introduction - University of Notre Dameundpress/excerpts/P03132-ex.pdf · george marsden’s...

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introduction

For three decades, the study of religious history has been surging in America, a trend reflected in the remarkable results of the American Historical Association’s 2009 survey, which showed that religion had become the most common specialty among professional historians. religious history possessed its greatest number of adherents among younger historians, signaling that this was a development not likely to vanish any time soon.1 experts offered various reasons for the survey results, but Yale historian Jon Butler spoke for many when he suggested that the growing popularity of religious history resulted from “the ob-vious inadequacy of the secularization thesis to explain world history since 1945.”2

crude versions of secularization theory posited the inexorable privatization and decline of faith in the withering light of modernity, yet increasingly since World War ii religion has seemed to be every-where: publicly and politically significant, on the rise, not the decline. Around the world vibrant expressions of all major religions have rede-fined terms of local and international engagement and made the “god factor” a global phenomenon. christianity’s vigor may have faded in western europe, but elsewhere—in sub-saharan Africa, central and south America, and parts of Asia—it has grown at mind-boggling rates. in the United states, meanwhile, many evangelical christians have be-come closely connected with political conservatism and recently a “Tea

© UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

2 American Evangelicalism

Party” movement that has countered President Barack Obama at every turn. American evangelicals have not been alone in their growing desire to make religion count in politics and society. During this same recent stretch of time liberal Protestants, catholics, and Jews have defended Obama’s progressive politics, while people of other non-Judeo- christian traditions have carried out similarly ambitious quests to orient commu-nity and country to their spiritual values. spurred on by new immigra-tion, new media, and a new global economic order, religious citizens have bucked predictions of secularization and stepped out into the public square. As a result, pundits and scholars alike can no longer deny the historical significance or currency of faith in the modern world.

One might expect the history of religion to be torn by the same ideological rifts that have emerged amid this rising tide of religiosity, and to some extent that has happened. evangelical christians, for in-stance, have often turned to nonacademic, entrepreneurial history writ-ers who offer a christian-inflected version of the American past. con-versely, several academic and journalistic historians have argued for fully secular versions of the American past, and especially of the American founding, in which the faith factor is written out of the narrative or downplayed as only a minor motivation for a few marginal historical actors. But welcome developments in recent decades have offered a way beyond a staunchly ideological history of religion.

First, a number of professional historians with no firm faith com-mitments themselves have written deeply sympathetic yet critical histo-ries of American religion. The pioneer of this kind of scholarship was Harvard’s Perry miller, who in the mid-twentieth century reinvigorated the serious intellectual study of Puritanism. With noticeable accelera-tion since the 1990s, historians of miller’s ilk—those who do not neces-sarily hold to any faith commitment—have joined the rush to incorpo-rate sacred matters in their treatments of American economic, social, cultural, and especially political development. David Hollinger has claimed that “religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it,” and whether or not they have heard this call, histori-ans of late have seemed ready to prove his point. spurred on by trends in Washington, where movement politics on the right and left have leaned on religion to marshal voters, political historians especially have


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been eager to integrate religion in their histories of grassroots mobiliza-tion, congressional and presidential policy, and inner-Beltway power struggles.

second, and more to the point of this volume, a number of believ-ing historians have broken out of the constraints of denominational, hagiographical history and engaged with the methods of mainstream academic history, producing sympathetic histories that locate churches and parishioners within their cultural and political milieu. mark noll notes in his conclusion to this volume that Timothy smith, a nazarene who received his PhD at Harvard before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins, was the parallel to Perry miller among believing historians with mainstream academic credentials. smith’s Revivalism and Social Reform (1957) remains a standard work for all historians interested in understanding the great nineteenth-century campaigns for social im-provement. Thanks to smith’s legacy and the influence of other like-minded chroniclers (such as noll) who profess faith commitments but write for a wider public, the quest to blend personal belief with rigor-ous, first-rate scholarship continues to inspire many young, ambitious historians.3

george marsden’s illustrious career bears witness to the rise of reli-gion in America’s new historical consciousness and the attempt by some scholars to write history from a faith-friendly perspective. marsden, one could say, was destined for this type of impact. After growing up in a Pennsylvania town and a devout Orthodox Presbyterian family, he at-tended the Quaker-affiliated Haverford college, attained an mDiv at Westminster seminary, a leading institution in his denominational tra-dition, and took his PhD in American studies at Yale University. At Yale, marsden worked with edmund morgan, a student of Perry miller and arguably the greatest historian of colonial and revolutionary America since World War ii. As marsden offered in a 2009 reflective piece for Reviews in American History, morgan was his “stylistic idol,” the teacher who taught him how to write not just for specialists in his field but also for laypeople—those who (as morgan put it) “are smarter than you but know nothing about the subject.” considering his work’s mass appeal, marsden obviously internalized morgan’s message. even more signifi-cant for his training in American religious history, however, was the



guidance of sydney Ahlstrom, his doctoral adviser. Ahlstrom’s magiste-rial A Religious History of the American People is still one of the standard surveys of religion in America; its volumes appear on many a religious history syllabus and many a graduate student’s exam reading list. Ahl-strom trained marsden and a number of other leading historians to take religion seriously but also to see religion as shaping, and shaped by, broader culture. marsden’s arduous theological preparation within his denominational perspective, and the wider professional training he re-ceived at Yale from morgan and Ahlstrom, proved to be a potent com-bination.4

evidence of this striking balance soon surfaced in marsden’s writ-ings. His first book, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (1970), was probably his narrowest, as one might expect from a revised doctoral dissertation. it was the closest thing marsden ever wrote to denominational history, yet, as Peter Wallace notes in his essay for this volume, it also heralded the great theme of all of marsden’s sub-sequent work: the evangelical mind. marsden’s authorship of Fundamen-talism and American Culture (1980) facilitated his first major impact on the discussion of American religion. As Barry Hankins comments, Fun-damentalism and American Culture almost single-handedly created a new historiography—the intellectual history of American fundamentalism—leaving others to flesh out that history in the three decades since. The book also had impeccable timing, coming out just as the moral majority burst onto the American political scene. Finally, it had such a compel-ling literary quality that many christian historians recall reading it for the first time as a curious experience, almost like reading one’s own life story. While Fundamentalism made the persuasive case that fundamen-talists had a real intellectual pedigree, Reforming Evangelicalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1987) revealed the darker side of that pedigree as it generated the wars over biblical inerrancy at Fuller seminary. Determined to craft an effective sequel to Fundamentalism and American Culture, yet equally set on testing different methods and approaches to the writing of evangelicalism’s history, marsden master-fully exploited the internal history of Fuller seminary—fascinating as it was on its own terms—for fresh reading of the tumultuous theological, cultural, and political forces that reshaped fundamentalism in the post–


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World War ii years. Though different from Fundamentalism in American Culture in its focus and reach, Reforming Fundamentalism displayed the same creativity and combination of incisive analysis with compelling prose as its predecessor.

The scale of marsden’s innovation and impact continued to broaden after the publication of Reforming Fundamentalism, in part because his own interest in evangelicalism’s history assumed broader proportions. marsden has always worked at a deliberate, methodical pace, publishing major works every half-decade or so; his influence in academic writing has been generated by the weightiness more than the frequency of his published word. This cadence has afforded him the unrushed time needed to turn up new sources and new angles and to open wider intel-lectual and cultural vistas onto and from which evangelical Protestant-ism’s particular history could be drawn for greater meaning and effect. During the 1990s and 2000s, marsden’s purview turned in a number of new directions, at once backward in time to foundational moments in the nation’s pre-twentieth-century sacred past, and beyond the bound-aries of evangelical studies to more comprehensive analyses of U.s. re-ligious and cultural history. marsden’s efforts produced several concrete results.

One of the by-products of marsden’s evolving concern was an en-livened reconsideration of American educational history. The Soul of the American University (1994) inaugurated marsden’s foray into a corollary concern that has shaped much of the second half of his career: the place of faith in the modern academy. This text featured many of marsden’s finest authorial strategies, including the ironic mode. Working forward from the early national period to the recent past, marsden tracked a long history in which religion came to be excluded from modern uni-versity life, not by some sinister secularist plot or imposition of will by irreligious intellectual elites, but as an unplanned side effect of scientific hegemony. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, he asserted, Ameri-ca’s educational leaders started to believe that reliance on the scientific method could lead to both reliable knowledge and the cure of social ills, without cost to the christian worldview. Over the next few decades such trust in the pedagogics of science deepened among progressive educators even as faith-based knowledge was viewed with greater suspicion. Amid



the explosive cold War period, when government funding of public universities expanded and the country’s academicians and administra-tors began celebrating the virtues of applied sciences, faith found itself relegated to margins. Having welcomed science into their classroom during the late nineteenth century as a complement to christian train-ing, educators thus approached the late twentieth century trumpeting scientific rationalism and objectivity over the faith claims of yesteryear.

Written as history, in the voice of an informed observer, The Soul of the American University nevertheless exhibited a quality rarely high-lighted in previous books: open partiality. Hints of his inclinations sur-faced in his Postscript, in which marsden argued for a revisiting of faith’s place in the academy. Having made the transition from the modern as-sumptions of the cold War academy, in which a confidence in human reason reigned supreme, to the destabilization of the postmodern age, in which certainty about anything seemed lost, marsden averred that American higher education was ready to reincorporate religion in its curricula. Trading the hat of the historian for that of the pundit, mars-den expanded this argument in his relatively brief follow-up text, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997). marsden used this short sequel to advance a provocative two-pronged thesis: that philosophical justification no longer existed for excluding faith perspectives from the academy, and that viewpoints of faith could, when applied thoughtfully and responsibly within a transparent context, enrich academic inquiry. With another dash of irony, marsden referenced the recent advent of postmodern perspectivalism, a trend viewed by some as threatening to religious creeds, as evidence of widespread doubt that knowledge of any kind could be objective. All knowledge, he insisted in concert with cul-tural critics of the day, was located in specific communities and insepa-rable from contexts created by confluences of thought, tradition, and circumstance. in marsden’s mind, this suggested at least two new poten-tials for academia: first, that private religious colleges be allowed to teach in accordance with their theological heritages, and second, that public institutions carve out space for faculty and instruction geared to particular faith commitments. Amid the celebration of postmodern di-versity, he asked, why shouldn’t “representatives of [religious] subcul-tures” have “their voices heard within public institutions so long as


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[they] respect the reasonable rules necessary to public institutions that serve diverse constituencies”?5

A second by-product of marsden’s evolving concern was his turn away from recent historical concerns to their roots in the eighteenth century. Fundamentalism’s struggles with liberal trends, evangelical-ism’s quest for relevance in the modern and postmodern eras, post–civil War trajectories in higher education: these themes, which marsden charted in his first four major books (Outrageous Idea not included), grew out of his broader interest in the long history of the evangelical mind. in his fifth extensive book—Jonathan Edwards: A Life (2003)—he turned to America’s finest example of that mind. in some ways this book marked a departure from what he had done before. Turning away from institution-based research and themes, marsden employed an-other medium—biography—for entry into the continuities and changes of the Protestant worldview. The medium proved well suited to mars-den’s temperament and skill as an author. While delving into the life of this intellectual heavyweight, marsden was able to write with the em-pathy and attention to detail evidenced in edmund morgan’s work as well as the theological thoroughness and intuitive sense of church life seen in sydney Ahlstrom’s treatises. moreover, in edwards’s life mars-den found a narrative arc full of drama but also profound significance, allowing him to write as he always desired to write: armed with colorful stories of the particular that contained nuggets of universal truth.

Of course Jonathan Edwards also marked a culmination of his previ-ous years of labor. On its pages marsden openly demonstrated respect for this prophet’s capabilities but steered clear of the hagiography wit-nessed elsewhere in edwards studies, and throughout he portrayed ed-wards as a man with forward-looking vision who was nevertheless firmly planted in the limiting contexts of eighteenth-century American cul-ture. He readily conceded edwards’s shortsightedness on topics such as slavery and christian ecumenism and acknowledged the restraints of edwards’s theology, which in some ways would hinder future develop-ment within evangelical Protestantism. Yet at the same time that he played by the rules of professional history laid out by his mentors in graduate school, he also wrote of edwards out of a deeply personal and publicly stated sense of vocation. in edwards’s life marsden identified



ways that a christian could fully engage with the intellectual trends of his time and in doing so make a robust defense of orthodox christianity. And in edwards’s labors marsden recognized the potential—indeed, necessity—that he had already laid out in his previous studies, of a thoughtful citizenry willing to participate in spirited intellectual ex-change, carried out in common respect and humility, for the betterment of church and community. When asked to comment on the origins of his interest in history and commitment to the profession, marsden once wrote that his was a quest to search out answers for the fundamentals of human experience especially as they related to the individual’s search for rootedness, meaning, and cosmic purpose in a world of rapidly in-creasing plurality and change. extending his reflections on his own jour-ney out of a protective religious tradition into the highest levels of academia, he wondered aloud how deeply grounded subcommunities of shared values could survive, let alone flourish, in a modern world that encouraged disjuncture and change, and do so in a mode of constructive negotiation without slipping into a state of kneejerk reaction. And he pondered how these subcultures could “pass on from generation to gen-eration assumptions, beliefs, values . . . peculiar to their own heritage at the same time they [were] constantly being shaped by . . . more common cultural outlooks.” in edwards, a man of strong intellect and moral as-surance yet sharp awareness of his times, marsden seemed to find the answer to this query—which is why he wrote with such conviction.6

One of the central tasks of this volume’s authors is to assess this con-viction as it appears in all of marsden’s major books; another is to reflect on its wider significance for the historical profession. American Evangeli-calism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History intends to facilitate this process by framing marsden’s work in at least three dif-ferent contexts. First and foremost, it seeks to assess marsden’s work in light of recent evangelical historiography. no one has done more to shape and mainstream the history of evangelicalism than marsden, which is why this most vital contribution will receive the most attention by the volume’s authors. While recognized as the dean of evangelical history, marsden has also garnered respect for his general contributions to the development of U.s. religious history. A diverse field encompass-ing scholars from various disciplines and educational settings (religious


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studies and American studies as well as history, seminaries and divinity schools as well as universities), U.s. religious history has flourished dur-ing the past few decades in part because of the friction created by the collision of interpretations, and in part because of constructive exchange across the fields. By virtue of his lofty position in the study of modern evangelicalism—a particularly charged subject in recent years— marsden has often found himself in the middle of the collisions and collabora-tions. His work, therefore, needs to be appraised within these broader encounters. A third context in which marsden’s writings will be ap-praised is the biggest: as manifestations of good writing. craftsmanship has always meant as much to marsden as fresh thinking and sound argu-mentation. His drive to test new methodologies and literary devices and always write well is thus worthy of attention, and this collection of es-says will flesh out those distinctive characteristics of marsden’s prose that allowed him to be such an effective author.

This breadth of interests and range of perspectives should indicate that this volume seeks to be something more than a festschrift, a tribute to one historian’s illustrious career. Though we certainly want to honor the efforts of a scholar who has fundamentally altered his discipline—his profession—we as editors and essayists also want to use his writings as a launch for wider discussion about past and future trajectories in the his-tory of evangelicalism and American religion, the challenges and oppor-tunities facing the next wave of religious historians, and the unchanging virtues of good historical writing. Accordingly, we hope that readers from various backgrounds will find this volume profitable, not just as a guide to the historiographical terrain of American evangelicalism, but also as an instructive lens onto the curiosities, ambitions, techniques, and intellectual wherewithal that allowed marsden to write with such immense authority. in a sense, we want this volume to advance yet an-other of marsden’s legacies, that of effective teaching.

This volume’s structure has been designed with these goals in mind. each of the book’s five sections will use one of marsden’s foundational texts as an entry into specific historical stages in the development of American evangelicalism and religion. moving chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present, the volume will begin by addressing marsden’s study of Jonathan edwards in light of the nation’s “Puritan



beginnings,” then shift into the nineteenth century with a look at marsden’s early study of new school Presbyterianism. in the third and fourth sections readers will encounter Fundamentalism and American Culture and The Soul of the American University. Discussion surrounding the former will open up fresh examination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while examination of the latter will facilitate broader discussion about secularization, Protestantism, and education in the mid-twentieth century. The fifth section, titled “Pluralism’s Bless-ing,” will use Reforming Fundamentalism to trigger examination of evan-gelicalism in the post–World War ii period.

The internal logic of these book sections is meant to enable instruc-tion as well. in each section a “state of the field” essay connects mars-den’s profiled work to other voices and studies in the relevant histori-ography, then a brief “scholarship profile” essay assesses the unique substantive and stylistic qualities of the profiled book. Finally, in each of the five sections, one, two, or three “new directions” essays will build on marsden’s corpus and in some cases explore territory in American reli-gious and evangelical history left untouched by marsden’s scholarship. marsden certainly laid the foundation for the historical study of funda-mentalism and evangelicalism, but (thankfully) he left something for others to say. some of what can and still needs to be said is suggested in these “new directions” chapters.

The volume then ends with mark noll’s essay on the trajectory of American religious history since World War ii, considering how “an evangelical won the Bancroft Prize,” as marsden did for Jonathan Ed-wards: A Life. To be sure, marsden has reached the upper echelon of academic religious history by working alongside other outstanding scholars in his field, a few of whom have aided in the publication of this volume, including Jon Butler, nathan Hatch, mark noll, Harry stout, and grant Wacker. Others such as catherine Albanese, catherine Brekus, richard Bushman, Joel carpenter, John corrigan, Jay Dolan, marie griffith, David Hall, Paul Harvey, Brooks Holifield, David Hol-linger, laurie maffly-Kipp, martin marty, colleen mcDannell, John mcgreevy, robert Orsi, Amanda Porterfield, Jonathan sarna, leigh schmidt, Ann Taves, and Thomas Tweed (just to name a few) have ad-vanced American religious history in similarly vital ways by training


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students and writing critical texts that have challenged us to rethink the place of the sacred in this nation’s past.

Yet for various reasons marsden has managed to carve out a résumé that stands apart. slightly older than most of his contemporaries on this “who’s who” list, he was among the first to create and ride the wave of new interest in U.s. religious history. Besides working on the leading edge of the new religious history, he served as a field general of sorts in guiding the historical study of evangelicalism into the academic main-stream. That he did so with an uncanny sense of timing is notable as well; the publication of Fundamentalism and American Culture in 1980, at the dawn of the reagan revolution, was not only a godsend for a cu-rious public trying to figure out what was happening in Washington, but also for the young historian himself, who wanted (and needed) to write for a wider audience. marsden’s breadth has also made him a leader. By writing about subjects spanning the eighteenth century to the present, marsden has managed to converse with religious specialists from across the spectrum, thus enhancing the scope of his influence. still, however much external circumstances have aided his professional profile, mars-den’s exceptional career is something that has been generated from within as a product of his own exceptional abilities. in his concluding essay noll captures a few of the essential qualities that allowed marsden to excel in his profession and aspire to a higher sense of vocation derived from his deep investment in the christian life of the mind.

notEs

1. robert B. Townsend, “A new Found religion? The Field surges among AHA members,” Perspectives on History 47 (December 2009), www.historians .org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-2009/a -new-found-religion-the-field-surges-among-aha-members.

2. Jon Butler, respondent in “religion and the Historical Profession,” The Immanent Frame, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/12/30/religion-and-the -historical-profession/, December 30, 2009.

3. ibid. see also Darren Dochuk, “searching Out the sacred in U.s. Po-litical History,” Perspectives on History 49 (may 2011): 46–49.

4. george marsden, “reflections: Doing American History in a World of subcultures,” Reviews in American History 37 (June 2009): 303–14.



5. see george marsden, “A Truly multicultural society,” e-mail exchange with Wen stephenson, Atlantic Online, October 2000, www.theatlantic.com/past /docs/issues/2000/10/wolfe-marsden.htm.

6. marsden, “reflections,” 307.


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