Perhaps the price of elite evangelical respectability in the modern academy is adoption of the embarrassment reflex—understood as, in its deepest sense, a willingness to allow the idea of the “social” to displace that of the classically theological at the taproot of intellectual life. Such a displacement demands that evangelicals norm their theological claims against the conclusions of the social sciences, rather than vice versa—or else be tarred with the dreaded label of fundamentalist.

Nearly thirty years ago, Notre Dame historian Mark Noll fired a resounding shot across the bow of his own tradition, declaring boldly that “[t]he scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”[1] Ever since its publication, few books have loomed over evangelical intellectual life more powerfully than The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which laid out what Noll viewed as a devastating indictment of evangelicalism’s incapacity for meaningful engagement with disciplines beyond its boundaries.
Over the decades since, a much more comprehensive evangelical intellectual ecosystem has emerged, partially in response to Noll’s critique. New colleges and universities explicitly interested in cultivating the “life of the mind” have been founded. The catalogs of publishers like Crossway Academic and InterVarsity Press overflow with interdisciplinary efforts to place the evangelical tradition into conversation with topics of current interest. A complex of parachurch groups like the Gospel Coalition, with thoughtful evangelical content ranging from popular to scholarly, has sprung up online. And at the K-12 level, the classical education movement has promoted thoroughgoing engagement with the philosophical and spiritual wisdom of generations past. By virtually any metric, the landscape of evangelical intellectual thought is materially more developed than it was in 1994.
And over those years this matrix of institutions has incubated a new sort of public figure: the elite evangelical. The elite evangelical was educated at top-flight institutions and largely eschews the “culture war” language of Moral Majority forerunners like Jerry Falwell. He reads Christianity Today, listens to Tim Keller sermons, and tends to know far more about J.R.R. Tolkien than J. Gresham Machen. Above all, he is proficient in the use of the word “winsomeness.”
The rise of such a class, however, has not led to much of a rapprochement between America’s evangelicals and an increasingly secular mainstream. Nor has it seemingly engendered a healthier and more unified evangelicalism. Indeed, the recent 2021 General Conference of the Southern Baptist Convention exposed publicly what had already been obvious to many observers for some time: an ugly and deepening rift between these post-Scandal “elite evangelicals” and the rank-and-file members who fill evangelical church pews across the country.
The SBC presidential election victory of “moderate” Ed Litton over conservative hardliner Mike Stone (as well as longtime SBC fixture Al Mohler) was widely perceived as a referendum on the denomination’s alignment with ex-President Donald Trump, but the issues in play transcend any single figure. Many observers were caught off guard by the size and vehemence of the coalition backing Stone’s candidacy, a reflection of the fact that a large and growing faction of lay evangelicals are deeply concerned about their movement’s present trajectory. Chief among their targets is the group of elite evangelical figures—the pastors whose op-eds appear in the New York Times, the writers who pen Gospel Coalition columns, the seminary professors who urge greater interaction with secular academia, and so on—that they derisively describe as “Big Eva,” and view as steering evangelicalism away from theology and toward issues like immigration, racial justice, the environment, and so on.
For those firmly ensconced in the elite evangelical ecosystem, it is easy to write off much of this backlash as a result of escalating political partisanship. Kept out of view is the question of whether any of the alarm is warranted—whether perhaps there’s something in the elite evangelical water that actually does merit their concern. What if the worry that manifests—often inaptly—as complaints about “liberalism,” “cultural Marxism,” and “critical race theory”—has an intelligible root?
Over the last few decades, whenever the political right happens to hold power, there have tended to appear claims that conservative American Christians—particularly evangelicals—are closer than ever to establishing something like an American theocratic caliphate. The Bush years had Damon Linker’s The Theocons; the Trump years had Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshipers and Jeff Sharlet’s The Family Netflix docuseries. Such commentary is downstream of the reality that American evangelicals often figure as the villains of modern academic historiography—characterized chiefly by their opposition to teaching evolution in schools, criticisms of various efforts at promoting civic equality, negativity toward environmental legislation, and so on.
For the elite evangelical who inevitably encounters such vilification within “mainstream academia,” the psychological response produced by all these allegations is likely to prove complex. Elite fears of an real-world Handmaid’s Tale are implausible on their face: at the time of this writing, Republican presidents have appointed twelve out of sixteen Supreme Court justices since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973,[2] and yet have never been able to marshal a majority to overturn that precedent, let alone revise the American constitutional order more dramatically. The most exaggerated versions of these claims don’t even attempt to persuade anyone not already adhering to preexisting secular assumptions.
Instead, for elite evangelicals, the critiques that cut deepest tend to be those that allege that American Christians have betrayed their own tradition in a fundamental way. Three recent books—all of which have sparked much discussion and controversy within evangelical circles—epitomize this sensibility. In Taking Back America for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, sociologists Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry argue that American Christians have bred a toxic “Christian nationalism” committed more to acquiring and wielding political power than to living out Christian ideals. In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, theologians Gregory Thompson and Duke L. Kwon contend that the complicity of the American church in historical racism is so severe that “the language of White supremacy and reparations, now so unfamiliar and awkward, [should] one day become as fixed in the church’s imagination and fundamental to its vocation as the language of repentance and reconciliation is today.”[3] And in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, historian Kristin Kobes du Mez posits that twentieth-century American Christianity was colonized by a toxic nationalist-inflected masculinity, one that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump.
The crucial common feature of these texts is that all of them are, at least in a sense, addressed to evangelicals (or at least point in that direction): they are calls to action of a sort, urging evangelicals to adopt alternative interpretations of their American Christian tradition, without repudiating it altogether, in the name of progress. At the heart of all three books is the conviction that popular evangelicalism as such is on the wrong track—that it needs to be saved from itself through immediate course correction, or risk falling back into a fundamentalist morass.
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Jews often associated with Gentiles, especially in Antioch (Josephus, Jewish War 2.45, 463). Cephas, however, seems to have started to “live like a Gentile” (Gal. 2:14), probably in the sense that he had ceased to observe Jewish dietary restrictions. In response to a heavenly vision (Acts 10:9–16; 11:4–10), he had tossed out an important Jewish identity marker, which many Jews went to great trouble to keep (Jdt. 12:2) and for which they sometimes endured deprivation (Josephus, The Life 14) and even death (1 Macc. 1:63). The people from James were offended, perhaps thinking that nothing in the apostolic letter had implied that Christian Jews should start to live like Gentiles (Acts 15:23–29).

Read the Passage
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he was eating with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party. And the rest of the Jews acted hypocritically along with him, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that their conduct was not in step with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you force the Gentiles to live like Jews?”
An Apostolic Confrontation
In Galatians 2:11 Paul drops his usual sequencing term “then” (Gal. 1:18, 21; Gal. 2:1) and switches to “but when,” a change that may indicate the event he is about to relate happened in roughly the same timeframe as the Jerusalem conference of Galatians 2:1–10. It probably occurred during the period Luke describes after the Jerusalem conference when Paul and Barnabas continued “teaching and preaching” in Antioch (Acts 15:35). “Opposed” (Gk. anthistēmi) is a strong term that often appears in contexts of struggle against evil (Matt. 5:39; James 4:7; 1 Pet. 5:9). The perfect-tense participle “condemned” (kategnōsmenos) envisions a metaphorical trial in which the judge has found the accused guilty beyond doubt (cf. Deut. 25:1 LXX).
Then Paul explains why (“for”) he could make such dramatic statements. Cephas had been accustomed to eating with Gentiles in Antioch. The verb “was eating” is in the imperfect tense (Gk. sunēsthien), implying that Peter was not doing anything unusual in eating with Gentiles before the emissaries from James arrived. After they arrived, however, he began to retreat (hypestellen) and separate (aphōrizen) himself from them. Again the verbs are in the imperfect tense, but now implying gradual action. Paul seems to have thought that Peter slowly gave in to the pressure that fear of James’s emissaries placed on him, perhaps with a measure of self-doubt (cf. Rom. 15:22–23).
There is no need to think that James intended the people he sent to Antioch to put this sort of pressure on Peter. James may have simply sent them to report on how the church at Antioch was doing a few months after the letter of “the apostles and the elders” explaining the contents of the apostolic decree (Acts 15:22–33).
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For many, grief brings despair, anger, or fear. Yet, my father’s passing hasn’t stirred those emotions in me. He lived his life with nothing left unsaid or undone. My four brothers, sister, and mother—his wife of 66 years—feel the same. We didn’t face his death with regret or unfinished business. We shared the rare gift of a complete relationship without the “what-ifs” or “if-onlys.”

After four decades as a caregiver, I thought I understood grief. I’ve watched my wife, Gracie, battle relentless pain and loss since her devastating car accident in 1983—a crash that led to more than 80 operations, multiple amputations, and a struggle with chronic pain that would crush most people. I’ve grieved alongside her in stages, mourning the parts of her health and life that slipped away over time. Some call it incremental and continual grief.
But standing beside my father’s casket, I encountered something new—a grief that cuts to the bone and leaves a void, like a door slammed shut. This wasn’t the slow, grinding sorrow of caregiving, where you brace yourself daily for another blow. And even though not unexpected, it was swift and final—a full-stop in the story of a man who shaped me.
My father and I shared a bond built on respect, love, and a mutual commitment to our Christian faith. His unwavering support and wise counsel were anchors in my life, especially during the most challenging caregiving moments. When I was lost in the wilderness of Gracie’s suffering, his words guided me back to solid ground.
For many, grief brings despair, anger, or fear. Yet, my father’s passing hasn’t stirred those emotions in me. He lived his life with nothing left unsaid or undone. My four brothers, sister, and mother—his wife of 66 years—feel the same. We didn’t face his death with regret or unfinished business. We shared the rare gift of a complete relationship without the “what-ifs” or “if-onlys.”
Caregivers know the unique pain of “anticipatory grief”—mourning the losses you see coming while still wrestling with the ones at hand. I’ve lived in that space for decades, grieving bit by bit as I watched Gracie’s body and spirit endure the unimaginable. That kind of grief is a slow bleed, exhausting even the strongest spirit. But this grief for my father is different—blunt, piercing, and conclusive. I am no longer waiting for the inevitable but living in its aftermath.
As I sit with these feelings, I’m struck by how my sorrow is softened by the lessons my father imparted throughout his life. One such lesson came unexpectedly when I was asked to speak at the Huntington’s Disease Society of America (HDSA) conference some years ago. Huntington’s is a devastating genetic disease that haunted my father’s family for generations. It was a heavy legacy, and knowing this weighed on me as I accepted the invitation.
I arrived the evening before and met many wonderful people at a meet-and-greet. I listened to their stories and felt the weight of their suffering. Even though I’m no stranger to harsh realities, the depth of their pain overwhelmed me. Later that night, as I sat in my hotel room, mentally rehearsing my keynote address, I called my father and confessed, “Dad, I don’t feel worthy to talk with these people.”
He didn’t hesitate. “You have been uniquely prepared and equipped by God to minister to these people and more—and there’s no one in line behind you to do it. Now get down there and do your job!” His voice, honed by decades as a pastor and Navy Chaplain, was steady and unyielding. My only response was, “Yes, Sir!”
The next day, I spoke with passion and conviction, knowing I was fulfilling my father’s commission. I’d seen him walk into the most horrific circumstances with the confidence of the Gospel and the authority of God’s Word. With his words echoing in my ears, I felt his hand on my shoulder as I stepped into that same role.
As I navigate this different kind of grief, I find solace in reflecting on the countless lessons my father imparted—in both word and deed. His life was a gift, not just to me but to so many others. My gratitude tempers the sting of loss. Though the tears come, they are mixed with joy for a life well lived and a race well run.
Many people experience grief tangled up with unresolved issues. My father had a difficult relationship with his own father, and his life was marked by sadness over “what could have been.” Yet, he allowed that sorrow to be transformed by God’s grace. He became a father to not only his six children but to our spouses, cousins, and a host of others who found refuge at our home.
As I wrestle with this different kind of grief, I am determined to let it be shaped by God’s provision, principles, and purpose. The loss of a father is a unique, incalculable pain. Sometimes, that loss comes from abandonment—but death comes for us all, even the most loving of fathers.
Since my father’s charge to take the stage at that conference, I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of fellow caregivers who struggle with the same kind of incremental grief and heartache I’ve carried. Now, while shouldering this different kind of grief, I find new resonance in the scriptures that describe Jesus as “…a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).
Reflecting on my father’s legacy of ministry to broken lives, I am reminded of his favorite hymn:
“There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole.There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”
My grief—a different kind of grief—is real and will last a lifetime until I am reunited with my father in Heaven. But I know what he would want me to do now: allow God to turn this grief into a balm for others. So, when my head hangs in sorrow, I still hear his voice echoing in my heart:
“Get out there and do your job.”
Peter Rosenberger hosts the nationally syndicated radio program, Hope for the Caregiver. His newest book is A Minute for Caregivers—When Every Day Feels Like Monday. www.HopeforTheCaregiver.com

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