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The actual vitality of American Christianity’s cultural capital today resides almost exclusively among average people in the pew rather than those in leadership, on the periphery not the center of cultural production, in tastes that run to the popular rather than the exceptional, the middle brow rather than the high brow, and almost always toward the practical as opposed to the theoretical or the imaginative. The collective impact of the Christian community of the nature and direction of the culture itself is negligible. They have been absent from the arenas in which the greatest influence in culture is exerted.

The chapter describes some new experimental techniques and results that shed light on our ordinary use of ‘knowledge’. The results presented can be elegantly explained by adopting an interest relative or ‘anti-intellectual’ understanding of knowledge, a new idea that has been gaining currency in philosophy.

This chapter discusses Dewey's theory of knowledge. The intellectualist sees knowledge as something absolutely certain, which is contemplatively seen, by a mind that is at most contingently embodied, working on its own. For Dewey's anti-intellectualism what is sought is rational and corrigibly fallible belief, actively achieved, even made or constructed, and with the aid of conceptual instruments of human design, by an intelligent but embodied organism that is a natural part of the world it seeks to know, engaged on this undertaking as a collaborating member of a society of intelligent organisms of the same kind.

This chapter addresses presidential anti-intellectualism as the problem itself. It begins with the characterization of presidential rhetorical trends as manifestations of the anti-intellectual presidency. This presented insight has advanced the understanding of the processes of institutional change—which are often incomplete and layered—it has distracted from a proper diagnosis of the pathologies of presidential rhetoric. In addition, presidential rhetoric must be analyzed in order to advance the understanding of the rhetorical presidency.

This chapter proposes anti-intellectualism as the unifying critique of the contemporary presidency and begins a debate on how to redirect the attention toward the quality, rather than just the quantity, of presidential rhetoric. Then, it presents evidence of the transformed—syntactically truncated and semantically shortened—structure of presidential rhetoric. It specifically reports the evidence of the relentless linguistic (syntactic and semantic) simplification of presidential rhetoric that occurred between 1789 and 2006. In addition, it takes off from the less ambitious proposition that there can be no plausible case for a thoroughgoing anti-intellectualism, which is operationally defined for this chapter as the relentless semantic and syntactic simplification of presidential rhetoric, because at some point simplification becomes oversimplification, and the drastically truncated structure of such language will fail to convey the minimum amount of information required as the basis for competent civic judgments. It can be concluded that the presidential rhetorical simplification across the last two centuries is real and demonstrable, and it cannot endorse the virtue of rhetorical simplicity indefinitely, because at some point simplification becomes oversimplification.

This chapter demonstrates the unanimity of opinion among speechwriters that simplicity is always preferred to complexity and justifies the operationalized link between a cult of rhetorical simplicity and operationalized anti-intellectualism. In particular, it reveals that the presidents' and speechwriters' exceptionless and deliberate drive to simplify presidential rhetoric since the mid-twentieth century has been the linguistic underpinning of the anti-intellectual presidency. It concludes by modeling the accumulation of several discrete decisions to go anti-intellectual as a classic tyranny of small decisions. In doing so, it provides an explanation to the puzzle of how such a radical institutional transformation as the anti-intellectual presidency crept up.

This chapter examines the substantive impoverishment of presidential rhetoric. Specifically, it provides the evidence of linguistic simplification with evidence of substantive anti-intellectualism. As presidents have taken the rhetorical path of least resistance by serving up simplistic sentences to citizens, they have correspondingly offered an easily digestible substantive menu devoid of argument and infused with inspirational platitudes, partisan punchlines, and emotional and human interest appeals. Moreover, it shows that presidential rhetoric today is short on logos, disingenuous on ethos, and long on pathos.

This chapter tackles the normative justifications of anti-intellectualism to explain its political seductiveness and, in rejecting them, explicates why anti-intellectualism damages democracy. In particular, it illustrates why presidential anti-intellectualism is a threat to democracy. The first two arguments presented are active justifications: the argument against elitism and the argument for participation. The third and fourth arguments are passive defenses of anti-intellectualism: the argument of inconsequentialism and the argument from necessity. It is stated that anti-intellectual rhetoric is a poor surrogate for genuine democratic responsiveness.

This chapter proposes a corrective account of rhetorical leadership premised on pedagogy, rather than demagogy. It also provides these tentative thoughts as an invitation to start, rather than to conclude, a new debate about the substance of presidential rhetoric rather than its quantity. Then, it closes with a solution to the problem of presidential anti-intellectualism by articulating the pedagogical purpose of rhetoric as theorized and practiced by the founding rhetorical presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, and as implied in scholarly criticisms of the contemporary presidency. There is a need to attend to the substance of presidential rhetoric precisely because presidents are responsible for the lion's share of what transpires in the American public sphere.

The question of the grounds of knowledge how can be distinguished from the question of the nature of knowledge how. We defend an intellectualist answer to the former question and an objectualist (nonpropositionalist, nondispositionalist) answer to the latter question. The central idea is that to know how to A is to stand in an objectual understanding relation to a way of A-ing. We propose a theory of the relevant type of understanding in terms of conceptions of ways of acting, grounded in propositional attitudes. The resulting view—an objectualist intellectualism—preserves all three of the following attractive theses: (1) knowing how is not merely a kind of knowing that, (2) knowing how is practical (it bears a substantive connection to action), and (3) knowing how is a cognitive achievement (it is a form of practical knowledge).

It is argued that intellectualism is incompatible with the facts about complementation in a variety of languages. It is also argued that one of the main empirical bases for anti-intellectualism (the alleged existence of ability-denoting ‘how to’ clauses) does not survive close scrutiny. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates the need to have abilities in the ontology of abstract entities that serve as arguments of attitude predicates; exemplifies the existence of epistemically oriented attitude predicates that select for both facts and abilities; sketches an ontology formalized in type theory with records for events, propositions, questions, outcomes, and abilities; indicates how a single verb can select for factive, resolutive, and ability-denoting infinitives without assuming lexical ambiguity; and shows how a semantic account of resolutive complementation (interrogatives embedded by predicates such as know, learn, and understand) extends to ‘how to’ clauses without introducing any additional mechanisms.

In the call and response tradition of African American churches, the concluding chapter reflects on ways in which this book responds to calls for serious scholarship in religious ethnography. As part of that response, it highlights several new perspectives and directions for future research suggested by the current findings: (1) the creative ways in which gender and age may be configured in grass roots institution-building; (2) the position of Sanctified churches, not as bastions of anti-intellectualism but as venues of communal intellectual activity where academic achievement is valued and promoted; (3) the twin dimensions of charismatic leadership that also demonstrates bureaucratic acumen; and (4) the workings of a spirit-grounded “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” that promotes social critique and activism.

So I return in the end to my one-note song: if academics did only the job they are trained and paid to do— introduce students to disciplinary materials and equip them with the necessary analytic skills—criticism of the kind Maloney mounts would have no object, and the various watch-dog groups headed by David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, and others would have to close shop. But even if this day were to arrive, the academy would not be home free because there would still be the problem I have alluded to but not fully addressed—the problem of money. Who is going to pay for the purified academic enterprise I celebrate in these pages? The unhappy fact is that the more my fellow academics obey the imperative always to academicize, the less they will have a claim to a skeptical public’s support. How do you sell to legislators, governors, trustees, donors, newspapers, etc., an academy that marches to its own drummer, an academy that asks of the subjects that petition for entry only that they be interesting, an academy unconcerned with the public yield of its activities, an academy that puts at the center of its operations the asking of questions for their own sake? How, that is, do you justify the enterprise? As I have already pointed out, you can’t, in part because the demand for justification never comes from the inside. The person who asks you to justify what you do is not saying, “tell me why you value the activity,” but “convince me that I should,” and if you respond in the spirit of that request, you will have exchanged your values for those of your inquisitor. It may seem paradoxical to say so, but any justification of the academy is always a denigration of it. The only honest thing to do when someone from the outside asks, “what use is this venture anyway?” is to answer “none whatsoever,” if by “use” is meant (as it always will be) of use to those with no investment in the obsessions internal to the profession.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the training of farmers and fighters, covering the idealization of manual labor and training the younger generation for battle and heroism. The discussion then turns to anti-intellectualism in Sabra culture, and the Sabra's cultural and spiritual horizons.

Millions of Americans are extraordinarily uninformed. This problem is often blamed on the poor quality of public schools, yet it largely stems from a peculiar conception of education rooted in America’s exceptional history. The birth of modern democracy in America fostered a populist mindset equating education with elitism. Although the Founding Fathers were learned men of the American Enlightenment, many 18^th and 19^th century Americans became convinced that common sense and folk wisdom were sufficient to succeed. Anti-intellectualism became particularly influential in the South, the nation’s poorest region. Conversely, education has been less associated with elitism in France and other European countries. This helps explain why modern America is sharply polarized, as the U.S. political debate reached astonishing levels of demagogy, propaganda, and disinformation well before Trump’s rise. Spurred by the Tea Party, Republicans routinely made ludicrous claims about Obama’s fake birth certificate and Islamism, “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” the “hoax” of climate change, the federal government’s “tyranny,” and other conspiracy theories. Such political extremism thrives on the ignorance, irrationality, and gullibility promoted by anti-intellectualism. Extremism in contemporary Europe is far less mainstream and more focused on immigration, the main concern of nativist far-right European parties.

Millions of white working-class and middle-class Americans vote against their own economic interest by defending policies that hurt them while profiting the rich, including the 1% wealthiest Americans. Several factors help explain this peculiar dimension of U.S. politics: myopia fostered by anti-intellectualism; the relationship between religious fundamentalism and free-market fundamentalism; blind faith in the American Dream; and how racism hinders economic solidarity.