Beatnik Christianity Treasures the Life of the Mind As a Sacred Means of Worship

Faced with the impossible choice between being intellectually honest or following Jesus, I chose intellectual honesty and became an agnostic. That was until a professor recommended Mark Noll’s book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. It saved and transformed my faith. In it Noll notes four key historical movements that were responsible for evangelicalism’s anti-intellectual impulse: fundamentalism, dispensational premillennialism, the Higher Life movement, and Pentecostalism. It was eye-opening because, four out of four, that was my church background.1

If we profess to follow The Way of Jesus, then let’s listen to Jesus. In the Matthew 22:36-40, our Lord taught, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Loving the Lord our God with all our minds is literally a part of what Jesus called the greatest commandment. There’s no getting around it. Sorry not sorry, but it’s a non-negotiable part of the Jesus tradition.

Leaning into the language of Harold Best, Christian worship is about the continuous outpouring of ourselves, including all that we are and all that we do, back to our loving Creator. It’s about participating in the divine dance of the Trinity. Worship is not a thing we do Sunday morning, but a lifestyle. Growing up I was continually exhorted that “dead intellectualism” is merely used to rationalize sin, but Noll’s book taught me that the life of the mind can be a virtuous means of worship in and of itself. God holistically gave us hands to serve, hearts to love, and minds to think.

Here it’s important to distinguish between faux-thinking and the life of the mind. Christians tend to be enculturated in a perpetual apologetic of what is already believed, but beatnik Christianity calls for a disposition of curious reconsideration of new ideas as merited by new evidence. It’s about rejecting the demand for black and white simplicity in favor of a nondualistic appreciation for complexity, nuance, paradox, tension, and harmony. The life of the mind isn’t about solution-focused pragmatism, but the humble, never-ending journey of creative learning and exploration.

The original beatniks were dismissed as pseudo-intellectuals. This is an area where I think it’s hard to generalize. There certainly were some among these eclectic figures, but I also think they got that label slapped on them for rebelling against the pretentious conventions of academia‘s rigid formalism. That part I do appreciate. I see no good reason why a writer can’t use words like “epistemology,” “hermeneutics,” and “socio-economic” in the same piece where he uses “gonna,” “ain’t,” or “assclown.” Contrary to popular belief, the life of the mind doesn’t have to be stuffy.