Well, I'm a linguist, and yes, we do have that. Actually, it works a lot like the philosophy of religion thing. Researchers within the subdiscipline that deals with X believe X is really important. But outside that subdiscipline/clique are a lot of people who have concluded that X is not important and/or doesn't really exist. Naturally, the people who believe in X publish a lot more about X than the people who think X is a stinking pile of dwagon crap. This can lead to outsiders getting the impression that the field has a consensus position about X=awesome.
The best example I know is the debate about linguistic universals. Chomskyan universalists think that all human languages are fundamentally alike, that there is a genetically determined "universal grammar" which shapes their structure. The Chomskyans are a very strong and impressive clique and a lot of non-linguists get the impression that what they say is what every serious linguist believes. But this is not so. A lot of us think the "universal grammar" stuff is vacuous non-sense which we can't be bothered with.
Starting a big fight with the Chomskyans has not been a good career move for the past half-century but this may be changing. In 2009, a couple of linguists started a shitstorm with the article The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. The abstract starts like this:
Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective.
Suddenly a lot of people are willing to die on this hill, so you can find a very ample supply of recent articles on both sides of this.
Question: my understanding is that the fact that humans manage to learn language so readily in early childhood, when compared with how bad we are at objectively simpler tasks like arithmetic, does suggest we have some kind of innate, specialized "language module", even if the Chomskyan view gets some important details wrong. Would that be generally accepted among linguistics, or is it contentious? And in the latter case, why would it be contentious?
(I ask because this understanding of language is one of the main building blocks in what I understand about human intelligence.)
In my article on trusting expert consensus, I talked about the value of having hard data on the opinions of experts in a given field. The unspoken subtext was that you should be careful of claims of expert consensus that don't have hard data to back them up. I've joked that when a philosopher says there's a philosophical consensus, what he really means is "I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me."
What's often really happening, though (at least in philosophy) is that the "consensus" really reflects the opinions of a particular academic clique. A sub-group of experts in the field spend a disproportionate amount of time talking to each other, and end up convincing themselves they represent the consensus of the entire profession. A rather conspicuous example of this is what I've called the Plantinga clique on my own blog—theistic philosophers who've convinced themselves that the opinions of Alvin Plantinga represent the consensus of philosophy.
But it isn't just theistic philosophers who do this. When I was in school, it was still possible to hear fans of Quine claim that everyone knew Quine had refuted the analytic synthetic distinction. Post PhilPapers survey, hopefully people have stopped claiming this. And one time, I heard a philosophy blogger berating scientists for being ignorant of the findings in philosophy that all philosophers agree on. I asked him for examples of claims that all philosophers agree on, I responded with examples of philosophers who rejected some of those claims, "Ah," he said, "but they don't count. Let me tell you who's opinions matter..." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was what it amounted to.)
I strongly suspect this happens in other disciplines: supposed "consensuses of experts" are really just the opinions of one clique within a discipline. Thus, I tend to approach claims of consensus in any discipline with skepticism when they're not backed up by hard data. But I don't actually know of verifiable examples of this problem outside of philosophy. Has other people with backgrounds in other disciplines noticed things like this?