Confessional Protestants are again NOT in the news thanks in part to a new survey that breaks the white Protestant world in the U.S. down into either evangelical or mainline Protestant camps. Korey Maas, Miles Smith, and D. G. Hart (aka Bob Dole) aimed at using the recent headlines surrounding those survey results to consider what the Protestant equivalent would be to the Roman Catholic intellectual landscape that Ross Douthat outlined in First Things. As it turned out, discussion of the value, plausibility, and deficiency of evangelical as descriptor took more time than planned. But the creation of the so-called evangelical mind, it could well be, is responsible for a failure to recognize the contributions of confessional Protestants. Equally plausible is the possibility that confessional Protestants themselves have lost touch with the intellectual tradition (authors, curricula, academic disciplines) that were the backdrop for the scholars and pastors who produced the Protestant confessions. In which case, if Roman Catholics present a thicker intellectual tradition than Protestants, the reason could be that their institutions have kept their intellectual traditions alive better than Protestants who may have been tempted to throw their intellectual energies into the evangelical mind.

Along the way the interlocutors referred to Miles Smith's recent essay on evangelical elites and to the range of Christian writers and scholars that Ken Myers hosts on the Mars Hill Audio Journal.