I have been reading through, bit by bit, some of the papers from the recent conference on American religious history held by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. It appears to have been a great conference with a lot of the big names in the field presenting talks.
This morning I read Jon Butler‘s talk, which was included in the conference under a session entitled “How Did We Get Here?” This session asked scholars to discuss the history of the relationship between humanities/social science disciplines and the study of American religion.
First, Butler shows how the historical roots of American religious history stem from the denominational histories of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Indeed, the goal of studying the religious past was to encourage the faithful and show the hand of God in sustaining particular denominations over time.
Second, Butler suggests that some of this “denominational history” still lingers in the work of American religious historians. Some religious historians today, Butler argues, are too “reverential” toward religion. The role of the historian is to study religion and its impact on society. It is not to affirm that “religion is good.” He chides those who reveal their religious convictions in the prefaces of history books. Butler wonders why this is necessary. Can’t a non-religious person write a good history of a particular religious movement without being somehow linked to that movement?
As someone who is a historian and a person of faith, I have always struggled with these questions and I still do not think I have come to a definitive answer. I am certainly attracted to religious topics because I am a believer, but good history is good history, regardless of the historian’s faith commitments or lack thereof.
I do think, however, that American religious historians can wear multiple hats and target their work towards multiple audiences. A historian with religious commitments might write a book for the academy or the history-reading public that is meant to advance knowledge of a given historical subject or help people understand their world in a deeper way. The church might also find this helpful, but the book I am describing here is not intended to encourage the religious person to commemorate God’s faithfulness in the past.
I am thinking here of the minor controversy surrounding the publication of Harry Stout’s The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Stout took a lot of heat from certain sectors of the evangelical Christian community for writing a book about their hero, George Whitefield, that explained his success in naturalistic ways. Stout suggested, as any good historian might, that Whitefield’s training in the theater and his ability to market himself had a lot to do with why the First Great Awakening happened the way it did. Some Christians had hoped that Stout might explain Whitefield’s success using providentialist categories. (Whitefield was a success because the spirit of God was upon him.) Stout defended himself as a historian in the modern sense of the word. While I know of many Christians who have benefited from reading Stout’s biography, his goal was not to encourage the church to a deeper spirituality by holding up Whitefield as an example.
But I also think that there are times when historians can use their expertise to help the church understand its identity. I even think that non-believing historians, or those who are not part of the church community in which the historian writes, might benefit from these books as well. For example, as many of my readers know, I am writing a history of the idea of America as “Christian nation.” The book is targeted to Christians. My goal is to get people in the pew to think historically about the relationship between religion and the American founding.
By writing such a book do I somehow cease to be an historian? I don’t think so. But I would also agree that this book is not a piece of original scholarship. I am not expecting it to be reviewed in The Journal of American History or The William and Mary Quarterly. The bottom line is that I cannot so easily separate my identity as a Christian from my identity as a historian. While my first book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home, was written to a general audience of scholars and history buffs, this new book reflects my interest in writing a history that will benefit the church. As a result, my identity as a Christian who teaches at a Christian college will be important to this project and I will thus be clearly identifying myself as such. I wonder what Butler would think of such a project.
Third, Butler tackles the question of “theory” in American religious studies. He believes that far too much “theory-driven scholarship” is unreadable. It fails to connect with a wider audience. I could not agree more. Yet Butler also notes that everyone who writes historical scholarship is motivated by some kind of “theory.” In the Way of Improvement Leads Home I turned to agrarian writers and cosmopolitan theorists to help make sense of the tensions in Philip Vickers Fithian’s life between his local affections and his cosmopolitan ambitions. Yet I deliberately chose, for the most part, not to address this use of theory in the narrative of the book. Others might disagree with that choice, but I think it makes the book more readable.
Butler, as always, gives us a lot to think about.
This is a very timely post–I just taught the Great Awakening today and drew heavily on Stout's, Butler's, and Lambert's interpretations. I realized preparing for class just what is so appealing about Butler's Awakening as interpretive fiction thesis–and why it is also problematic.
Fundamentally, I think that Butler was reacting against a providential historiography as much as anything else. Removing Christian power as the Awakening's cause not only raises questions about its cause but also its existence. One is forced to resort to naturalistic explanations. I think that scholars have largely risen to the occasion–see Kidd, Lambert, and Timothy Hall on itineracy–but I think that Butler needed to make the call. Suggesting that the Awakening was a “fiction” helped pull apart assumptions about faith, history, and causation.
I am also very sympathetic to Butler's stance on revealing one's own faith in one's work. I have heard him express some pride in the fact that readers and students have been unable to suss out his religious background from his books and lectures. It's also a stance I have taken (though partly because of his influence on me–he was one of my instructors in my first grad program). I don't tell students about my religious background and I try not to let it work too much. Obviously it does, to some degree, but I also want to keep readers/students from prejudging my work too much–he is a member of “x” denomination, so I will read his work this way.
(Oddly enough, I have already had *2* students ask me directly about my religious background so far this term. And we are 3 weeks in!)
With Stout, I wonder how much his choice of press played in the reception of his book–Eerdman's is not Oxford University Press (his first book press) or Penguin (his third book press). Do people expect a different kind of scholarship when they pick up a book from that press than when you go to one of the standard university presses, or a mass market (vintage, penguin, etc) press? (Not a lesser quality of scholarship, mind you–but one that takes a different stance on the relationship between faith and history.)
As for the question of theory–well, I had Penn Press order me not to use certain terms in the title because it would mark the book less marketable (creole = ok, creolization = not ok). And John's read my work, so he is familiar with me and theory. So I am not one to weigh in, I suppose!
John–Great comment. Thanks for taking the time to do it. I think you are probably right about Butler reacting against providentialism, but I also think he has a beef with people like Marsden who are not providentialists but still identify themselves as Christians in the prefaces of their books, as if this somehow gives them more insight. Again, a lot of it has to do with audience and genre, but I think I am with you and Butler in wondering what difference it makes in a piece of scholarship other than perhaps selling more books to Christians who like history.
When a student asks you about your religious faith in class what do you say?
As for Stout, I think your right. He tried to write an objective Whitefield biography for an Eerdmans-type readership. I don't remember him revealing himself as a Christian in that book. Landsman assigned his book to his undergraduate colonial course at Stony Brook and, as you might imagine, none of this came up. Frankly, the book is the most undergraduate accessible work on the Great Awakening out there.
I suspect that you are correct vis a vis Butler and Marsden. Marsden himself has always seemed to be a “strange bedfellows” scholar to me; I was surprised to read him citing feminist theory on “subject position” to explain how his overt positioning as as evangelical frames his work. But he's not fundamentally wrong in that respect.
For me, I keep coming back to a line that one of my profs in grad school (who wrote about indigenous people in Mexico) coined: there's biography, and then there's autobiography. Each has strengths and weaknesses. To apply it to this case, she would point out that a book about self-professed modern evangelical about the Christian tradition in US history is not inherently superior to one written by a non-believer, though the immediacy of the author does carry some weight. The risk is in the identification with the “we”–can Marsden really speak for Edwards? or is the self-identification as being part of a common tradition problematic?–and the fact that gaining perspective in some areas also entails loss of perspective in others.
Having written a first book about Quakers–I can reveal here I am not a Quaker–and starting a second book on African American history–I am white–these questions are on my mind. It was also an issue for the book I edited on comparative American history–the colonial Americas certainly look different when you're writing from the US than they do when you're writing from Latin America.
When students ask me about my faith, I gently inform them that it's a private matter that I don't think is relevant to the course at hand: I try, as much as possible, to teach in a way where I don't advertise my faith, and I hope they participate in the class in a way that doesn't advertise theirs. It's a continuation of a line I put out on the first day: this isn't a space where we're going to question anyone's beliefs and convert them. The neutral pose–even if fictitious, since no one is ever totally neutral–can allows to approach these issues historically, without individuals having the same stake with respect to who was “right” and “wrong” on doctrinal issues.