Why Protestants Convert: Conversionitis

Twenty-four years ago, at the opening of his classic work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll acidly remarked that "the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Since that time, there have been plenty of signs of hope and improvement. The classical Christian education movement, initially spearheaded largely by evangelical Protestants, has grown immensely in numbers and influence, though it remains a fairly small blip on the American educational landscape. New evangelical colleges committed to the renewing of the evangelical mind, such as New Saint Andrews College and Patrick Henry College, though tiny in numbers, punch well above their weight in academic and cultural influence. The number of evangelical graduate students attending top-notch programs has increased greatly over this period (albeit too greatly for the stagnant evangelical job market to bear). The evangelical publishing industrial complex is doing very well, and publishers like Crossway are putting out material of genuine depth and theological weight.