I am a historian who loves to investigate ideas, manners, habits and their origins.
Intellectual and cultural genealogies are important context for understanding systems, governments, institutions, and peoples. In higher academia, for example, we pay attention to who someone’s dissertation advisors were. It matters that the discredited Lost Cause narrative of post-Civil War Reconstruction was promoted, not by a Southern school, but, by the Ivy League elite at Columbia University, a narrative developed by professor William Archibald Dunning and his students. This northern elite intellectual cadre created a historical narrative that served as an excuse Southerners used to justify Jim Crow. To them, giving Black men the right to vote was an awful idea that could only have come from idiots or corrupt politicians who wanted the votes of freedmen so they could take power. They claimed having to treat Blacks as fellow voters had been an undue hardship on Southern Whites, who were of course only to be expected to react violently against this imposition by the “corrupt” Yankee Republicans. How the former Black slaves were supposed to react to citizenship, after being robbed, violated, and beaten for centuries and then losing the right to vote, was beside the point; what mattered was that Southern Whites had a hard time and this school of historiography provided the academic pedigree to support Southern White supremacy and disarm Northern White liberal critics of the Southern racial order.
It also matters that Socrates was from Athens and lived from 470 BC to 399 BC. He lived through the Golden Age of Athens, and its hubris, and he was the teacher of Plato. Plato was also from Athens, and lived from around 423 BC to 348 BC, and saw Athenian democracy scapegoat and judicially murder Socrates after the Peloponnesian War. Plato went on, founded an academy and became the teacher of Aristotle who hailed from the northern city of Stagira near the Macedonian border. Aristotle, who lived from 384 BC to 322 BC, came to Athens and remained there until the death of Plato. That is an intellectual genealogy where we can trace the evolution and consequences of particular lines of thought through their work. After Plato died, Aristotle traveled for a few years and eventually went back north to become the tutor of the 13 year-old son of the Macedonian king, and that boy grew up to become Alexander the Great. Consequences.
Something I have mentioned before is that the 18th and 19th-century success of the United States versus its fellow former colonies in the Western Hemisphere can be explained by heritage. It matters immensely that the USA came from England and that its competitors came from Portugal, Spain, and France. America was not “European,” it was “British.” The colonial inheritance went through Canterbury, not Rome or Moscow.
Because origins, connections, and transmissions matter, we can analyze habits of social organization—like civilizational manners and leadership capacity, or their absence—by looking closely at who the caretakers of a culture were and whom they served.
The cultural critic Aaron Renn recently argued that the 'evangelical elite' is essentially a misnomer because it doesn't exist. Despite numbering in the tens of millions, evangelicals wield far less influence than their sheer size would suggest. Renn notes that while evangelicals are successful in “prosaic” business and populist politics, they are almost entirely absent from the “commanding heights” of law, finance, and culture-shaping institutions. This observation prompted a penetrating analysis from theologian, Dr. Anthony Bradley on Substack Notes last week:
The evangelical elite deficit is an intellectual-cultural inheritance crisis.
As a historian, I love these social-intellectual discussions about Protestantism, as it is the tradition with, by far, the greatest legacy impact on American society, especially during the first three centuries. My own trajectory through Oral Roberts University, Norwich University, and Howard University has provided me with a unique vantage point on how different American subcultures transmit their values and organize their worlds. I have seen the zeal of the relatively recent evangelical enclosure, the legacy reservoir of WASP institutional discipline in the military scholar tradition, and the excellence forged by the determined resilience of a Protestant tradition that could never assume respect or dignity.
Renn is right on the “what,” and Bradley is right on the “why.” We need to also look at the “who.” The evangelical elite deficit is an intellectual-cultural lineage crisis. Who are the evangelicals under discussion, and what were their ancestors doing a century ago? What habits did they inculcate and how did they get separated from earlier American Protestant traditions of elite formation? Institution-building requires a cultural mindset, and how many evangelicals come from American subcultures with a real history of doing that under duress and without inherited high status? Can you build institutions if your early 20th-century ancestors were defined by a habitus of withdrawal, separation, and a chronic, excessive suspicion of institutions?
Many evangelicals understand ownership, but they do not understand governance. Evangelical business success is concentrated in sectors like retail, restaurants, and distribution—niche fiefs, where the power of ownership is absolute. This is effective for building a company with a relatively predictable business model, but it is a poor preparation for the commanding heights of society. Institutional power in places like high finance, the Supreme Court, or elite universities requires a different social capital: the ability to marshal a consensus among the governed and to navigate complex, high-trust systems that you do not personally own. When evangelicals bring a fief mindset to politics or public institutions, they may win a few elections, but often fail to create durable institutions that flourish and survive in a messy and fallen world. Instead, they become lords of gated enclaves and public square paupers.
We see this evidenced in the habitual church splits triggered by contentious disagreement. Evangelicals require a tradition with stronger institutional brakes on the impulse for withdrawal from uncomfortable situations. This would mean adopting a culture of institutional patience, as mentioned by Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, in a recent article: “Anglican Churn & Protestant Impatience”.
This weakness is why Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option captured their imaginations a decade ago. Despite Dreher not being an evangelical, he articulated their anxieties so well because evangelicals do not do well with adversity—or with the growing pains and setbacks that come with trying to build institutions worthy of being called elite. And yet the examples in that work did not make use of the one most applicable to the USA: The Black Protestant tradition.
The chain linking evangelicals to the successful Protestant American past has been severed. Identifying who broke it—and which groups within American Protestantism have best preserved their connections to the old ways—is essential to recovering lost wisdom and avoiding the mistakes that led to both its loss and evangelicals' isolation from mainstream American society.