Molly Worthen's remarkable Apostles of Reason is an authoritative guide to the past six decades of American evangelical Christianity. It is one of the most important accounts we now have on post-World War II evangelicalism, alongside books such as Joel Carpenter's Revive Us Again, Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, and Steven Miller's The Age of Evangelicalism. Yet Worthen's highly engaging book may not garner as much of an audience among American evangelicals as one might hope, because in the contest between evangelical conservatives and myriad evangelical dissenters, Worthen is not hesitant to take sides. Her preference is for the dissenters.

Worthen's wide-ranging survey centers on evangelicals’ quest for certainty and biblical authority, and especially the effort to defend the doctrine of inerrancy. From Carl Henry, the founding editor of Christianity Today, to the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention's “Conservative Resurgence,” traditionalist evangelicals have elevated inerrancy as an indispensable precept for Bible-believing Christians. Inerrancy posits that the Bible (in the original manuscripts) is “God-breathed,” authored by the Holy Spirit working through inspired saints, and is therefore entirely free from factual or ethical error. The obvious problem with inerrancy is that it never solves debates over the scripture's meaning: even conservatives do not agree on all manner of biblical issues, from the proper method of baptism to the theology of the end times.

Worthen takes a skeptical—even hostile—view of the real agenda of the inerrantists. Whether they perceive it or not, the “doctrine of inerrancy was a comforting gauze that concealed a great deal of ugliness,” she says. It was and is, “in essence, a means of managing the Bible's vulnerability to subjective judgment” (199). Evangelicalism, Worthen contends, has always been a multivalent, fractious conglomeration of perspectives rather than a unified set of principles. Anyone who suggests that there is a set of defining evangelical doctrines—as the authors of The Fundamentals argued a century ago, just as today's conservative seminarians do—are really acting on their anxiety about free inquiry and about their movement's impermanent qualities.

Twenty-five years ago, in his magisterial Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, historian David Bebbington, whose name does not appear in the index, offered his famous quadrilateral of conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism (the centrality of the cross), and activism as the defining traits of evangelical Christianity. Whether or not Worthen has Bebbington in mind, it is precisely the attempt to define evangelical faith that she finds objectionable, and usually politically motivated. Pop evangelical gurus from Francis Schaeffer to Christian America history writer David Barton have promoted their own versions of historical, theological, and scientific orthodoxy—usually more crass than those of scholars like Bebbington—in order to give “the appearance of sophistication and unassailable truth,” but ultimately, “to shut down debate” (209).

There has always been a “vocal minority” of evangelicals, though, often coming from Wesleyan Holiness or Anabaptist traditions (Worthen admittedly sets aside the question of the African American or Hispanic evangelical traditions), who have battled against conservatives’ “narrow interpretation of scripture, selective notions of discipleship, and assumptions about human knowledge and religious experience that have come to dominate the Christian Right” (253). Even leaders at elite evangelical institutions such as Wheaton College, she tells us, “expect open inquiry to stop short of challenging fundamental doctrines” (257). This stifling of dissent, and determination to demand orthodoxy, is the real problem for the evangelical “mind.” A thriving evangelical intellectual culture would take a cue from the dissenters, and from certain Christian academics, and embrace “the tasks of discovering new knowledge, creating original and provocative art, and puzzling out the path toward a more humane civilization” (261).

At the end of the book, Worthen turns fully programmatic, contending that for those who study evangelicalism (and perhaps for evangelicals themselves), “we must allow room for diversity and internal contradiction . . . We must recognize that American evangelicalism owes more to its fractures and clashes, its anxieties and doubts, than to any political pronouncement or point of doctrine” (264). Worthen never discloses her own connection to evangelicalism, but it seems clear that, by this point, her real target in the book is the concept of orthodoxy itself.

But can any movement like evangelicalism—or its affiliated institutions or denominations—really operate without any sense of orthodoxy? May we draw any lines between evangelicals and non-evangelicals? Or lines between helpful debate and rabble-rousing? Surely we can all agree, for example, that someone who denies the existence of God cannot be an evangelical. What about someone who denies the divinity of Jesus? As Worthen notes, even secular universities have their own implicit codes of orthodoxy, so perhaps evangelicals cannot do without orthodoxy either. Where we should draw the lines, and what issues are non-negotiable, will remain points of contention. But an evangelicalism that is all rootless inquiry—one that regards no belief as beyond the pale—is not likely to remain the potent force it has been in America and around the world.

But I quibble. Worthen's book will now stand as required reading for any student or scholar of American evangelicalism. If it is provocative, it is because Worthen writes with such an authoritative voice and command of the nooks and crannies of American evangelical life. If many rank-and-file conservatives will not find Worthen a friendly interlocutor, I hope that this would not keep them from reading this most informative and challenging account of their movement and its anxieties.