"What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?"

Today, while in Boston visiting potential colleges with our son, we toured the JFK Presidential Museum. It's fascinating set of exhibits with artifacts, news footage, audio interviews, letters, etc.--well worth an afternoon when you're in town. One artifact was a marked-up invitation list for a 1962 White House state dinner honoring Andre Malraux, then France's Minister of Cultural Affairs. Here's the first page of the list:

They would have been decent table company, no? (I'll take the list as an official White House recognition that Murray and Niebuhr, as I've argued, should go together--even if the Niebuhrs for whatever reason were crossed off this dinner.)

So I came back to our B&B thinking about the decline in public prominence of Christian intellectuals in America since 1962, and a friend pointed me to Alan Jacobs' new essay in Harper's--subtitled "What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?" Unsurprisingly with Jacobs, it's a great read. Here's a taste of his explanation (which, in full, touches on the careers of, among others, T.S. Eliot, Maritain, Niebuhr, Auden, Richard Neuhaus, Cornel West, and Marilynne Robinson): 

It was the Sixties that changed everything, and not primarily because of the Vietnam War or the cause of civil rights. There were many Christians on both sides of those divides. The primary conflict was over the sexual revolution and the changes in the American legal system that accompanied it: changes in divorce law, for instance, but especially in abortion law. (Many Christians supported and continue to support abortion rights, of course; but abortion is rarely if ever the central, faith-defining issue for them that it often is for those in the pro-life camp.) By the time these changes happened and Christian intellectuals found themselves suddenly outside the circles of power, no longer at the head table of liberalism, Christians had built up sufficient institutional stability and financial resourcefulness to be able to create their own subaltern counterpublics. And this temptation proved irresistible. As Marilynne Robinson has rightly said in reflecting on the agitation she can create by calling herself a Christian, “This is a gauge of the degree to which the right has colonized the word and also of the degree to which the center and left have capitulated, have surrendered the word and also the identity.” 

As they say, read the whole thing.