Thanks to John Fea who treated his readers to a minor kerfuffle among historians of the American Revolution, I noticed ways in which the alleged disparity between church and secular history is less obvious than I had thought. The source of the dispute concerns whether historians can actually identify with the founding of the U.S. and affirm that the American Revolution was a good thing, sort of like the founding of Christianity and saying Jesus was a good thing. I know, I know, America is not the church, but the relationship between historians who are U.S. citizens (at least) and the United States of America is comparable to church historians who belong to a sector of Christianity that they study.
Here is how the debate started:
Non-academic J.F. Gearhart asked one group of commentators if they thought the American Revolution was a good thing. Is the world a better place because the American Revolution occurred? The pained look on their silent faces spoke volumes. The anguished mental gymnastics of the three visibly uncomfortable academics was reminiscent of an American President coming up with “What is ‘is.’” Finally Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University, managed to say (and I am paraphrasing), “There were some good things which came out of the American Revolution and some bad things.” Gearhart pressed her to provide a “net-net” rendering on the Revolution. She declined to do so and laughingly noted that her students want her to do the same.
Her answer called to mind the motto from the 1980s: “some people are communist, some people are capitalist” meaning so why can’t we all live together. “Because it is a god-damned Evil Empire” replied the simple-minded American-exceptionalist president Ronald Reagan. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union would be around forever…which turned out to be about five years in real time. The post 9/11 actions of simple-minded American-exceptionalist president George Bush reinforced the negative attitudes towards traditional interpretations of the American Revolution by the Vietnam era and post-Vietnam generation scholars. Commentator Linda Colley, Princeton University, emphatically called on Americans to stop stressing exceptionalism. (I have double exclamation points in my notes on her comment.) Out with city on a hill. No more last best hope of mankind. Forget about making the world safe for democracy. America has no rendezvous destiny. America is the problem not the solution for thinking it is the solution and not the problem.
To this, Michael Zuckerman responded:
I don’t for a moment discount the bright visions and the glowing words of the Founders, and I don’t know any other academics who do. The scholars who spoke at The American Revolution Reborn study the founders – all the founders – because they treasure those ideals and that rhetoric. But the world of the Founders and the founders is not ours, and their virtues no longer characterize us distinctively or, in some cases, at all. The question is how we salvage something of those virtues in a world transformed, and largely transformed in ways inimical to those virtues. The question is how we renew those virtues under new circumstances and against the odds. But we can’t take up those questions and a dozen others like them if we simply reiterate the old verities. If we are to engage in the conversation we have to have in 2013, we have got to acknowledge the realities of our new world.
Peter Feinman, who started the imbroglio, finished with this:
If however, the language of academics today is condescending, doesn’t take pride in the American Revolution, and only criticizes America, then Mike Zuckerman is right: the battle over the changes America needs to live up to its potential is lost.
There is a difference between challenging America to be great and simply constantly condemning it for its shortcomings. Academics haven’t learned to speak the language of patriotism when criticizing America. They should champion the journey the Founding Fathers began, rather than only criticizing them for failing to meet their 21st century moral standards.
Yes, the American Revolution was a good thing, but we can’t rest on our laurels.
Yes the American Revolution was a good thing, but there is more that needs to be done.
Yes, the American Revolution was a good thing, and with your help the journey the Founding Fathers began can be renewed for the 21st century.
Striking (to all about me) is the degree to which both sides in this debate identify with the “values” or ideals of the American founding. They may disagree about the state of those goods in other periods of U.S. history, but these historians apparently are not bashful in taking sides. Of course, I never suspected that scholars were reluctant to spell out what the U.S. should do or be. But scholars who study a subject are supposed to be dispassionate, removed, unbiased. Even if w-wers would have us know that no such intellectual position of neutrality is possible, historians do try to remove their personal convictions as much as possible from the way they try to understand the past. If they did not, then they would be like your average proponent of the antithesis who roams through the past and points out the saved and the damned as he goes. Instead of relying on personal convictions about good politics, fair societies, or virtuous politicians, historians try to follow the conventions of the academic discipline and look for what is significant in the past, based on a shared understanding of say, electoral politics, dominant and subordinate people groups, economic developments, or the scale and scope of the nation-state.
But if a historian is a citizen of the United States, she cannot be entirely objective about U.S. history because a member of the body politic she is studying generally has definite views about how the nation should conduct its affairs, the relations between states and the national bureaucracy, which partisan groups should shut up, and which lobbyists should be monitored. It is akin to being a member of the Presbyterian Church and having definite views about revivalism, limited atonement, and exclusive-psalmody. Both church and “regular” historians study parts of humanity, not the whole, and they look to institutions as a way to generalize about the affairs of an institution’s members. And if they happen to belong to some of those parts of humanity, then their study will be colored by their own commitments as members of church or nation.
For at least a half century, the assumption in history circles is that church historians are less trustworthy than regular historians because the former, who generally belong to some religious group, are prone to bias and relying on interpretive standards that are not available to all people. But this exchange between Feinman and Zuckerman may indicate that such a distinction is much more theoretical than real. After all, historians of the U.S. who are citizens of the U.S. are prone to biases and interpretive standards that Danes or Italians who study the U.S. do not share. And if a historian of the U.S. who is a citizen of the U.S. is loyal to the Constitution, the Republican Party, or hawkish foreign policy as a citizen, is she any less parochial (compared to the people who inhabit planet earth) than a church historian who is anti-revival, pro-liturgy, or anti-women’s ordination? I don’t think so.
Does this change the status of church history? Or should it? Should departments of history include church historians among their ranks, the way they employ labor, political, foreign policy, or Central American historians? It all depends (such courage). But on the basis of this exchange between Feinman and Zuckerman, I see no reason for regarding church historians as inherently different (and thus inferior) to “regular” historians.
Old Life 
Hey Dr. Hart, long-time listener, first time caller (no, not that kind of caller). I enjoyed this bit of historiography.
As someone who has dabbled in history, my guess is that suspicion of bias is only one of the issues faced by church historians. Bias is a problem, but academic historians acknowledge the subjective factors driving them to study their topic. After all, we don’t suppose that an historian would spend his or her life devoted to learning and teaching about ancient Greece all the while hating the subject and finding it completely boring. And we supposedly do live a post-objective world.
I can imagine that academics set the bias bar higher for church historians, but there are other negative connotations associated with church history that make it hard for church historians to find a home in history faculties.
(1) Church history is associated with either institutional or intellectual history. These types of history are seen as old fashioned.
(2) Church history tends to be seen as engaging in special pleading, with its own religious vocabulary, theological complexities, and so on. For example, in order to make sense of Calvin’s theology one has to be able to make sense of his commentaries. Historians who otherwise are non-religious and who have not devoted time to understanding the basics of Christian theology or hermeneutics can’t make head or tail of what is going on. It appears to be a history that is only available to Christians.
I believe that the response to these challenges lies in branding.
Church historians need to address the bias issue head on, and the climate has never been so favorable. In other words, no professor does history w/o subjectivity, but the awareness of these motivations and professionalism go a long way to mitigate harmful bias.
Regarding church history, it does not need to be called that. Why not something like “history of American Presbyterianism” or “social history of religious ideas” or “history of religion and philosophy”? I don’t think that we have to use the term “church history” and coming up with a term that has less baggage may be advantageous.
Finally, the church historian (or whatever you want to call it) can stress the benefits that she brings to the academic community. We all recognize that religion has been a hugely important factor in history, for good or ill. It would be a shame for a faculty to be completely unable to understand some of the most influential ideas, documents, and movements throughout history. A church historian, especially one who has been well-trained or who is a Christian, has been steeped in the subject and is thus able to understand the religious language, much like a historian of German history must understand German.
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Mad Hung., I’m not sure CH has ever been associated with intellectual history. Plus, folks like David Hollinger, an intellectual historian, are thoroughly mainstream.
As for special vocabulary that is unavailable to outsiders, have you ever listened historians of economics?
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DGH, you are certainly correct about historians of economics. Maybe that is a way for church historians to market themselves, as a type or method of history similar to a history of economics or a history of science.
Church historians do face a lot of negative stereotypes and they could probably benefit from some creative thinking about how to address the problem, especially new PhD’s looking for a job.
Landing a history job is hard enough without the added pressure of having to overcome a bias against church historians. This very issue is one of the reasons I jumped ship after my MA and went to law school.
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I’m not an academically trained historian. Rather, I’m a physicist with a law degree. But I can at least confess to my own bias.
When someone says he or she is a “church historian,” I tend to think of that in the same way as someone who says that he or she is a “corporate historian” for some Fortune 100 company. After all, such historians often receive certain patronage, whether direct or indirect, from the very institutions whose history they are studying. While I expect such a person to have the same skills as other similarly trained historians, I also expect these historians to retell the history of their patron in a more fair light than they may do otherwise.
I think church historians will continue to be viewed with some skepticism so long as their patron’s public stature is influenced directly or indirectly by their work.
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I received my MA in history from a secular public university, and never picked up on bias against Christian historians of American religion.
Mark Noll and George Marsden were spoken of in the same breath as secular Mary Beth Norton, and my (thoroughly secularist) prof never did anything to suggest that one should be taken more seriously than another.
That being said, historians doing any institutional history (including that of the bride of Christ) have been out of favor for a while.
Perhaps transnational church history, like DGH’s new global history of Calvinism, is a way to marry academic trends and church history.
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Hart on Fea’s new book.
http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=383&cur_iss=Y
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Thanks for the link to the review.
Dr. Hart, have you read David Hollinger’s “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History” yet? I was wondering what your thoughts were.
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Darren, not yet have I read Hollinger, though I have read an essay or two that went into it. My initial interest is with the idea that the mainline actually won (instead of evangelicals). I am by no means someone who thinks evangelical influence has been large or positive. But if the mainline actually won the culture wars, then it would be possible to say that Muslims won over the secular Kemalists in Turkey.
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over at the keller/carson/piper— five biographies from dgh
D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of the standard biography of J. Gresham Machen, and most recently, a history of Calvinism.
Here are five biographies he recommends:
1. Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950).
A colorful treatment of an even more colorful figure that captures the central dynamic of the Reformation, namely, how to be right with God.
2. Stewart Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (1982).
A scrupulously researched inquiry that situates a hero of Scottish Calvinism within the political, educational, and ecclesiastical complexities of nineteenth-century Scotland.
3. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991).
A provocative account that looks past hagiography to capture the human (and sometimes unflattering) aspects of Protestantism’s greatest evangelist.
4. Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (2002).
Arguably the best biography of the infamous literary critic in part because the author, a music critic, takes into account the subject’s love of music.
5. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (2009).
A smartly conceived narrative that allows Calvin’s “greatness” to emerge not from hindsight but from the accidents of sixteenth-century Europe.
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At least Hart stayed away from Paul Johnson and Jonathan Edwards.
I recommend Tomkins on Wesley. Check out this review by Oakes.
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/–john-wesley-a-biography-25
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Augustine–the earthly city operates by sacrificing to false gods but the true church eliminates original sin by means of water baptism and sacrificing donatists to the earthly city
Constantine eliminated animal sacrifices to pagan gods by cutting off the heads of other pagan humans, by sacrificing (shedding the blood of) his enemies
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 1975, Johns Hopkins—“Tropics is the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively.”
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David Steinmetz, Memory and Mission, p32—“Historians are left with historical materials that will not conform to their finer theological instincts and with results that force them to conclusions that they find personally disagreeable. There is one commandment that Church historians must scrupulously observe–honor thy father and mother. They have no god-like prerogative to ‘improve’ history. The past event is beyond the reach of the historian at the level of its sheer givenness.”
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What is a non-christian historian? A fool, who is not to be trusted as far as you can throw him.
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D.G. – Should departments of history include church historians among their ranks, the way they employ labor, political, foreign policy, or Central American historians?
Erik – Absolutely, and when I win the lottery I’m setting up the Darryl G. Hart endowed Professorship on Church History at Iowa State, with Hart himself as the first occupant.
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Regarding David Hollinger:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/182-7772984-4018940?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david%20hollinger&sprefix=david+hollin%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Adavid%20hollinger
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Mark,
Thanks for that list.
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Notable historians-as-apologists include Edwin Yamauchi and John Warwick Montgomery. Another good example is Stephen Keillor, whose work in American history from a Christian perspective defies categorization, and whose balance between good scholarship and faith commitments Green appreciates, even if he doesn’t wholly agree. Green advises that others, like Francis Schaeffer, should be studied with more care. While not a trained historian, Schaeffer’s sweeping judgments about the past often didn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s curious that N. T. Wright, the leading scholar of the modern quest for the historical Jesus, isn’t considered. http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/christian-historiography-five-rival-versions
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