Mark Noll

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the history of Christianity, in connection with intellectual and political developments in the United States, Canada, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom. He was long afiliated with Wheaton College, and is a cofounder of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicalism.

He has a special interest in evangelicalism. Time Magazine, in 2005, put him among the "25 most influential Evangelicals in the U.S.". In a 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind Mark Noll asserts that the scandal of evangelicalism he "is that there is not much of an evangelical mind ....notwithstanding all their other virtues…American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations”. The title is shorthand for the ongoing conversation about evangelical anti-intellectualism, according to John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, a sister publication of Christianity Today.

Evangelicalism and politics

In the 1994 book, he said there are three problems that discourage intellectual involvement by evangelicals:

1. "Evangelical culture, which “allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment”
2. "Evangelicalism is lacking institutional participation in the world of intellect. Evangelicals have no research universities or periodicals that engage politics, sciences, or the arts.
3. "It is a theological issue “to neglect, generation after generation, serious attention to the mind, nature, society, the arts…[and] may be, in fact, sinful”

He continued to say that evangelicals isolate themselves from intellectual society due to a lack of deep scholarship, because “evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God…In our past we have much more eagerly leaped to defend the faith than to explore its implications for the intellectual life...“though often dissenting from specific features of fundamentalism, [evangelicals] have largely retained the mentality of fundamentalism when it comes to looking at the world, and there has been a similarly meager harvest of evangelical intellectual life”

Speaking of David Barton of Wallbuilders, a group emphasizing Biblical principles in American history and government, he said "Barton is a very hard-working researcher, but what I guess I worry about is the collapsing of historical distance, and the effort to make really anybody fit directly into the category of the early 21st century evangelicals..."I would say he is no worse than some of the Ivy League types who do the same thing, who say the founding fathers believed in separation of church and state and therefore we do, too."