A good word…If we succumb to evacuating God as He has revealed Himself in His Word we wind up with a Deism, a god who has walked away, or a god who is less than the Lord God of hosts.
When we do this we experience what Marcus Clarke experienced: “Marcus Clarke is best known for his book “For The Term of his Natural Life.” To him, Australia was a “land of monstrosities, of trees without shade, flowers without perfume, birds that could not fly and beasts which had not yet learned to walk on all fours”. In the Australian bush he learned to find the “beauty in loneliness,” and in “haggard gum trees blown into odd shapes or distorted by fierce, hot winds”. 
“In 1866 he was completely overwhelmed by the proposition that the only possible theory was that of materialism. The loss of his religious faith left him utterly bereaved.
“Happy is the man who can believe,” he wrote. “I cannot. I am no desperate destroyer, no denier of God in heaven. I am rather as one who, wandering through the pleasant gardens of Faith and implicit belief, has stumbled upon the stern rocks that border them; the rocks of Reason, and Practicality and Materialism, and stunned by the fall is no more able to return to the pleasant paths and rest with ease upon the dewy turf but must cling to the rugged and sharp stones around him, lest he fall into the raging sea of despair and utter incredulity that boils and seethes beneath him:’  Desperately feeling the need for forgiveness but deprived of the means of gaining it, he “sought oblivion in an opium den”.
When we succumb to the pressure of secularism we leave the Lord God of Hosts. And we become subject to our own idolatries that leaves us destitute of our greatest joy, knowing Him!

Couldn’t it be that this “intellectual inferiority complex” as you call it, is written into the very DNA of evangelicalism? Historically, I’d suggest that’s that the case, considering that contemporary evangelicalism grew out of a desire to compete against the claims of modernism that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There has always seemed to be this great desire from evangelicalism to be intellectually recognised and respected as a movement and bewilderment when it is not. What do others think?