Tyler Cowen is an economist and public intellectual who is the lead writer Marginal revolution. When it linked to mine recent piece in the City Journal on North vs. South Appalachia, I had more people write to me about it than any other mention I’ve ever received. He is a very popular guy.
He recently put a short post about how more and more of the classical liberals he knows are religious. I noticed this nugget in there.
If you find a non-leftist intellectual, they are increasingly Nietzschean, compared to the days of yore. But if instead they are classical liberals, they are usually also religious. This could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestants thrown into the mix, but the Protestants entered last. [emphasis added]
I have some ideas about why Cowen knows so few Protestant intellectuals.
First, Protestant intellectuals tend not to center their Protestant identity the way Catholics do. For example, Robert George, Amy Coney Barrett, Patrick Deneen and Duncan Stroik are people for whom their Catholic identity is central to their public persona.
Perhaps for cultural reasons, Protestants tend not to. There are some Episcopalians among the leaders of the conservatism of the movement, for example, but they are very quiet about it. In fact, when I researched the religious backgrounds of leaders of conservative organizations a while back, I actually had to ask most of the Episcopalians personally to find out their religion because it wasn’t online anywhere I could find. Evangelicals seem to be on the same page. In a previous postI pointed out that the person I think is the best evangelical public intellectual is someone I really couldn’t list because he’s never publicly said he’s a Protestant, as far as I know.
Second, Catholics have institutions and networks designed to publicly support and promote their intellectuals. Protestants don’t have it. For example, this morning I had coffee with someone who is a retired chemist. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard with Robert Burns Woodward, who was a Nobel laureate and the leading organic chemist of the 20th century. This individual was at the top of his class and went on to a highly successful research career in the pharmaceutical industry. He is currently working on writing about the relationship between Reformed theology and science. But no one in the evangelical world even knows about him.
You’d think that after decades of bemoaning the “scandal of the evangelical mind,” we’d be heavily promoting the world-class scientists and other intellectual figures we have. But this is not the case.
I’m not a scientist but I’m not a chopped liver either. I was a partner at a consulting firm, a senior fellow at a major think tank, and have written and been quoted in most of the top publications in the country (NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Atlantic, etc.). But the institution that has done the most to promote my work is First Things magazine, which focuses on Catholicism.
Arguably, the best career move I could make as a writer on culture, men’s issues, and public policy would be to convert to Catholicism. That would probably open doors to opportunities that I won’t have otherwise.
The case of former NIH director Francis Collins is the exception that proves the rule. Evangelicals heavily promoted Collins both personally and institutionally. This is what Catholics are able to do for their intellectuals, but which is too rare in the evangelical world.
To learn more about the Catholic “intellectual ecosystem,” read on this piece from 2021 by Onsi Aaron Kamel on the subject.
Third, Catholicism is normative within American conservatism. As I did pointed out many times, postwar conservatism has been a strongly Catholic-Jewish project. Within the Christian wing of the conservatism movement, Catholicism is essentially normative. This is one reason incoming converts to Catholicism have long played an important role in conservatism. I’m told that many young, ambitious DC conservatives end up converting even today. I’m sure most of these are genuine, but the fact that conservatism is a strongly Catholic environment surely plays a role. (Religion is spread through social media if nothing else). So it’s no surprise that the list of classic liberal types Cowen knows starts with Catholics and Jews. Evangelicals may be the largest and most important voting block in the Republican coalition, but they are not the proverbial decision-makers.
Fourth, there are certainly some substantive problems with the lack of top-notch Protestant public intellectual talent. Joel Carini only outstanding some of the cultural traits that inhibit this development. Fergus McCullough too listed some internal considerations.
However, I would argue that Cowen’s experience does not fully reflect reality because of points one through three above. In all of them, Protestants have work to do: center identity, create or leverage networks and institutions, and renegotiate their relationship with the movement’s conservatism.
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