaos and distorts the truth; cultivating a weak and disordered evangelical mind is a profitable endeavor for Old Scratch.

My childhood in the conservative evangelical church of the 1980s was defined by focus on the personal pursuit of an individual relationship with Jesus. After accepting Christ into my heart, I understood the primary activities of the Christian life to be sharing the Good News with others so they could be saved from hell and fixing my own hope on the afterlife. The heaven I expected then was ethereal, a cloud- and harp-filled existence with little familiarity or continuity to life on earth. I tried to look forward to it, but that required the most advanced of mental leaps to make “the things of earth … grow strangely dim,” as that old hymn goes.

This (rightful) emphasis on saving souls and (unfortunate) picture of a disembodied heaven left me—and, I think, many other American evangelicals—with a diminished version of Christian life. It encouraged private discipline but discouraged us from better stewarding a fallen creation (Matt. 25:31–46; Eph. 2:10; James 2:14–26). It cast works, no matter how biblical, as a hangover from Catholicism or else a misguided swerve into the liberal social gospel—something that might sully and distract. Private, spiritualized faith was sufficient in this model, and living a middle-class life in the land of the American dream with a historic period of peace and bipartisanship in the late 20th century made it easy to maintain that illusion.

That idea of Christianity as a one-time, soul-saving decision inadvertently deceived us. We came to think—or, at least, to act on the assumption—that our minds, having been redeemed in Christ, would be able to see all kinds of things clearly without really having to try.

We wouldn’t apply this logic to our bodies, of course: No one thinks that in becoming Christians we immediately sprout bigger muscles and inherently enjoy good health. But we sometimes do, in hubris, behave as if becoming Christians flips a switch in our brains, ignoring all the Bible says about growing in wisdom and understanding (Prov. 2:1–4; Luke 2:52; James 1:5; Heb. 5:12–14). We rely too much on our own thoughts, imagining they can be trusted without testing because we have a Counselor (John 14:26).

This kind of naive hubris—this intellectualized anti-intellectualism—is not inherent to Christianity. In fact, it’s a significant deviation from much of church history. There is a great tradition of applied wisdom in our faith, a tradition of carefully seeking the Creator and humbly accepting his invitation to study and steward his creation. Sociologist Rodney Stark—and, more recently, historian Tom Holland—has argued that it was Christian pursuit of truth that helped to birth the scientific method. Christian intellectual curiosity developed as an act of humility and submission to God, grounded in the belief that the whole universe was marked with his fingerprints.

Functioning rightly, that curiosity is always paired with a distinctly Christian understanding of the fallenness and dignity of each person. This combination of convictions built much of the society and government we have in the US today. Modern democratic governance, abolition, universal education, the introduction of hospitals: All this and more flowed from the people of God actively seeking understanding and taking action in the world for its flourishing. That is, they flowed from the opposite of intellectualized anti-intellectualism.

Today we must recover that older, better model. The mind needs the body, just as the body needs the mind, and I believe the recovery of the Christian mind must start with the church, the body of Christ.

By “the church” I mean both the global church, united across eras, borders, and denominations, and the local congregation. Learning from other Christians, past and present, helps us wrestle past our assumptions and toward the truth. And the local church is a place of embodied community. The Christian mind cannot grow alone or on the empty calories of screen time. We are meant to be in community, to worship together, to encourage and exhort one another in faith and works.

A recovered evangelical mind—one infused with humility, curiosity, and love for Christ and his creation—has much to offer our confused and divided society. Christians should be, of all people, the most aware of the most insidious characteristic sins of our culture: consumerism, constant distraction, alienation, hidden exploitations. We should be committed to a biblical perspective on political and ethical issues even when it requires us to cross party lines. (And as the late theologian Tim Keller pointed out, it surely does.) We should be champions of science and fact over superstition and convenience, reliably careful and thoughtful with the information we receive and share, “as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16).

This is not a call to read a few more books in a community group—though that’s not a bad idea—any more than we can improve physical health by eating a salad or two. It’s rather about exercising our minds in all things to become more Christlike, not for our own sake but to better love others and steward Christ’s creation. The goal, as Noll wrote 30 years ago, is “to exercise the mind for Christ,” “to think like a Christian about the nature and workings of the physical world, the character of human social structures like government and the economy, the meaning of the past, the nature of artistic creation, and the circumstances attending our perception of the world outside ourselves.”

This all takes time and discipline and practice, and it brings no guarantee of clarity for our most difficult problems, let alone a cultural or political turnaround. But deeply thoughtful Christians could be a healing salve for our divisive, angry, and anxious time.

I believe that, in some mysterious way, the deposits of Christian thoughtfulness into the created order are not lost. They are part of the construction of a cathedral we may not live to see, part of our apprenticeship in a work yet unrecognized, part of the establishment of a future kingdom. And sometimes, as history has shown, the world responds to the work of the well-trained Christian mind.