On the way to what?

Evangelical ascendancy to the halls of power in the United States is not enough | Marvin Olasky

Photo by Sean Sime

This week made it seven years since evangelical George W. Bush entered the White House, a feat celebrated in D. Michael Lindsay's Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford University Press, 2007).

The book is a useful compendium of interviews with upwardly mobile evangelicals in not only politics and business but university life. Lindsay exults that "academic prestige and educational credentials can enable a group to move from the social margins to the intellectual mainstream, and evangelicals are well on the way." But the question should be asked: On the way to what? What profiteth evangelicals to gain prestige and credentials when during their ascendance many wear masks, and then find that their faces have changed to fit the masks?