In my recent post on platforms and publishing, I noted that certain “experts” seem to be mostly platform and little substance, and that evangelicals have a special fondness for these sorts of pop experts. Matthew Lee Anderson subsequently asked me to address the question “Why do you think evangelicals are especially vulnerable to ‘experts’?”
I am not the first person to note the evangelical experts phenomenon – Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson devoted a provocative book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, to the topic a couple years ago. (I reviewed The Anointed, and the problems with its approach, at Patheos in 2011.) More recently, I was tasked with leading WORLD Magazine’s coverage of conservative Christians’ growing doubts about popular history writer David Barton.
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