Malcolm Foley directs the Black Church Studies Program at Truett Seminary in Waco. Today at the Anxious Bench he responded to my post on AHA president James Sweet’s article on presentism. I responded to the piece in the comments section at The Anxious Bench, but could not get it to publish. Here is what I wrote:
Thanks for this, Malcolm. I AM afraid about the decline of history in American universities and liberal arts colleges. But I am not afraid because I might lose my job or be forced to give-up control over some kind of “fiefdom” over which I preside. (Please help me find the “mini-kingdom” over which I rule–I’m still looking for it!) In other words, I do not fear the loss of the discipline of history because of economic reasons or concerns related to power. I fear the loss of the discipline of history because I believe it offers a way of thinking that is essential to the creation of a strong democratic society and a thoughtful church. The study of history forces us to come to grips with the past on its own terms, not ours. Unlike other liberal arts disciplines such as sociology, religious studies, political science, etc. it emphasizes the sheer otherness of the past.
This is not to say that a historian is not interested in continuity–indeed I have spent a lot of my career pointing out continuity and even allowing the present to guide my understanding of the past. As I wrote in my original post, I will continue to do so. But history forces us to deal with otherness in a way in which other disciplines (even those disciplines who peddle in the past) do not. And, as I argued almost ten years ago in Why Study History, confronting the otherness of the past–listening to it, empathizing with its people–can cultivate virtue in our lives. This, of course, is not to say that the study of history is better than other disciplines, it is just different.
As far as “boundary policing” goes, I plead guilty. I have a Ph.D in history. I am not a religious studies scholar or a political scientist. I was trained differently. I teach different kinds of courses than those trained in these other disciplines. I fully expect those scholars to defend the boundaries of their disciplines as well. Anyone who has sat in a general education committee meeting knows what I am talking about here. For example, I couldn’t imagine hiring someone with a Ph.D. in religious studies or political science or sociology or theology to teach history at my institution. If that is “boundary policing,” then so be it. We all have boundaries to police. Moreover, I currently serve as president of an organization affiliated with the American Historical Association, not the AAR, ASCH, or some other professional association. (Having said that, if you heard my Conference on Faith and History presidential address last April on your home campus at Baylor I tried to suggest that there should be plenty of room for all kinds of approaches to history, including ones that privilege presentism).
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m glad to see you blogging at The Anxious Bench these days and wish you well on a great semester.
Foley: “If objectivity means that I treat evil ideas the same as I treat just ones, I have no time for it.”
We can treat ideas fairly or unfairly, and treating just ideas fairly but evil ideas unfairly would be one way of not treating them the same, but, I think, not a good one.
Complex issue, of course. Few of us would give classroom space to a holocaust denier. We’d just shut it down, saying, sorry, that’s not happening here.
But, should we do the same with someone arguing, say, that, all in all, Jefferson’s legacy is on balance for the good, despite his slave-holding and etc.?
If someone dissents from contemporary gender ideology–ie, holds you can’t just declare yourself to be whatever gender you want–that, in many quarters, is evil. It does actual harm, by exacerbating depression, leading to suicide of trans youths. Should such an argument be treated the same way we treat holocaust denial, as not just wrong, but deeply anti-social, and therefore as something that shouldn’t be heard?
Many would say “yes.”
I know, we live our lives on slippery slopes, but this strikes me as dangerous path to go down.
I couldn’t agree more with this John. I often wonder what a classroom looks like for someone who teaches the past the way Foley suggests in this quote?
In addition to Jefferson’s legacy and transgenderism, another example might be abortion. What if a student or a reader thinks abortion is evil but another student or reader thinks taking away a women’s right to choose is evil? Should a discussion of whether abortion is ethical or unethical play any role in a history lecture on the pro-life movement in America?
One can replace abortion with all sorts of issues. What if a person believes, based on their reading of the Bible, that women should not hold the office of pastor and as a result thinks that those who do believe women should hold this office are evil or immoral (or vice-versa)? Is the goal of a women’s history class to advance one view or the other?
“Evil” is not a historical category. If you are going to say that history is about calling out evil then you are opening a pandora’s box to the David Barton’s of the world. They are fighting evil too and they can find plenty of evidence in the founding to muster a case (largely through cherry-picking) to show that the founders believed religion and morality was essential to a successful republic.
In the end, according to Foley and his online defenders, the only differences between a historian and a practitioner of another discipline (political scientist, ethicist, sociologist, etc.) is that a historian “fights evil” in the present by starting in the past. This, to quote Bernard Bailyn, is little more than “indoctrination by historical example.”
Don’t get me wrong, “fighting evil” is important. But it is not the historian’s primary task. A historian provides the necessary background and understanding to complex issues as they unfolded over time so that a student can debate them in their ethics, religious studies, theology, philosophy, or political science class. My thinking here is shaped two decades in an intellectual/academic/liberal arts community where faculty are not teaching the thinking habits of their disciplines as isolated individuals, but as part of an integrated general education curriculum where each discipline–and its unique way of thinking–contribute something to the greater whole of a student’s education.
Finally, to say that “evil” is not a historical category does not automatically mean that one is engaged in some kind of Rankean exercise. Having said that, I think even a pure Rankean approach to the past can cultivate virtues in students and readers as they learn to see the world on other’s terms and make sense of the past as a foreign country. I believe this because I have 20 years of student and reader testimony from men, women, and people of color to support the claim. I am not a pure Rankean (in WHY STUDY HISTORY I balance the “past is a foreign country” with the idea of a “useable past” and the importance of bringing diverse voices and texts into the classroom) but even a Rankean approach to history has the potential to make the world–our democracy, our churches–a better place.
So let a thousand activists bloom! I have spent the better part of the last decade doing activism, but I would never hold up my book *Believe Me* or most of what I write on my blog or CURRENT as a model of how to do historical scholarship or how to train students in the discipline of historical thinking. Heck, I think I mentioned Trump in class two or three times during his entire four year term! 🙂
I don’t know Malcolm Foley–I don’t think I have ever had a conversation with him that extended beyond pleasantries (which is why I was surprised that he seemed to know me well enough to claim that I was motivated by fear of economic loss and power), but from all I have heard he is doing wonderful work for the Church in his various roles at Baylor and in his congregation.
I confess I couldn’t follow his analysis when he traced your and others’ hesitations to turn history into an intentionally moralizing discipline to “fear.” It seems to me, in fact, that history’s insistence that it has its hands full just figuring out what happened and how to accurately tell the story, that since there’s no shortage of folk out there who*do* take it as their role to pronounce moral judgments, and that *the best* way historians can contribute to our society’s collective effort to sort the moral from the immoral is to make sure we have reliabe accounts of the lives we’re pronouncing judgment upon, it seems to me that it’s actually not al that satisfying to most people thathistorians are reluctance to become moralizers. Folk want to jump past the details and the complexities of the past, if they can, and get to the part where we give the thumbs up or the thumbs down. A discipline that won’t do that isn’t, it often seems to folk, practical, or good for much. Likewise, if we can get to the moral judgment, why do we even need the deep dives historians continually take? That may be of interest to antiquarians and buffs, but the average person, the political leader, the influencer, doesn’t need it. They just need to know Jonathan Edwards owned a slave, nothing in all his theology or thinking or praying stopped him from owning a slave, so it’s all of it complicit in slavery, and therefore we can dismiss all of it and get on with things.
This desire to simplify by exclusion isn’t just a feature of the social justice left, by the way, but that’s another discussion. I’ll just say here that I sense there’s something wrong–morally wrong–with the insistence that things be made more simple for us, and it’s maybe the historian’s most significant moral contribution to the world to show how very uch things were *not simple* at all.
But I would like to raise a flag about Foley’s tracing of your hesitancies to “fear” about losing power, or prestige, or even a job. One thing I have noted among those who consider themselves activists first, who take it as their task less to understand the world than to change it, is that when they meet resistance, they always want to personalize it. It’s never that the principles involved in this question are difficult, and hard to grasp, or complex, and open to different takes, or dubious, and sincerely debatable. It’s tather that the person ojecting wants attention, or is wedded to the familiar, or lacks compassion, or is devoted to maintaining their privilege, or whatever. I’m not entirely sure about the source of this: Is it simply strategic, a way of putting the skeptic on the defensive, of tarring them in the public square, or is it that they see the matter as so cut-and-dry and their own take as so obviously the right one, that they’re convinced only impure motives can accountfor anyone disagreeing with them? But I’ve encountered it over and over again from activists and political animals on the right and left. One of the great blessings of the academic temperament is it wants to take ideas seriously.
Thanks for this, John. Couldn’t agree more.
I should hope so–I probably got a lot of these ideas from you!