Abby McCloskey, Christianity Today Magazine, June 10, 2025

“I spent the last year working on a book about Christians, American politics, and the challenges of faithful and nuanced Christian engagement that are unique to this moment. But as I wrote, I came to think those challenges are rooted in a larger problem for American evangelicalism that extends well beyond politics: a Christian mind out of practice.

The brain is not literally muscle, but our minds work as if it were. There is no switch to be turned on and off when quandaries present themselves. We must always exercise our minds, or else they atrophy.

And the American evangelical mind is not in good shape. For too many of us, faith is a private affair that exists largely in our own thoughts—yet those thoughts are not particularly deep. As Mark Noll famously charged three decades ago in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, too many American evangelicals have little appetite for exploring with rigor our historic faith or the world around us.”