Thanks to John Fea for the link to this video from a new project about the slaves that once called Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello “home”. Just Friday I was reading about Jefferson in Fea’s Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? The book is an essential read for those wanting a full historical treatment of that question. I hope to review it in a little more detail at some point once I manage to finish it. To be fair, Jefferson wanted to end the institution of slavery, at least according to his writings and actions (he presented legislation to that effect, but none of it ever was passed). However, he only ever freed a handful of his personal slaves, and his life at Monticello relied on their free labor. Check out this piece, and see the links at Dr. Fea’s site for more information on the project at Monticello.
Archive for the 'History' Category
The Hidden Side of Monticello
(Illustration by Jennifer Hewitson / For The LA Times)
John M. Barry offers a little historical perspective on the origins of the church/state relation debate. Not too surprisingly, the debate about the relationship between church and government in the US dates back to the earliest colonies. Barry looks specifically at the Massachusetts Bay Colony and more specifically the thoughts of Roger Williams. Here is a taste. (HT: John Fea)
The church-state conflict began when Puritans, envisioning a Christian nation, founded what John Winthrop called “a citty upon a hill” in Massachusetts, and Williams rejected that vision for another: freedom. He insisted that the state refrain from intervening in the relationship between humans and God, stating that even people advocating “the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or Antichristian consciences and worships” be allowed to pray — or not pray — freely, and that “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”
Yet Williams was no atheist. He was a devout Puritan minister who, like other Massachusetts Puritans, fled religious persecution in England. Upon his arrival in 1631 he was considered so godly that Boston Puritans had asked him to lead their church. He declined — because he considered their church insufficiently pure.
Reverence for both Scripture and freedom led Williams to his position. His mentor was Edward Coke, the great English jurist who ruled, “The house of every one is as his castle,” extending the liberties of great lords — and an inviolate refuge where one was free — to the lowest English commoners. Coke pioneered the use of habeas corpus to prevent arbitrary imprisonment. And when Chancellor of England Thomas Egerton said, “Rex est lex loquens; the king is the law speaking,” and agreed that the monarch could “suspend any particular law” for “reason of state,” Coke decreed instead that the law bound the king. Coke was imprisoned — without charge — for his view of liberty, but that same view ran in Williams’ veins.
Equally important to Williams was Scripture. Going beyond the “render unto Caesar” verse in the New Testament, he recognized the difficulty in reconciling contradictory scriptural passages as well as different Bible translations. He even had before him an example of a new translation that served a political purpose. King James had disliked the existing English Bible because in his view it insufficiently taught obedience to authority; the King James Bible would correct that.
Given these complexities, Williams judged it impossible for any human to interpret all Scripture without error. Therefore he considered it “monstrous” for one person to impose any religious belief on another. He also realized that any government-sponsored prayer required a public official to pass judgment on something to do with God, a sacrilegious presumption. He also knew that when one mixes religion and politics, one gets politics. So to protect the purity of the church, he demanded — 150 years before Jefferson — a “wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world.”
Interesting side note in there about the history of the King James Bible. Funny that it is often seen as the epitome of the unbiased standard against which new version are compared for any attempt to change the language, while it is a biased translation to begin with!
Can Glenn Beck Read?
Dr. John Fea
I’m not so sure after the uproar of the last week or so. It all started with a post by my friend and colleague John Fea. Dr. Fea is the chair of the Department of History here at Messiah College, a thoughtful Christian, and an exemplary historian specializing in early American History. He is very careful to approach his craft in a way that allows his beliefs to inform his work, but never to turn his work into propaganda in support of his views. The furor erupted over what, in my opinion, is a gross inability of Glenn Beck to let the facts stand in the way of a good story that he could gain publicity from.
The kerfuffle is based on an interesting piece by Dr. Fea on Patheos a week or so ago. Dr. Fea points out that President Barack Obama has cited his faith as a part of his policy-making and life at a level that is somewhat unprecedented. In fact, after citing some examples, Dr. Fea makes the statement:
Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history.
Now, this is not a proclamation, of course. Dr. Fea qualifies the statement with “may be”, but Beck and his disciples seem to have not been able to read that part. They have accused Dr. Fea of stating that Obama is the most explicitly Christian president in American history. Here is the whole paragraph in context:
Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history. If we analyze his language in the same way that historians examine the religious language of the Founding Fathers or even George W. Bush, we will find that Obama’s piety, use of the Bible, and references to Christian faith and theology put most other American presidents to shame on this front. I think there may be good reasons why some people will not vote for Obama in November, but his commitment to Christianity is not one of them.
Worse than just missing the “may be”, they also seem to not know what explicitly means. How Beck, and his disciples, read this as an endorsement of Obama’s theology is beyond me. Dr. Fea does not even say that Obama is, in fact, a Christian, let alone an exemplary one. He is simply saying that Obama has been more public about his claimed faith. He also says that Christians can’t really find fault with his commitment to Christianity as a basis for voting against him. Can we find fault with his personal theology? Sure. Can we disagree with how he thinks his faith should be worked out in policy? Of course. Do we have any real evidence that he is not a Christian or is not committed to his faith? No. Sorry. I didn’t vote for him in 2008, but I have no doubt that he is a Christian, and find claims that he is a Muslim laughable.
Now, one might ask if the problem is that Beck views Dr. Fea as a liberal shill for Obama. The answer is clearly a resounding no, if you take the time to read the rest of the article. Here is the last two paragraphs of the original:
Unfortunately, for all of his religious rhetoric, Obama the president has failed to articulate the faith-based political vision he promised us that night in the tiny village of Grantham, Pennsylvania. His handling of the recent contraception issue was a disaster. He missed a wonderful opportunity to explain his health care proposal—disparaged by the GOP as “Obamacare”—as a direct extension of his Christian convictions to care for the poor and the needy. He has failed in his promise to reduce abortions in the United States and, as a result, protect the weakest and most vulnerable of the “least of these.” His plan to tax the richest members of society is driven by populist rhetoric, but it lacks a prophetic edge informed by the radical implications of Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels.
If Obama wins in 2012, we will see his true colors on matters of faith and policy. Without another election to worry about, he can either turn toward secularism or provide a vision of faith-based political action that would be quite different from what the Christian Right and his GOP rivals are offering. Will we get the Obama of the Compassion Forum or the Obama of the last three years?
This is certainly no endorsement of Obama. This seems to be Dr. Fea calling for Obama to actually deliver on the rhetoric in which he is so “explicitly Christian”. Somehow the few comments I read through seemed to miss this entirely. Perhaps they never bothered to read the second page of the piece? I wish that his pieces would be one page, but it is always worth clicking for page 2 when needed. To raise a furor about this radical professor without actually taking the time to read the whole piece and actually evaluate the claims is another sign of what is wrong with our current political climate, and why I have no way to argue with those Christians who have decided to withdraw from the voting/political process. (see this post from yesterday)
The only redeeming quality about the furor is that perhaps some have read the whole piece and realized that Beck is wrong in his characterization of Dr. Fea. I want to also point my readers to read the whole thing, but also to consider the response of Dr. Fea. After dealing with an inbox and voice-mail box filled with vitriol from those who believed Beck’s lies and misrepresentation, Dr. Fea offered grace-filled response on his blog. Here is a taste, but I suggest that reading the whole thing will give a more balanced perspective on the type of faculty I get to work with here.
I do not want to dwell on this too much. As a writer I realize that in the United States people are free to disagree. I guess that comes with the territory. But I would like to at least make two comments:
1. I continue to stand by my argument about Barack Obama being the most explicitly Christian president in American history. Perhaps I could have said this more clearly, but I do not know of any president (certainly not Washington, Adams, or Jefferson, the three presidents who I focused on in my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?) who has talked more openly about his Christian faith than Obama. If future historians judge Obama’s rhetoric in the same way that today’s historians judge the rhetoric of George Washington or John Adams or any other president, they will conclude that Obama has used his faith as part of his public rhetoric to a much greater extent than these Founders. When I wrote this I was not making a statement about whether Obama utilizes Christian faith correctly or not. I was rather making a statement about how explicitly Christian Obama’s rhetoric happens to be.
I do not agree with many of Obama’s policies. Some of my agreements stem from my Christian faith. I tried to reference some of my disappointment with Obama in my Patheos piece. But when Obama says he is a Christian, I take him at his word. I think Jesus said something about he who is without sin cast the first stone.
2. After what happened to me today I am even more deeply convinced about the need for civil dialogue in America. You can read the comments for yourself, but I would say that most of the 800 comments on The Blaze have nothing to do with the argument of my piece. They instead focused on the controversial headline.
But even if some of Glenn Beck’s followers did read the whole piece and concluded that they disagreed with my argument, the level of vitriol I have experienced today has made me concerned for our country. How can democracy flourish without civility, respect for those with whom we differ, and a sense of mutual understanding? I continue to believe that the answer lies in education, particularly in history and the other humanities. It is these disciplines that have the potential to bring meaningful change to the world because they are rooted in virtues such as intellectual hospitality, empathy, understanding, and civility.
My Christian faith and my vocation as a historian remind me that we are human beings, created in the image of God, and thus worthy of respect. My Christian faith and my vocation as a historian calls me to listen to those with whom I might disagree and perhaps even learn something from them. To do otherwise is a failure to love my neighbor (Mt. 22:39–I did not feel much love from my Christian brothers and sisters who wrote to me today). My Christian faith and my vocation as a historian teaches me humility and reminds me that sometimes I may need to sacrifice my own deeply held convictions for a better opinion.
Democracy does not require us to abandon our most cherished beliefs. Far from it. Democracy implies that we bring our cherished beliefs to the public arena (and the Internet) with vigor. A democracy offers the opportunity to debate others with whom we differ and try to convince them–rationally and civilly–to come over to our point of view. As Christians, we are required by God to love our enemies, but in the process we might even learn something from them. The cultivation of this kind of democratic culture is America’s best hope.
Thanks, John, for being willing to model Christian grace and civility despite the mean-spirited nature of the attacks on him. If Beck (who ironically is a Mormon, which many Christians would classify as outside orthodox faith), had offered the same grace-filled response to Dr. Fea and started a dialogue, the situation might have caused more growth and understanding, rather than furthering the negative nature of politics in the US. I am thankful that there are still moderate voices who seek to understand and reason with others, rather than simply out-shout their opponents. If I had any respect for Glenn Beck, this might have been the final straw. Of course, I lost my respect for Beck long ago, and this situation seems in conflict with his pledge of nonviolence which promised more civility.
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Note: I am intentionally not linking to Beck’s website which helped escalate the issue since driving more hits for him would only compound the problem since it would encourage him to continue making money off of this type of con.
Also, comments that resort to personal attacks or add to the vitriol will not be approved, or will be deleted. Comments adding voices to the discussion in a civil fashion are welcomed.
This was a fascinating look at the Cyrus Cylinder down through the years. This object has confirmed parts of Scripture, been an important object in the motivation of Christian and Muslim nations, and still has an impact all these years later. Those with interest in the Scriptures or history will probably agree that this talk is a must-watch!
How is Scripture Illuminated to Us?
Over at the Pangea Blog on Patheos, Kurt Willems explores what he considers to be a flawed way of reading Scripture. He represents it by the concept of what Scripture “plainly” means to the reader. The idea seems reasonable. Why would God make Scripture “tricky” such that the meaning wasn’t clear? The problem with this technique is that this is an entirely egotistical approach to theology. The Bible was handed down to us, but it was not written only for us. It was written to an original audience, with divinely inspired timelessness. Let me give Willems’ take as he puts it:
I believe that this approach to the bible is flawed, which is why I often call it the “surface level approach.” It seems quite arrogant to assume that the Holy Scriptures are simplistic to understand and do not require us to do any homework. The problem is that we live with gaps in-between the text and us. For instance, there is a considerable communication gap between the original authors of the Scriptures and our 21st century culture. We all know what it is like to have a communication gap. Think about it. How many husbands get themselves in trouble for saying something that sounds like something totally different than what they actually had in mind.
Wife says: How do I look in this outfit.
Husband says: It looks ok.
Wife says: Ok… (she says with a tone). That’s about as good of an answer as calling me fat! You jerk!
This is a communication gap to the extreme! Now take this stupid analogy and imagine that there is also a language, cultural, and more than 2000 years in our communication gap; that is what we have when we approach the Bible.
Given the reality of this gap, we need to be careful not impose our ideas onto the text, even if they “make sense” to us. That does not mean that nothing is “plain” in the Bible, but over the past few years I have begun to realize that there is much more to the Scriptures than I had ever known. The bible contains several genres, some of which include: historical narrative (story), didactic literature (straight forward language), wisdom literature (timeless truths), prophetic literature (fore-telling or forth-telling), apocalyptic literature (imagery soaked), and poetry.
Not only so, but there is metaphors, word-pictures, hyperbole, humor, and many other rhetorical devises used throughout the 66 books. What I have come to realize is that if I am going to take the Bible as God’s inspired Word, I need to attempt to interpret every passage in light of the gaps, genres, and rhetoric that the Holy Spirit chose to employ in cooperation with the various human authors. To not attempt to read the Bible in such a way is to ignore God’s complexity, creativity, and incarnational nature.
I think that Willems is on to something here. To interpret each passage on its own merits as it “plainly” appears results in an extremely disjointed and inconsistent faith. Some passages seem to plainly support predestination, while others talk as if we have free will to choose to follow Christ. Most people feel that it is plain that Psalms and Proverbs are poetry, but there is disagreement about whether Genesis 1-3 is poetry or history. Those on each side claim that it is “plain” that they are correct. There must be something underlying our theology that unites these disparate passages in a way that yields a unified whole, rather than the disjointed and inconsistent faith that reads all passages “plainly”.
Even worse, some Christians force unity by reading their own prejudices into the text. Some of the founding fathers of our country spoke of “all men are created equal” while holding some men as slaves and unworthy of equality. They backed this up by choosing to interpret the short epistle of Philemon as plainly allowing slavery while interpreting away text that clearly indicated that all men (every nation, tongue, and tribe) were equal citizens of God’s Kingdom. It is all too easy to slip into this trap. I know I have in the past, and likely there are areas where this is still a struggle. I pray that God will reveal these areas to me and reveal to me the Truth.
I’d encourage each of us to look at Scripture more carefully. While it might seem more godly to look only for the “plain” meaning, I think it is offensive to God, and disrespectful of His Word, to treat Scripture as if it were simply a poorly written history textbook full of facts and figures but no nuance, no story, lacking in real literary skill. God is the greatest Author, certainly His Spirit is capable of much more than we have often credited Him with!
Reflecting on Imperfect Heroes
10 as it is written,
“THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE;
11 THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS,
THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD;
12 ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS;
THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD,
THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.”
13 “THEIR THROAT IS AN OPEN GRAVE,
WITH THEIR TONGUES THEY KEEP DECEIVING,”
“THE POISON OF ASPS IS UNDER THEIR LIPS”;
14 “WHOSE MOUTH IS FULL OF CURSING AND BITTERNESS”;
15 “THEIR FEET ARE SWIFT TO SHED BLOOD,
16 DESTRUCTION AND MISERY ARE IN THEIR PATHS,
17 AND THE PATH OF PEACE THEY HAVE NOT KNOWN.”
18 “THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES.” (Romans 3.10-18 NASB)
I couldn’t help but think of this as I contemplated the death of Joe Paterno this weekend. I was intrigued, though not surprised, by the reaction. Some of my friends, many with ties to Penn State wanted to put aside the recent revelations about Paterno’s poor handling of what he has admitted he knew about the actions of Jerry Sandusky and simply praise the legend that we all thought we knew to be above critique as a man, if not as a coach. Others wanted to say all of that didn’t matter in the shadow of the Sandusky scandal. I can’t help but think that these extremes, while tempting, are simply easy alternatives to admitting that Paterno was a man, like all of us, who had good and bad times. He often made good decisions, and certainly should be applauded for not simply amassing his wealth for himself and seeking the bigger paycheck. He was faithful to Penn State, and donated millions back to the University.
On the other hand, we must admit that his ego has been reported to be large, especially late in his career. It has been a long time since Penn State has been relevant on the national stage in any consistent sense. Partially, this is due to Paterno’s entrenched opinions and unwillingness to change significantly. While the defenses have been consistently good, if not great, the offense has rarely been the envy of anyone. Coaches on his staff rarely were replaced, despite lackluster seasons. The insulated nature of the staff probably contributed to the culture that allegedly allowed Sandusky continued access to the program and facilities long after allegations of impropriety had caused him to be “banned” from the building.
The lesson? None of us is perfect. Some of us tend to overlook our shortcomings and dwell on the good we see in ourselves. Others are more prone to flagellate themselves over every failure and overlook their many good qualities. The truth is that we should keep both in mind. We should also keep in mind that all of the people around us have both as well. Even the biggest villain has some good attributes, and even the most saintly person we know has inner struggles we may never see. Have the revelations about Sandusky changed who Joe Paterno was? No. They have simply revealed things we didn’t know. We ought always to offer grace and mercy to those around us whose struggles are most visible, and refrain from sanctifying others when we know that they are human, and therefore have issues and struggles we know little about.
I leave the decision on his soul to the One who alone makes that determination, but I pray for mercy, as I would want were I in his position.
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Over at The Way of Improvement Leads Home today, John Fea offers a couple of links to takes on this, but also offers an analysis that agrees with mine, just from his perspective as an historian.
As a historian, I think that there are a few things we have to remember as we assess the legacy of Joe Paterno.
1. It is difficult to give a fair assessment of Paterno’s legacy while we are still caught up in the emotions of his death and the whole Sandusky affair.
2. When we put our confidence in people, whether they lived in the past or live in the present, we are likely to be inspired by them, but we are just as likely to be disappointed. There are no heroes in history–we are flawed human beings. There are no villains in history–we, in the eyes of God, all possess dignity and worth.
You can find his links here.
Herman Cain vs. John Wesley
Presidential Candidate Herman Cain
An interesting article on Tony Campolo’s Red Letter Christians blog. This piece was written by Morgan Guyton (who I’m not familiar with), but it is an interesting look at the tempting American perspective of personal responsibility. His piece is so good I’ll copy it here in its entirety. You can respond in the comments below or on the original post here.
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“If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Thus says Herman Cain to the unemployed Wall Street protestors. I understand why he said it. He wants to live in a world where the American Dream works, where being optimistic and entrepreneurial and hard-working guarantees success. Cain wants for blame to be something that is distributed neatly and perfectly between individual people. This could be described as an ethic ofindividual responsibility.
In a different context, Cain credits God’s grace for his fortune: “As you get older, your faith gets stronger because of your own personal experiences where you know the only way you could have made it through some of those personal experiences was by the grace of God.” This way of understanding our dependence on God’s grace is often termed the doctrine ofdivine providence.
The question is whether these two belief systems are compatible. Can you say at the same time that people are individually responsible for their success or failure but then credit their success to the grace of God? I would argue that the humility of knowing your dependence on God’s grace ought to keep you from saying something like “If you’re not rich, blame yourself.” If you really believe that you stand on God’s grace, that means your work ethic, intelligence, and creativity are to God’s credit, not yours, which disqualifies using these qualities as a soapbox from which to judge other people. A lot of Christians want to get credit for the humility of believing in divine providence while retaining the right to judge others based on an ethic of individual responsibility.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, lived in a very different time than ours. He framed his entire theology around the concept of divine providence. His understanding of our dependence on God led him to believe that the rich were supposed to take care of the poor. Instead of saying, “If you’re not rich, blame yourself,” Wesley said, “If I die rich, blame me.” Here’s exactly how he put it in 18th century language: “If I leave behind me ten pounds [when I die]… you and all mankind bear witness against me, that I have lived and died a thief and a robber.” Wesley believed that there was nothing wrong with making money as long as you spent all of it helping the poor after “supplying thy own reasonable wants, together with those of thy family.”
In his sermon “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley explains that all wealth belongs to God and is given to those who have it for the purpose of taking care of others:
You may consider yourself as one in whose hands the Proprietor of heaven and earth and all things therein has lodged a part of his goods, to be disposed of according to his direction. And his direction is, that you should look upon yourself as one of a certain number of indigent persons who are to be provided for out of that portion of His goods wherewith you are entrusted.
Wesley assumed that being truly dependent on God’s grace meant seeing ourselves as “indigent persons” (poor). People who have money have the God-given responsibility to help those who don’t. If Christians lived according to Wesley’s vision, none of us would have financial security but it wouldn’t matter because everyone would trust God and lean on each other. When Wesley saw that members of his Methodist movement were adding small luxuries to their life as they increased their wealth, he ripped into them in his “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity”:
But you say, you can ‘afford’ it! O be ashamed to take such miserable nonsense into your mouths…. Can any steward ‘afford’ to be an errant knave? To waste his Lord’s goods? Can any servant ‘afford’ to lay out his master’s money any other wise than his master appoints him?
Wesley was utterly scandalized that anyone could spend more money than necessary on themselves. He contradicts the views of people like Herman Cain most squarely when heblames the rich among his followers for the plight of their poor brethren:
Many of your brethren, beloved of God, have not food to eat; they have not raiment to put on; they have not a place where to lay their head. And why are they thus distressed? Because you impiously, unjustly, and cruelly detain from them what your Master lodges in your hands on purpose to supply their wants!
Whereas today wealth is supposedly the measure of hard work and diligence, in Wesley’s sermon “The Mystery of Iniquity,” he writes that poverty is the greatest virtue:
As long as the Christians in any place were poor they were devoted to God. While they had little of the world they did not love the world; but the more had of it the more they loved it. This constrained the Lover of their souls at various times to unchain their persecutors, who by reducing them to their former poverty reduced them to their former purity. But still remember: riches have in all ages been the bane of genuine Christianity.
I’m sure that somebody will say Wesley was just an oddball and he certainly was, but his views on wealth and poverty are far closer to the norm of historical Christianity than our age’s view that wealth shows our virtue. For most of Christian history, poverty was idealized because it meant putting your full trust in God. Part of the difference between Wesley’s vantage point and ours is that he was writing in a time when the values of capitalism were only starting to replace the values of feudalism that had preceded them.
The glue that held the feudal order together was the doctrine of divine providence, the idea that everything in creation belonged to God and everyone had a place within this order. The king’s privilege and power were accompanied by an awesome responsibility for his subjects, each of whom had a certain acreage of land to tend for God and their king. If kings were not so easily corrupted by their power, then this order grounded in divine providence might have worked. Because divine providence was associated with the corruption of feudal Christendom, the presumptions that frame our secular society and free-market economy push in the entirely opposite direction.
The ethic of individual responsibility that people like Herman Cain are trying to make “Christian” is actually the core of the secular humanist response to feudal Christendom’s understanding of divine providence. It is secular to think of our wealth as something we’ve earned and can use how we please instead of seeing it as a gift from God to use for His purpose. It doesn’t mean anything to piously credit your fortune to “the grace of God” unless you really see it as an unmerited gift. So many Christians today want to talk one way when the topic is economics and another way when the topic is religion.
John Wesley really believed that God has given us everything we have to share with others. And while I don’t think we should return to feudalism, I do think that divine providence lays the foundation for a better world than the world of individual responsibility we have now. It’s also more honest. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” Everything that we have ever accomplished is the result of skills and habits that were cultivated in us through the guidance of parents, teachers, and mentors over the course of our life. To falsely individualize our accomplishments is to mock all the people who have made us who we are and the God who has worked through all who helped us because He loves us. We are the product of a community investment in our success ordered by the “invisible hand” of divine providence.
In one sense, Herman Cain is right. As Christians, we shouldn’t blame anyone else if we’re not rich; we should instead thank God for sparing us the treacherous temptations of wealth. The richer we are, the more we should blame ourselves if people around us are suffering because we haven’t shared what God gave us to share with them. In truth though, “blame” shouldn’t be part of Christian vocabulary. Jesus took the blame on the cross so that we could simply be grateful as the foundation for everything we do with whatever God has given us to share.
Fea on Historians as Activists
Dr. John Fea
In today’s installment of Dr. John Fea (friend and chair of the Department of History here at Messiah College), Fea turns his attention to the role of historians in modern culture. Here is a bit of his take:
There are a variety of ways to think about how a historian might be an agent for change. For example, some might say that the historian has the responsibility find heroes in the past that inspire us to beneficent action in the present. A Christian historian might challenge us to draw inspiration from Billy Graham’s commitment to evangelism, or Dietrich Boenhoffer’s resistance to Hitler, or Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights, or Susan B. Anthony’s battle for women’s suffrage. In this model, the past serves the present only when we focus on its heroes.
Such a view of the past is evident in a recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) concluding that school students are widely ignorant of the civil rights movement. Such a lack of knowledge is problematic, the study argues, because schools that do not adequately teach their students about this great reform movement in American history fail in their responsibility “to educate…citizens to be agents of change.” The implication is that the study of the past is important because it produces activists.
The “past as inspiration” model has its merits. No one will disagree with the notion that the study of heroic individuals in the past can spur us on to great deeds in the present. The past should be inspirational. We should celebrate its heroes and then do our best, in the words of Jesus in Luke 10:37, to “go and do likewise.”
But such an approach to the study of the past has its limits. All of us know that sometimes—perhaps more often than not—the past does not inspire. It is filled with brokenness and sin. It is filled with people who we may not want our kids know about. The study of the past always reminds us that we live in a fallen world.
When confronted with a past where heroes are hard to find, we often use the past as a morality tale. The inspirational figures inspire us, but the darker figures serve as examples of what we must avoid in the present and the future. How many times have you heard someone say that we must study the past so that “we do not make the same mistakes all over again?” In this model, which gets us closer to what students of the past actually do for society, the historian serves as a watchdog. He or she reminds us where we have been and alerts us to when we start to travel down paths that have been unproductive, morally suspect, or downright disastrous.
Indeed, historians can make a major contribution to the world by inspiring us and reminding us where we have been in the past and where we may not want to go in the future. But neither of these approaches to the study of history and its relationship to society are what primarily motivates someone like Tara in her work among the children of Africa.
Tara landed this job because she was able to articulate the ways in which her study of history has cultivated virtues in her life that are necessary to engage a world that is different from her own. Anyone who regularly reads this column knows that I am convinced that history, as a way of thinking about the world, teaches us virtues that are absolutely essential for life in a civil society. History is the antidote to the shouting matches we call the “culture wars.” And, as I have argued before, it can also draw us closer to God.
As a student of history, Tara learned to listen to voices from the past, to walk in the shoes of others (even if they were dead), to step outside her own moment in time and her own self-interested approach to the world and try to understand as—difficult as that might be—the hopes, dreams, struggles, and mindsets of people who were different than her, or who were from another era, or who held beliefs that did not conform to her own world view. In this sense, the study of history humanized her. If history can help us have better marriages, it can also help us to be reconcilers and humble servants to those in need.
(You can read the rest here.) Interesting thoughts. Having taken AP American History in high school, I didn’t take a “history course” here at Messiah College as an undergrad, though the general education track had a lot of history pieces to it. I do think the type of thinking that Fea espouses here is valuable whenever we deal with others, even our neighbors or colleagues!
This Explains So Much
Interesting take from TMQ this week on the political front. Here is his take:
Entire Nation Parties Like It’s 1999: The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that median household income, adjusted for inflation, has declined to the level of the year 1999. After unemployment, this decline in household income is the second-most disturbing aspect of the stalled American economy.
Campaigning in 2008 for the Democratic presidential nomination, in industrial states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, Hillary Clinton constantly used the line, “We need to return to the prosperity of the 1990s.” At the time Clinton said this, Pennsylvania and Ohio were, judged by median household income, better off than in the 1990s. But many voters believe life was better in the past than in the present, so Clinton’s appeal to nostalgia helped her attract support. Well — now we’ve returned to the prosperity of the 1990s.
This just feels like it is saying something about our perception of history. I think most of us understood what Mrs. Clinton meant. The late 1990s seemed affluent to us, even though we continued to improve, the feeling went away. Who would have thought during the early days of the slowing economy that we were really still much better off than we had been. Now we have returned to the level of the 1990s after years of decline, but it feels so different this time. Surely part of that is the feeling of going back down to this value, and not knowing where the bottom of this decline will be. The perception that our increase was actually just holding steady has also contributed.
No Longer Normal
