Page 4116 – Christianity Today (2024)

When Disney’s Pocahantas opened in 1995, the New York Times Magazine published a parody titled “Mohandas.” Pocahantas was typical Disney fare, bleached and sugary, so “Mohandas” pretended to review a similarly Disneyfied animated life of Gandhi, complete with treacly coming-of-age ballads (“The Man in the Diaper”), hyper-idealized historical characters (Disney’s Gandhi looked like Mr. Clean and was voiced by Michael Jackson), and fictional sidekicks (a sassy cow voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, and an animated spinning wheel voiced by Jackie Mason.)[1]

But one part of the parody was pure invented silliness, suggesting that the villain in the fictitious Mohandas looked suspiciously like Jeff Katzenberg, the former Disney animation executive whom Michael Eisner had famously overlooked for the Number Two job—and who had therefore huffed off to found Dreamworks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. There wasn’t anything in Pocahantas that actually referred to this famous rivalry, especially since it was only just budding, and no media executive could be that petty anyway, right? Wrong. For—lo and behold!—six years later the bud hath flowered and hath borne rivalrous fruit in Dreamworks’ Shrek—so taste and eat, and you will be as entertainment insiders, knowing both good and evil industry gossip, whether you care to or don’t.

Let me explain. Shrek is Dreamworks’ latest salvo in the bloody popcorn wars it wages with Disney, its only current rival in the feature animation industry. Loosely based on a book by William Steig, it is a twisted fairy tale about a green ogre, the eponymous Shrek (Scottishly voiced by Mike Myers), who dwells in a swamp, happily alone, until the evil Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) chases all of the other fairy-tale creatures—from Snow White to various witches and unicorns—into Shrek’s swamp. Shrek cuts a deal with Farquaad: If he can rescue the lovely Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from her dragon-protected castle and deliver her to Farquaad to marry—so Farquaad can become a legitimate king—Shrek will get his swamp back. Simple enough. Except, of course, while the grotesque Shrek is delivering Fiona, he falls in love with her, and she with him. Oh, and along the way, Shrek picks up a sassy donkey sidekick, voiced by Eddie Murphy. Perhaps Ms. Goldberg was unavailable.

Now, as most reviews will tell you, Shrek is Dreamworks’ digitally animated raspberry to the Disney Corporation. It makes nasty references to past Disney films, and is supposed to have somehow cast the cowardly Lord Farquaad in the mold of Michael Eisner. The whole dopey feud is everywhere for all to see. But in attempting to subvert Disney’s saccharinized version of various fairy tales and legends, Dreamworks has fatally overstepped, as if Katzenberg, socking Eisner in the nose, had knocked himself unconscious in the process. Shrek doesn’t just subvert the treacly Disney version of fairy tales, it subverts the glorious and mysterious and ennobling idea of fairytales themselves.

For one thing, Shrek is tiresome in its unalleviated puncturing. No sooner does a moment fill with meaning and beauty than you can sense the hatpins poised to prick it. It’s as if Mona Lisa smiles, Jeff Katzenberg paints a mustache on her, and we cut to the next scene. When the seven dwarves carry Snow White to Shrek’s house in her glass coffin, Shrek exclaims, “Get the dead broad off the table!” And much of this is disturbingly inappropriate for children. When Farquaad tortures him for information, a legless Gingerbread Man spits in his eye and barks: “Eat me!” A goofy announcer says of Snow White, “Although she lives with seven men, she’s not easy!” Later, when Shrek sees the tiny Farquaad’s towering castle he asks, “Do you think maybe he’s compensating for something?” It’s funny, barely, but are phallic jokes necessary in a children’s movie? Flatulence jokes abound, too, as though sophisticated animation equipment and $100 million had somehow fallen into the hands of fifth-grade boys.

Later, Fiona and Shrek bump into an oversexed Robin Hood, whose merry men break into song about what’s really on Robin’s mind. One lyric ending with the word “maid” continues: “What he’s basically saying is that he likes to get—” pause, “—paid!” The Grand Canyon between the sensibility of a joke like this and that of most parents is breathtaking. And again we hear that Farquaad’s skyscraping battlements are “compensating for something,” just in case we had missed this Freudian gem the first time around. Nope.

But the worst example of the movie’s runaway deflation isn’t a dirty or puerile joke. It’s when the waking Princess Fiona greets the morning by singing a genuinely moving song. She is soon joined in her reverie by a bluebird, who trills along with her happily, until it attempts a particularly high note—and suddenly inflates and explodes, leaving a pair of smoking talons still clinging to its branch. It’s a startling and downright ugly moment, one for which you are quite unprepared. But it gets worse. Fiona then sees the dead bird has left a nest of three eggs. We behold the orphans with her for a moment, wondering what will become of them, until this poignant image dissolves into three eggs frying in a pan. Ha! Another joke! And Shrek and his mugging donkey eat the eggs for breakfast. The audience in my particular theater groaned and sighed, obviously horrified. If only they had known this was all a pointed, brilliant send-up of the singing bluebird scene in Disney’s Snow White of 1938. Poor unenlightened saps!

But the apotheosis of it all comes at the end. After Shrek and Fiona have fallen in love, we learn that at night Fiona herself turns into an ogre. But when she kisses her true love the spell will be broken and she will be forever beautiful, as she is during the day. We assume this will occur when she kisses Shrek—and surely Shrek, too, will be transformed, and they will live happily ever after. But we must be hopelessly old-fashioned, because this isn’t how things turn out at all. Shrek does rescue Fiona from Farquaad’s clutches, and they finally kiss. She is in her ogre mode, but though there is a moment of rapture, neither she nor Shrek is transformed. They ride off into the sunset, happily ever ogres.

Evidently the hoary fairy tale conceit that one’s inner beauty will be revealed on the outside is for people wearing pince-nez, celluloid collars, and spats. The brave new moral we moderns are to take home with us is something more along the lines of “appearances don’t matter” or maybe “accept thyself.” What is going on? Are beauty and nobility and innocence such medieval concepts that fairytales themselves cannot portray them positively? Must not only Shrek remain ugly, but Fiona become forever so? Shall the Ugly Duckling accept himself, and all swans turn into Ugly Ducklings, lest feelings get hurt? Shall the Frog Prince stand his warty ground and require the princess to croak and leap into the mossy well with him, ker-plump? Why? And why does this ending feel so forced? Why do I feel like my nose has been pinched and I’ve just been dosed with castor oil? Is it because I know that my legitimate expectations are being thwarted by a trendy idea? Does Shrek really mean to say that fairy tale virtues don’t exist, or are relative, or meaningless? It reminds me of gray communists screaming that God does not exist and that all human beings need is bread and vodka and cement housing. Did anyone ever believe that?

The old fairy tales aver the opposite; that what everyone knows in his heart to be true is true, that there are such things as goodness and beauty and truth—and even though in this life they are often obscured or hidden altogether, a time will come when the truth will be revealed, when dragons will be slain and bewitched captives will be set free forever. ‘Tis the Gospel truth, and till such stories are told again, I won’t choose between schmaltzy, focus-group-tested niceties and sophom*oric, joke-strewn subversion. I’ll rent old videos and wait.

Eric Metaxas writes for Big Idea Productions, the makers of VeggieTales and 3-2-1 Penguins!. He is the author of many children’s books, including Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving (TommyNelson).

1. In the interests of full disclosure, I authored the parody, which exists in cyberspace (frozen, Walt-like) at www.ericmetaxas.com.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

On July 30, 1776, British troops, flush with bravado as they prepared to run George Washington’s battered army off of Long Island, burned the general in effigy. Alongside Washington they torched the figure of a minister, the Reverend John Witherspoon. “An account of the present face of things in America would be very defective indeed,” complained an English officer, “if no mention was made of this political firebrand, who perhaps had not a less share in the Revolution than Washington himself.” That wasn’t just sour grapes. As much as any figure in the colonial era, Witherspoon embodied the explosive alliance between faith and freedom that would inflame the American struggle for Independence. Not long after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), he was accused of turning the campus into a “seminary of sedition.” Following a weekend visit, John Adams called him “as high a son of liberty as any man in America.”

Few could have seen it coming. A native of Scotland, Witherspoon spent his early years of ministry preaching and teaching. In September 1758, from the Abbey at Paisley, he rebuked pastors for getting entangled in public affairs. He called it sinful and reckless for them “to desire or claim the direction of such matters as fall within the province of the civil magistrates.” Twenty years later the same minister would help persuade the American Continental Congress to keep General Washington and his army up and running.

No religious figure of the era exerted greater influence on national politics. Witherspoon’s mailing list included the likes of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Benjamin Rush. He signed the Declaration of Independence—the only cleric to do so—and lost a son in the Revolutionary War. As a state legislator and delegate, he helped ratify the Constitution. And as the principal instructor at Princeton, he groomed a generation of men—including James Madison—for leadership roles in the new nation. Historian Garry Wills has called him “probably the most influential teacher in the entire history of American education.”

Not in recent memory has the nation’s political culture seemed more primed for—or needful of—the statesmanship of a John Witherspoon. President George W. Bush is making the redemptive work of religious organizations a central feature of his domestic agenda. In so doing, he and his allies apparently hope to reestablish the historic link between robust faith and a healthy civil society. As they continue to collect and fend off their critics, there is much to be learned from the Princeton divine.

Preamble to Liberty

Witherspoon entered the ministry precisely when Scottish Presbyterianism was in schism. One faction, the so-called Moderates, levered the British patronage law to get the upper hand over the more conservative Popular Party, or evangelicals, in the church’s General Assembly. The young minister emerged as a leader of the evangelicals, who defended the rights of congregations to elect clergy and control their own affairs. The divisions got ugly. Armed soldiers forced ministers on parishes; others were deposed. There were riots. Thousands bolted from the Church of Scotland. Witherspoon, while strenuously defending orthodox doctrine, became known as a conciliator.

These ecclesiastical outbursts were not occurring in a vacuum. In 1747, when Witherspoon attended his first General Assembly meeting, Francis Hutcheson was busy launching the Scottish Enlightenment with his philosophy of “Common Sense.” David Hume was proofreading his Essay Concerning the Human Understanding. And Adam Smith was teaching literature and likely gathering material for The Wealth of Nations. The Moderates in the Scottish church, says one historian, were “only another expression of the general stir of intellectual liberty of the eighteenth century.”

For the Calvinist cleric it was a bit too liberating. Enlightenment theology tended to cast off orthodox doctrine and flatten Christianity into an ethical system. Nevertheless, Scotland’s social and intellectual elite eagerly embraced the new ideas. Alexander Carlyle, for example, claimed that Hutcheson possessed “a fervent and persuasive eloquence which was irresistible.” There were lessons in all of this ferment, ones that Witherspoon would carry with him across the Atlantic.

Faith and Freedom

American Presbyterians were trying to quiet their own doctrinal squabbles. When the president’s post opened at the College of New Jersey, an incubator for Presbyterian ministers, church leaders turned to Witherspoon. After two years of negotiating, he agreed to come. His main task when he arrived in Princeton in 1768 was to get the college on a firm financial footing. That required fundraising trips throughout the colonies—and constant exposure to the temper of the times. “A man will become an American,” he concluded, “by residing in this country three months … more certainly than by reading or hearing of it for three years, amidst the sophistry of daily disputation.”

Along with the disputations came the Boston Tea Party, the closing of Boston Harbor, and the “Coercive Acts” of Parliament in March and April of 1774. That year Witherspoon joined 72 representatives from New Jersey to help elect state delegates to the first Continental Congress. In June 1775, shortly after armed fighting broke out at Lexington, he drafted a pastoral letter for the Presbyterian Synod of New York and Philadelphia. It gave unqualified support to the Congress and warned that if British aggression continued, “a lasting and bloody contest must be expected.” According to one historian, the letter “changed the role of the Presbyterian clergy from uncommitted observers to active supporters of the revolution.” A year later, Witherspoon joined the Congress as a delegate and led the movement in New Jersey to depose the royal governor.

There was nothing extraordinary about preachers in the Revolutionary era getting mixed up in politics. Many served in state legislatures; quite a few used their pulpits to put an apocalyptic spin on current events. What distinguished Witherspoon was his steely logic about the bond between faith and freedom. In Witherspoon’s most famous sermon, “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men,” he joined political and religious liberty at the hip. “There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire,” he warned. “If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage.”

Indeed, Witherspoon went even further: He made piety indispensable to republican government. Virtually all the Founders, even the most secular-minded, praised the social utility of religion. But few argued as effectively as Witherspoon about its ability to keep a free people from plunging into chaos. “Nothing is more certain,” he said, “than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction.” The remedy: “He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion.”

Witherspoon was not a charismatic speaker—”no flowers in my prose, or in my garden,” he liked to say—but his “Dominion” sermon was a rhetorical gem. Delivered in May 1776, it captured the mood of the colonies and was widely distributed. William Warren Sweet, dean of American church historians, has called it “one of the most influential pulpit utterances during the whole course of the war.”

Two months later Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence, pledging with his compatriots “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” By November the vow was put to the test. Word came that the King’s troops were headed toward Princeton. Witherspoon was forced to cut the term short, dismiss the college, and flee with his wife and family. Washington and his army marched through town on December 2. Within a week a brigade of British troops arrived, quartered themselves in the empty college building, and staged the battle of Princeton.

The Christian Statesman

Princeton would play host to another battle, this one a war of ideas. The crisis with Britain had created the need for a new breed of social leader: a political leader able to engage the vital issues of the day, while brokering political differences. “In 1740 America’s leading intellectuals were clergymen and thought about theology,” writes historian Edmund Morgan. “In 1790 they were statesmen and thought about politics.”

No religious figure was more crucial to this transition than Witherspoon. Here again his fight against the Moderates in the Scottish Church would prove fateful. Witherspoon was not timid about taking intellectual challenges head on. Indeed, he often warned his students against using spirituality as a mask for anti-intellectualism. “We see sometimes the pride of unsanctified knowledge do great injury to religion,” he said in an address to the senior class. “On the other hand, we find some persons of real piety, despising human learning, and disgracing the most glorious truths, by a meanness and indecency hardly sufferable in their manner of handling them.”

Moreover, the intellectual contests washing onto American shores were inescapable; they touched politics, philosophy, and religion. To counter them, Witherspoon put in place rigorous courses in rhetoric and moral philosophy. He introduced the lecture system in American colleges. He bought state-of-the-art scientific equipment and greatly expanded the college’s library. His grammar school soon became one of the best in the colonies.

In his Lectures in Moral Philosophy, a required course, Witherspoon articulated a system of social and political ethics drawn both from his Calvinist tradition and the seventeenth-century English Whigs. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1690), which found a place in Witherspoon’s personal library, was mandatory reading. He also borrowed heavily from Hutcheson, his old nemesis, in emphasizing man’s moral sense and capacity for virtue. Indeed, Witherspoon grappled all his life with Common Sense philosophy, scorning its rosy view of human nature, yet willing to use reason as an aid to revelation. “If the Scripture is true,” he said, “the discoveries of reason cannot be contrary to it, and therefore, it has nothing to fear from that quarter.” With Witherspoon’s synthesis, “a force was present at Princeton which would combat the products of eighteenth century rationalism.” Indeed, he instigated the most important response to the Enlightenment in American higher education.

Witherspoon had a politician’s keen sense of the moment. He rightly envisioned the College of New Jersey assuming a crucial role in providing leadership to the new nation. Toward that end, he launched the most extensive program of oratorical study in revolutionary America. He taught Lectures on Eloquence, an impressive introduction to the art of persuasion. He revved up student philosophical societies to help train students in public speaking. (And speak they did, gathering nightly to deliver orations on free trade, civil disobedience and the horrors of war.) He awarded honorary degrees to political figures, and played host to future presidents and Supreme Court justices.

As much a practitioner as he was an educator, Witherspoon modeled for his students the application of the lessons he imparted to them. He personally delivered assistance to Gen. Washington and the Continental Army. He spent five years in the Continental Congress, serving on more than 100 committees. During a crucial debate over the Articles of Confederation, he challenged Ben Franklin’s claim that a confederacy based on equal votes would soon expire. The union must be agreed to now, Witherspoon argued, when all the states faced a common enemy; otherwise, as the conflict deepened they easily could lose heart. “Shall we establish nothing good, because it cannot be eternal? Shall we live without government because every constitution has its old age and its period?”

As an educator, Witherspoon’s aim was to “fit young Gentlemen for serving their Country in public Stations” and to place them “in offices of power or trust.” That goal was met. As a teacher of theology and ethics, he naturally exerted much influence through his students bound for the ministry. Of the 469 graduates of the college during his presidency, 114 became pastors in churches throughout the colonies.

Though significant, the number might have been larger. Before Witherspoon’s arrival, nearly 50 percent of all Princeton graduates became ministers; by the end of his 25-year administration, only half that many would so. The political crisis surely had much to do with this, but so did the president’s broad vision of Christian vocation.

The result was that Reverend Witherspoon, an evangelical minister, presided over the foremost school for statesmen at the most strategic point in American history. Among his graduates was one U.S. president (James Madison, B.A., 1771); a vice president (Aaron Burr, B.A., 1772); 12 members of the Continental Congress; five delegates to the Constitutional Convention; 49 U.S. representatives; 28 U.S. senators; three Supreme Court Justices; eight U.S. district judges; one secretary of state; three attorneys general; and two foreign ministers. Another 26 served as state judges, 17 as members of their state conventions that ratified the proposed Constitution.

In August 1768 a somewhat austere Scottish minister arrived in Princeton with his wife and five children. He found the main college building, Nassau Hall, lit from top to bottom with candles to greet him. Perhaps none of those who welcomed him could have guessed that he would help set the campus ablaze with revolutionary fervor. John Adams, writing on the eve of independence, feared that “we have not Men, fit for the Times.” But those men did in fact appear, thanks in no small measure to this preacher-cum-politician.

Given the flourishing of religion in America, it is easy to forget that political liberalism in Europe came laced with antireligious venom. It would not be so in the United States, and Witherspoon’s career was part of the reason. “It is in the man of piety … that we may expect to find the uncorrupted patriot, the useful citizen, and the invincible soldier,” he said. “God grant in America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable and the unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the support and establishment of both.”

Joseph Loconte is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, University Press of Virginia, 2000, 370 pp.; $49.50, hardcover; $17.50, paper

As the American Revolution wound down, J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur sounded a death knell for more than British colonial rule. Indians, he wrote, appeared to be "a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans."[1] Ever since, most of us in the United States have been inclined to agree. On the face of it, Crevecoeur's prediction has seemed accurate, at least with respect to the course, if not the cause, of Indian history. Our history books and movies have told us that in the hundred years after the Revolution, Indian lands and populations got swallowed up, sometimes in small bits, other times in large chunks. As the nation grew, Natives became increasingly removed, literally and figuratively, from the centers of American culture. Once out of sight, it was easy to put them out of mind. And that's pretty much where they've remained, even for American historians. Today some of us, depending on where we live, get occasional glimpses of Native Americans and their part in America's past. But the disappearing act that Crevecouer forecast appears to have been realized.

Yet appearances can be deceiving. And in this case, as with Crevecoeur's more famous prophecy of a single American identity arising out of the interplay of multiple religious and ethnic groups, history has proven to be more complex and less certain than the Frenchman anticipated. At least that is the conclusion I have been coming to over the last decade.

It turns out that Crevecoeur was not a very good prophet (in any sense of that word), but he did help formulate a powerful fiction about the place, or lack thereof, of Native Americans in the emerging republic. White Americans in the late eighteenth century were inclined to associate Indians with a colonial past and not with a national future. They envisioned their fledgling nation as a "new world without Indians." Their nineteenth-century successors concurred. Presidents, pioneers, and professors relegated Natives more and more to the margins of American life, so much so that by the twentieth century it became difficult to imagine that Indians had ever been anywhere else.

That was certainly where I found them when I began graduate work at Johns Hopkins University in the late 1970s. My study of American history, including early America, caught sight of Indians only when I looked at the periphery. I proceeded to write a dissertation and a book about eighteenth-century religious diversity without giving Native Americans a second thought. What I did know about Indians at the time, I had learned mostly from a fellow graduate student, James Merrell. Jim was tirelessly working away on the Catawba Indians of the Carolinas. By the time his book on them appeared (1989),[2] he had convinced me that it was time to "dis-cover" Crevecoeur's fiction and to re-place Indians within American history. Many other historians arrived independently at the same conclusion, with the result that we are in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship intended to do just that.

A case in point is Native Americans and the Early Republic. The contributors to this outstanding volume are collectively persuaded that accounts of the early national period must return Indians to the central places they occupied within American life down to the 1840s. Not surprisingly, Jim Merrell states this most boldly in an afterword that adeptly links the volume's ten preceding essays and sets out an ambitious research agenda for Native American historians. Over the past 15 years, Merrell's voice has been the sharpest and clearest among a new generation of Indian historians insisting that Natives be seen as major actors rather than bit players in the drama of colonial American history. Now he and his coauthors extend that argument to the first decades of the new republic.

Merrell suggests that however much Crevecoeur expected and others wanted Indians to go away (literally or culturally) in the 1780s, they hadn't and wouldn't for another two generations. Most of the continent north of the Rio Grande was still "Indian Country"; vast stretches of land remained under Native control, as they had been before the arrival of the first Europeans.

Even more telling, Indians retained a presence almost everywhere whites lived in post-Revolutionary America. Face-to-face contacts were far more commonplace in the late eighteenth century than we might imagine. Citizens of the new nation were accustomed to seeing and interacting with Natives. That would no longer be the case four or five decades later. By the 1830s, Indians had become little more than a novelty or a curiosity to most East Coast residents. What happened in the intervening years to bring about such a dramatic change is far less clear than it once seemed.

Simply acknowledging that this change occurred is more than many past students of the early Republic have managed. The essays in this volume, however, go a good deal further. For one thing, they show that there was no single path that all Natives traveled to arrive at their obscurity in white eyes. Nor was that destination so inevitable that Indian choices never mattered. Or to put it another way, Indians participated in their own history; they were important agents in shaping and responding to their circ*mstances, not the helpless victims of some preordained destiny.

Complexity and contingency consequently replace uniformity and predictability as major themes in these new accounts of Native Americans during the early Republic. As such, they sound a similar chord to what Ira Berlin has recently claimed regarding the history of slaves and slavery in North America during its first two centuries and to what Peter Charles Hoffer has argued for early American history in general. In the latter's words, "irony, contradiction, and contingency" were at the heart of the "unpredictable course" of events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[3]

For Indians, few events were more contingent than America's War for Independence. As Colin Calloway rehearses the story in the book's prologue, Natives were determined to secure their own freedom during the American Revolution, but they were unsure which potential ally, if any, held the brightest promise of winning a victory advantageous to Indians. When forced to take sides, they split, not only between but within tribes. As a result, "the Revolution assumed the look of a civil war" for many Indian peoples. The losses they incurred only became compounded following the Treaty of Paris, for whether they had supported or opposed the colonial victors, Indians remained at war after 1783, now contesting with the influx of aggressive settlers who flooded westward in search of a better life. And if war and invasion were not enough, "economic dislocation, political factionalism and fragmentation, disruption of ancient traditions, hunger, disease, and betrayal into the hands of their enemies" soon beset Native American communities from New York to Georgia.

Yet not all was darkness, Calloway suggests, for "in the kaleidoscopic, 'all-change' world of the Revolutionary era, there were exceptions and variations. The upheaval generated by the Revolution offered opportunity as well as oppression." Seminoles, for example, seized the chance to break free of the Creek confederacy. Handsome Lake used it to generate spiritual revival among the Iroquois. Their examples and others point to an Indian resilience and resourcefulness usually overlooked. If Natives were susceptible to losing their worlds, they were also capable of reconstructing them.

Some of that rebuilding entailed rethinking who whites were and how to relate to them. For their part, many migrating whites were about the same business. The result, as a number of these essays make clear, was a complex range of cultural conceptions (or misconceptions) held by each of the other, conceptions that went a long way toward that shaping intercultural relations for the next two generations.

Among Euro-Americans, alongside Crevecoeur's fiction of the disappearing Indian arose the equally powerful myth of the resistant Indian: ally of the British in the Revolution (and therefore enemy of American liberty), obstacle to national expansion, and terror on the frontier. Like many potent myths, this one contained a measure of truth. After all, from the outset there were Indians who quite understandably resisted the incursions of Europeans with all the means at their disposal. But, also from the outset, there were others who formed alliances with the newcomers, while still others pulled back "out of range." As a comprehensive account of Indian identity, then, the notion of the resistant Indian was a self-serving fiction by which whites "justified massive dispossession of Native Americans."

Reginald Horsman's interpretation of post-Revolution relations places more emphasis on federal policymakers' embrace of Enlightenment ideals, including the notion of the meliorative savage, a Native capable of being saved by "civilization" if only he gave up his Indianness. Elise Marienstras finds both positive and negative images of Indians circulating within white popular culture in the early 1800s, each contributing in its own way to the formation of an American national identity that defined itself over against alien Indians.

That whites were not the only ones operating according to fictions about the other becomes clear in Richard White's analysis of Indian-U.S. diplomacy in the late eighteenth century. Natives had long been inventing their own stories about European newcomers, especially in the Old Northwest, where the fictions employed on both sides of the cultural divide had helped create a "middle ground" that allowed for mostly peaceful and productive relations in the colonial era. American independence brought new circ*mstances, but images of whites remained a critical part of the thinking of Indian leaders. Their disagreements in the 1780s and 1790s over whether to see Americans as benevolent (George Washington in the imagery of the day) or malevolent (proverbial Big Knives) contributed to the diversity of Native responses to U.S. policies in the early Republic.

That perceptions of reality were often more important than reality itself in shaping Indian-white exchanges in the Revolutionary era and beyond should not be surprising. After all, if that was the case, it only parallels what was true for other American relationships at the time. For example, some historians since the 1960s have argued that belief in a British plot against American liberty in the 1760s and 1770s, whether there was in fact one or not, was sufficient to push many colonists toward rebellion. But we may be surprised at just how wide the gap between perception and reality was among peoples with more dramatic cultural differences.

Theda Perdue, for example, looks at eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Euro-American traveler and trader accounts of Native women and finds a "remarkably uniform assessment" that got some descriptive detail right but usually misread female economic, familial, and sexual activities in ways that left whites feeling disturbed and threatened. From today's perspective, it is clear that these observers were too quick to presume that the same acts meant the same thing in all cultures and too slow to catch on to the possibility that Indian peoples might have their own definitions and rules regulating their social behavior.

Perhaps there was no more important an instance of misinterpretation than the Euro-American claim that agriculture was not a vital part of Native economies, and never would be until men replaced women as the principal agricultural laborers in Indian societies. Proponents of Jeffersonian agrarianism in the early nineteenth century consequently pushed for Native males to give up the hunt and take up the plow. Native women, in turn, were to give up the hoe and take up the household. Nothing less than major elements of the new nation's "civilizing" policy toward Native Americans in the early Republic were based upon such perceptions. As a result, the realities of Native women's lives were altered in fundamental ways.

Why was cultural misperception so prevalent in Indian-white relations? It's tempting to lay the blame both on ignorance and on a willful desire to misunderstand for the sake of legitimating one's own actions. No doubt those factors played a part. But Daniel H. Usner, Jr., finds a more complex part of the answer in the lens eighteenth-century Euro-Americans used to view Indian lifestyles. He, too, is specifically interested in why Jeffersonians couldn't "see" that eastern woodland Indians farmed. Whites' apparent blindness stemmed from embracing a theory of human behavior which asserted that "how a society utilized natural resources determined the rates of growth in population and of movement up a ladder of evolution." With such a model in mind, Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s attributed the impressive natural increase of the colonial population to Europeans' agrarian ways. Meanwhile, Native depopulation was interpreted as the natural fruit of their lives as hunters. A half-century later, Jeffersonians, operating under the same assumptions, eagerly tried to get Indians on board with their vision of national commercial agricultural expansion. Indian survival, they claimed, depended on a fundamental shift in the Natives' livelihood.

Yet the demand that Indians farm like whites came at the same moment that whites were also demanding more access to Indian lands. No wonder Indian peoples like the Iroquois felt squeezed, and no wonder they resisted some if not all of the Jeffersonians' reform agenda. Operating from "an understanding of livelihood sharply different from the Jeffersonian model of economic life," the Iroquois in western New York made their own decisions about what to keep and what to change in their economic activities. The result was a set of choices that in Usner's mind "contributed in the long run to [Iroquois] endurance through the nineteenth century and to the present."

Whether Usner is right about the Iroquois is probably less important than recognizing the value of his effort to see their actions from the inside. Only by putting on the mind of the Iroquois or other Native Americans can historians hope to read more accurately the motives and meanings of Indian acts. That may sound obvious, but until rather recently historians have been disinclined or unable to do so. While anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists have helped historians "get inside" Native communities, much of the best recent historical work is primarily the result of lending a keener ear to what Indians said and a keener eye to what Indians did.

Take, for example, Daniel K. Richter's analysis of Seneca relations with Pennsylvania's new government in the decade after the American Revolution. Richter shows that only by listening more carefully to what the Seneca in their diplomatic negotiations meant by terms like Father, Brother, and Onas (an Iroquoian word referring originally to William Penn and then to later colonial governors) can we understand how they understood their changing world in the 1780s. Joel W. Martin similarly tries to look from within the cultural matrix of Native groups in the southeast to see how they responded to the upheavals of the late eighteenth century. He finds that Cherokees and Muskogee Creeks, faced with the territorial and cultural onslaught of Euro-Americans, hid essential values and convictions from the newcomers. They created a "cultural underground" as a form of resistance; by developing and concealing ideas and practices that championed Indian separateness, Cherokees and Muskogees preserved spaces of autonomy from white intrusion.

Studies like Martin's are commendable for taking us deeper into Indian worlds in a way reminiscent of what Albert Raboteau accomplished two decades ago when he unveiled slave religion as the "invisible institution" of antebellum slavery.[4] But Jim Merrell thinks we need to go even further into Indian Country. To the extent that all these essays focus primarily or exclusively on Indian points of contact with or responses to whites, they don't touch the daily lives of most ordinary Natives. Merrell believes that existing sources, creatively employed, can yield narrow peeks if not wide vistas into those lives. Telling their stories would help enlarge our picture of what it meant to be an Indian in the early Republic.

They might also, at least indirectly, tell us more about our broader national experience if linked to what was happening with other Americans at the time. Interesting parallels exist, for example, between Indian and white spiritual renewal movements in the early nineteenth century. Beyond that, if we could see Indians and whites not only participating in similar events but as coparticipants in a collective past (although not an identical past), we might see the history of the early Republic whole to a degree hitherto unrealized.

How important is that? Perhaps a partial answer may be inferred from the words of Tarhe, a Wyandot leader, who after a defeat in 1795 encouraged federal officials to "take care of your little ones; an impartial father equally regards all his children." No historians, I suspect, would want to think of themselves as "fathers" to those Americans of whatever stripe who lived through the early national period. But we, historians and ordinary Americans alike, may be their siblings, and the call to impartiality should fall upon our ears as weightily as Tarhe hoped it would fall upon Federalist policymakers.

Treating all the participants in our nation's early history with what James Axtell has called "moral and methodological parity" seems imperative if also elusive.[5] Giving all their due has proven no easier in reconstructing the past than it did for those living it in the first place. To their credit, the contributors to Native Americans and the Early Republic generally do well at enlarging our understanding of Native history without resorting to unfair, one-sided judgments. Such justice-doing will not erase the stain of the trials and tragedies that too often beset relations between Indians and whites in the post-Revolutionary era. But it might help us to undo our longstanding national impulse to accept Crevecoeur at his word.

Richard W. Pointer is professor of history at Westmont College.

1. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, and, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (Viking Penguin, 1981), p. 122.

2. James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989).

3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); Peter Charles Hoffer, The Brave New World: A History of Early America (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 3.

4. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

5. James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. ix.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:• Native Americans and the Early Republic, edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

George III, by Christopher Hibbert, Basic Books, 1998, 464 pp.; $28

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, by Francis S. Fox, Penn State University Press, 2000, 211 pp.; $29.95

A lot of ordinary people were caught up in the American War for Independence, and a surprising number of them were of German extraction. Some, like the King of England, who conversed with his wife in German all their days, have been the subject of many books. Others, like the residents of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where 85 percent of the county’s 15,000 residents came from Germany, have not. To come once again at the question of the morality of the American Revolution but from an unfamiliar perspective—through the experiences of George III, who is deftly portrayed in Christopher Hibbert’s personal biography, and of the Northampton residents, whose story Francis Fox opens up for the first time in his pathbreaking book—is to be reminded of the moral complexities that extraordinary times brought to the lives of ordinary people.

The German angle shared by these books is no more than an intriguing sidelight. George III kept self-consciously loyal to the German principality of Hanover, whose Elector he remained during his years as Britain’s monarch, and he dispatched all but one of his sons to Hanover for part of their education, but he never paid a visit to these German lands. The German background of the settlers in Northampton County functioned usually as a negative reference point. Dissatisfaction with the Old World had propelled them to the New. Once having left behind the economic, religious, domestic, or political circ*mstances that made Germany unattractive, these migrants valued most about their new life in North America the chance to be left alone while they started a new life. When the War for Independence forced the German migrants of Northampton County to think directly about their political tie to the German-descended king of England, and when that monarch took notice of the colonists whose numbers included the Northampton immigrants, things German were not in the forefront of their thinking.

Yet what was in the forefront, as depicted in these two books, was not what we might expect. In both cases the Revolutionary War brought unexpected transformations. The conflict that transformed George III—an earnest Christian, devoted husband and father, and conscientious ruler—into a despotic ogre worked a change of similar magnitude for the much more obscure citizens of Northampton County. In George’s case, the change was a matter of perception; in Northampton County, where the Revolution was marked by anything but the triumph of liberty, the changes came in response to opportunity. In both cases, the actual unfolding of events as viewed by historians more than two centuries later was strikingly at odds with popular interpretations at the time.

As Hibbert’s life of George III spells out in considerable detail, the third of the Hanoverians to reign as British monarch was an unlikely candidate for the enormities with which he was charged in the American Declaration of Independence. Even when recognizing that the Declaration was never intended as a disinterested account of the actual facts in dispute between the 13 colonies and the mother country—as almost everyone at the time realized—even, that is, when the Declaration is considered as an artful bit of propaganda, its depiction of George III still amounts to an unusually violent denunciation.

For the purpose of assessing the morality of the war that produced the United States of America, it helps to remember that the critical paragraph of the Declaration—beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal”—ended with the assertion that “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” Most of the rest of the Declaration was devoted to justifying that claim.

Since public declamation of the Declaration is not common now, it is useful to recall the extremity of its denunciation. In its graphic terms, George III “has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries [most, as it happens, from Hanover, with only a few “Hessians” from Hesse-Cassel] to complete the work of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circ*mstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” After very much more of the same, the conclusion about George comes as no surprise: “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

And so to Christopher Hibbert’s biography, where (not surprisingly) a very different figure appears. The historical George III turns out to have been relatively moderate on the American question. When in 1769 one of his ministers proposed withdrawing Massachusetts’ charter in response to a provocative assertion of rights by its legislature, George counseled restraint and sought a non-confrontational solution. Later, especially after the Boston “Tea Party” of December 1773, George did come to share the belief of his Prime Minister Lord North, a large majority in Parliament, and leading public Britons like Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and John Wesley that firmness was required in dealing with the colonies in order to preserve the rule of law, defend property rights, and counteract government by mob rule. But even in that commitment George himself remained fairly moderate with respect to his revolting subjects. He continued for several years to look for a solution that would have acceded to many patriot demands while preserving the principle of Parliamentary supremacy over the colonies, and he oversaw orders to British military commanders that were much milder than those later issued to deal with the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

One of the reasons that a peaceful solution could not be found was, to be sure, George’s own relative insensitivity to colonial realities. While he was attentive to reports from his Board of Trade and Secretary of State for the Colonies, he was never an astute judge of political talent. Friendship and personal loyalty counted for more in selecting ministers like Lord North than their political wisdom or ability to work with the era’s sharply divided political factions. In addition, George’s own efforts at playing a constructive role in governmental affairs often backfired by upsetting precedents, procedures, and conventions that had developed under the benign neglect of his Hanoverian predecessors.

George, in other words, was an occasionally inept ruler. But he was in no sense a fiendish tyrant. To the contrary, he was a notably serious defender of moral values in public and in private. One of the reasons he distrusted American protests over their rights came from his own rude dealings with John Wilkes, a likable but also scabrous sybarite who parlayed yellow journalism, demagogic rabble-rousing, and a leveling political philosophy into election as a member of Parliament. “Wilkes and Liberty” was the great cry that arose when Parliament refused to seat this political radical, and the extreme, even atheistic connotations of that cry were very much in the king’s mind when he received the colonists’ protests about their violated freedoms. Similarly, George resisted making Charles James Fox a Parliamentary minister not so much because of Fox’s well-reasoned arguments in favor of the American patriots, but because Fox was a profligate gambler, openly disdained religion, and publicly kept a mistress.

For his own part, George was probably the most straightforwardly pious of the major political figures of his age. He read the Bible and attended Anglican prayers daily, at his coronation he deliberately removed his crown before taking Communion, he observed Sunday as a reverent holy day, he exhorted (ineffectually) his sons to seek God as their highest good, he admired John Wesley and the Countess of Huntingdon for their evangelical convictions, he gave a steady stream of charity to the poor, after his eyesight failed he was able to recite the alternating verses of the Psalms read at daily worship, and even when he had become irreversibly non compos mentis the habits of a lifetime endured (though sometimes with bizarre variations, as on the occasion when he administered the sacrament to himself). In 1795 George was being driven to Parliament when an unruly crowd surrounded his carriage and a window was broken by a projectile shot or thrown in anger. The king’s retinue was all in a dither, but he remained entirely calm, and shortly thereafter said, “Well … one person is proposing this, and another is supposing that, forgetting that there is One above us all who disposes of everyone and on whom alone we depend.”

For the sake of comparison, the United States did not have a president who shared as fully the beliefs and practices of traditional orthodox Christianity until after the Civil War and the election of Rutherford B. Hays and James A. Garfield. The comparison is doubly apt, for like the British monarch these presidents were politicians of ordinary intellect and ordinary capabilities. The George III portrayed by Christopher Hibbert was not Britain’s brightest or wisest leader but, in terms of ordinary decency, he was, the polemics of the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding, one of the best.

Francis Fox’s Sweet Land of Liberty also turns conventional ascriptions upside down, but for a class of people very different from the king and his circle. At the time of the Revolution, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, was a newly organized political entity north of Philadelphia and stretching westward from the Delaware River; its three main towns were Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton. Among the many German settlers who had moved into the area from the 1730s were a number of Moravians and Mennonites, pacifists for whom the Revolution would pose especially perilous choices.

Fox’s book, the product of extraordinarily thorough research in local Pennsylvania records, is made up entirely of personal vignettes. Several of the chapters are short since they concern people who only just nudged into the public record. Such ones include Michael Ohl, who was German Reformed but who dared to offer kind words about the Moravians whom some ardent patriots were attacking for not supporting the Revolutionary effort with sufficient ardor. For his pains Ohl was twice clapped into prison and assessed heavy fines. Another was Joseph Romig, from a Moravian family but not himself a practicing Moravian, who had to become a wandering vagabond when he was forced out of his home by freebooting militiamen.

The individuals for whom most documentation is available and whose biographies are presented at greatest length were those who organized the county militia at the request of the patriotic legislature of the new state of Pennsylvania. The legislators in Philadelphia wanted military help for fighting on two fronts—against the main British army under General Howe which menaced Philadelphia, and against the British and Indian forces who were a threat to the North and who on July 3, 1778, massacred more than 100 patriot soldiers and civilians at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, 65 miles northwest of Easton.

Once the Northampton militia was raised, however, it turned out to be much more interested in tyrannizing neighbors than in fending off the British. Fox’s longest chapters document the actions of County Lieutenant John Wetzel, Justice Frederich Limbach, and Henry Geiger, who became the Colonel of Northampton’s Second Battalion. For these men, the Revolutionary War ushered in a period of great and unanticipated opportunity, but not in the terms with which the Declaration of Independence addressed George III or the Pennsylvania assembly called to arms. For them it was rather, in Fox’s phrase, “an era where suspicion and persecution of one’s neighbors became a blood sport.”

What the Revolution allowed Wetzel, Limbach, Geiger, and their subordinates to grasp was primarily the lands and goods of those who for religious reasons refused to mobilize for war or who hesitated at committing themselves to the patriot cause. The Militia Act and the Test Act that the Pennsylvania legislature passed in order to mobilize support for the new government became in the hands of these local leaders cruel instruments of oppression. Both acts provided for fines and the sale of personal property when citizens refused to either register for military duty or sign an oath supporting the new government.

When these provisions came into play, they offered a double opportunity for men on the make: they provided cash to pay militiamen for their service, and they offered desirable goods at cheap prices. Even when the new Pennsylvania government expressly requested local officials to go easy on Moravian and Mennonite farmers, whom almost everyone regarded as inoffensive citizens, the Northampton militiamen still did what they could to, again in Fox’s phrase, “feather their own nests.” If there is a hero in Fox’s book, it is John Ettwein, the Moravians’ bishop, who used all legal means and a wide variety of personal contacts, to protect his people and other reluctant patriots.

The rawest exercise of “patriot liberty” occurred in the summer of 1778, when with precipitate haste the militia fell on about a dozen Mennonite families in Upper Saucon township. The men from these families were hailed to Easton, where they were asked to take the loyalty oath. When from religious scruple they refused, Justice Limbach ordered them to forfeit their property and leave Pennsylvania within 30 days. Protests and appeals to Philadelphia were lost in the confusion surrounding the Wyoming massacre. As many as 2,000 bargain-hunters attended a series of auctions held in late August and early September at which the Mennonites’ livestock, grain, tools, books (including Bibles), whiskey, and household furniture were sold out from under them. Fox’s summary is not pretty: “the auctions stranded eleven Mennonite families in empty houses that had been stripped of every object that could be removed and sold, from spools of threat to heirlooms that had been carried across the Atlantic. … Not a morsel of bread had been left for the children. … Some of the men’s wives were pregnant and would soon give birth.”

Fox himself does not expatiate on the personal stories he has reconstructed with such care, but his book is provided with a brief, powerful afterword by Michael Zuckerman, a distinguished historian of early America at the University of Pennsylvania. To Zuckerman, Fox’s research provides “a new and altogether more disturbing Revolution than we have been accustomed to reckon with.” Put most starkly, this was a Revolution fought for general principles of liberty that resulted in gross abuses against liberty in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.

The word in season from these illuminating books should not be taken as a mindless revisionism supplanting a mindless patriotism. Although George III was in fact a decent, honorable man, his virtues could not overcome the British bungling that must bear considerable responsibility for the American War of Independence. Likewise, it cannot be concluded from the savagery in the name of liberty that was perpetrated on law-abiding and God-fearing Northampton citizens that patriots lacked legitimate causes for revolt. But what the accounts of these two books can do is alert modern American readers to the moral contingencies of our Revolution. To at least some degree, judgments about the morality of that war, along with judgments concerning those who took part in it on both sides, depended on how the war came out. To at least some degree, the Revolution was “right”—and the uplifting interpretations of the Revolution as construed by generations of loyal Americans have been “right”—because of who at the end of the day wielded the most effective “might.”

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (Blackwell).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:• George III, by Christopher Hibbert• Sweet Land of Liberty, by Francis S. Fox

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Contributions to Original Intent, by Derek H. Davis, Oxford University Press, 2000, 288 pp.; $39.95

Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, by John Witte, Jr., Westview Press, 2000, 224 pp.; $29, paper

America is a nation that was born Christian; indeed, it was born Reformed Protestant, and this suggests that an assertive and intrusive religiosity shaped this nation’s political institutions and patterns of social life. Curiously, however, this is a heritage that some Christian authors who work and prosper in elite intellectual circles seem embarrassed by and attempt to mitigate or even, in some instances, effectively deny. More particularly, some—by means of a highly selective historiography, an anachronistic focus on “progressive” political actors, and confused depictions of Reformed theology—offer their readers a history of American political and religious life that renders America’s past congenial to contemporary secular sensibilities and provides a valuable tool in “correctly” reading the “original intent” of the religious clauses of the First Amendment.

The works under review, Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774-1789: Contributions to Original Intent, by Derek H. Davis, and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment: Essential Rights and Liberties, by John Witte, Jr., are guilty of these intellectual shortcomings.[1] What needs to be made clear, and yet is obfuscated in differing ways by these two prominent Christian scholars,[2] is that America from 1630 to 1780 was predominantly Reformed Protestant in its religiosity, and continued to be powerfully Christian for at least the next 75 years. Although it is true that the nature of American religiosity was rapidly changing during the years after the War for Independence, this period witnessed a huge upsurge of pietistic and evangelical Christian activity and must not be viewed as a period of increasing secularization in any simple sense. Indeed, even as the particular goals and aspirations of America’s seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Reformed Protestant founders came to be rejected, the vast majority of America’s religious and political leaders continued to insist on an intimate relationship between the public’s need for moral citizens and the essential role of Christianity in achieving this end.

Given the overwhelmingly Christian environment of the early Republic, it is not surprising to learn that there was anything but a strict wall of separation between church and state. Yet this manifest reality is rarely conspicuous in the histories provided by Davis and Witte; in both books, but most particularly in Witte’s account, the reader is directed to attend to the 1820s writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson rather than to the actual norms, laws, and practices of the vast majority of Americans living in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The thrust of both books is to celebrate anachronistically the rise of the separation of church and state, religious pluralism, state neutrality between Christianity and its opponents, and the privatization of religion in America and its effectual disappearance from the public square.

Accordingly, many readers will become confused, conflating all who opposed close connections between church and state— including evangelicals and pietists, Christian humanists, and secular liberals—into a liberal, secular, and “Lockean” amalgam that plays well with contemporary academic sensibilities. Although Witte attempts to avoid such conflation, his efforts come to naught in the sweep of his all-encompassing narrative.

If Witte and Davis had more clearly defined the differences between these varying groups, they would have prepared their readers to understand and give a correct reading to still important documents and statutes, such as Madison’s 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. Knowing for whom such documents were written and how their original audiences understood these statements gives all of us a better handle on the authentic religious and political culture of the time, and the appropriate place of such essays and legal enactments in continuing Constitutional disputes.

Still more troubling is Davis’s and Witte’s failure to take notice of America’s enduring embrace of the Reformed Protestant (and Jewish) concept of a national covenant. As Perry Miller explained, Americans (including those in the Continental Congress), up until the end of the nineteenth century, believed themselves bound by a special national covenant with God. Under the auspices of a national covenant, when individuals sin, their encompassing group corporately pays—by incurring the wrath of God in the form of floods, wars, famines, plagues, droughts, fires, and other calamities. This aspect of Reform Protestantism, wholly ignored by Witte’s and Davis’s inadequate accounts of Reformed theology, must not be overlooked if one is to make sense of the hostility of Americans before the 1750s to the religiously “errant,” even in a community of saints and wholly fallen sinners whose eternal fates are irresistible and humanly unalterable.

Only when one knows that the members of Congress believed their new nation was bound by a national covenant with God can one understand their concern that irreligious and impious behavior not be condoned in the ranks of the army and navy (and as they trusted, not by the states). Accordingly, to fight against such a possibility, Congress created a demanding code for the military. But this too, like so much else that is inconvenient about the deep religiosity of the years surrounding America’s War for Independence, Witte ignores and Davis slights.

To be sure, Davis and Witte accurately recount some of the story of American religious life in the early Republic. Indeed, although such nuggets are too often buried in endnotes or in highly condensed and isolated asides, one can learn a great deal from each author concerning the true nature of American religious laws and practices in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Thus, we learn from Davis that during those very years in which he finds that the true essence and “progressive evolving intentions” of America were to be found in a whole-hearted embrace of separation of church and state, only Virginia and New York failed to require religious tests for those wishing to hold public office (and New York nonetheless excluded Catholics). All other states required that state officeholders (and thus, all federal senatorial electors) be Protestant (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Vermont), Trinitarian Christian (Delaware), accepting of Scripture (Pennsylvania and Vermont), or Christian (Maryland). So much for the separation of church and state.

Moreover, regarding the language of the Journals of the Continental Congress, Davis finds that “the proclamations and official state papers of the Congress are, as Edward F. Humphrey remarked, ‘so filled with Biblical phrases as to resemble Old Testament ecclesiastical documents.'” Davis continues, noting that in the 1770s, America “was still overwhelmingly biblically orthodox in its worldview, and, as already suggested, the religious dimensions of civil government were in that day still generally taken for granted.” Davis thus demonstrates that Congress consistently acted in support of a religiosity that brought together the actions of church and state in its constant appeal for divine aid, daily prayers, appointment of military chaplaincies; its members attending worship services as a body; its proclamations for days of fasting and humiliation; and its ordering that an American Bible either be imported or published. Indeed, Davis acknowledges, “the Continental Congress operated almost totally within an accommodationist paradigm”—a finding which, the author admits, surprised him greatly, as he had expected “to find considerably more evidence than [he] did from the confederation period that would support separationist arguments.”

Similarly, at the colonial and state level, Davis reports that

only three colonies allowed Catholics to vote. They were banned from holding public office in all New England colonies save Rhode Island. New Hampshire law called for the imprisonment of all persons who refused to repudiate the pope, the mass, and transubstantiation. New York held the death penalty over priests who entered the colony, Virginia boasted that it would only arrest them. Georgia did not permit Catholics to reside within its boundaries; the Carolinas merely barred them from office.

It is not surprising, then, that Davis holds that “we must always look beyond the founding era for the latent effects and outcomes of an inchoate ‘original intent.'” He must make this claim, no matter how nebulous, if he is to produce a history purporting to show that the original intent of the Constitution, supporting the radical separationist doctrine preferred by Mr. Davis, is not to be found in the 1780s but instead in the spirit of religious toleration, plurality, equality, and separatism discoverable in Madison’s 1822 “Letter to Edward Livingston” or his late 1820s “Detached Memoranda.”

Nowhere in Davis’s work does one come to learn that it was during the years preceding the War of Independence that members of the clergy played such a critical role in assuring their pious countrymen that political resistance was in keeping with God’s will. In addition, even though the Continental Congress was Davis’s preeminent concern, he fails to make mention of what James Hutson calls the “deeply religious men in positions of national legislative leadership.” For example, Hutson, in his admirable Religion and the Founding of the American Republic, writes that the Secretary of the Congress, Charles Thompson, “retired from public life to translate the Scriptures from Greek to English” and that the famous pamphleteer, John Dickinson, “also retired from public life to devote himself to religious scholarship.” Much the same was true of three of the Congress’s presidents: Elias Boudinot, Henry Laurens, and John Jay.

Not only were many members more deeply pious than one would infer from Davis and Witte, but the public actions of the Congress were far more intrusively religious than indicated by either author. It was not once or twice but at least thirteen times that Congress unapologetically sought, on the nation’s behalf, the intervention of Jesus Christ and, at other times, that of the Holy Ghost (which Davis, curiously, both describes and then later denies). Nor does one learn from Davis or Witte that James Madison had himself been appointed by the Continental Congress on March 14, 1781 to serve, and by all accounts did, on a committee of three “to prepare a recommendation to the states for setting apart a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer” which was delivered on March 20, 1781, for May 2, 1781.

No one would guess, from these accounts, that Congress early on voted to “discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, co*ckfighting, exhibitions of shews, [and] plays.” Similarly, no mention is made of the persistent efforts made by Congress, not the states, to bring American Indians to Christ (see, for example, Journals of the Continental Congress for November 11, 1775, excerpted above). Both authors fail to convey in a reasonably balanced fashion just how intent this Congress was on winning the favor of Christ and the great lengths it went to in order to lead the emerging nation in that direction.

Given such omissions, it is not surprising that Davis must reject the central argument and purpose of his having written his book, which was “to examine the record of the Continental Congress on religion for the purpose of discovering what that record might contribute toward a resolution of the modern debate over the original intent of the constitutional framers regarding the interplay of government and religion in the United States.” And, again, what did he find? He found that his study “revealed that the notion of the separation of church and state, at the federal level, was virtually nonexistent in the confederate period.” His evidence will not permit him both to fulfill the book’s intentions and to come to what he believes is the correct outcome. And so, as we have seen, he is forced to turn to the 1820s writings of Madison to discover the “true” meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. At best, this is a most curious conclusion.

Witte’s text enjoys greater coherence, and evidence that cuts against the grain of his narrative’s loving embrace of the rise in America of a largely secular public sphere and the increasing privatization of religious life (though, for Witte, this does have its limits) is accordingly rarer. But it does exist, though routinely framed in ways that focus the reader’s attention elsewhere. For example, with the seventeenth century under scrutiny, Witte rightly notes that in New England, Quakers “who failed to leave were subject to flogging and the confiscation of their properties. The four Quakers who returned after banishment were hung in the Boston Commons in 1659 and 1660.” But having acknowledged this evidence of pervasively intrusive religion, Witte shifts quickly to seventeenth-century Maryland, which he characterizes as “providing ample inspiration during the constitutional debates of the next century.” The implication is that the case of Maryland provides a significant contrast.

What Witte fails to make clear is that—like almost all the colonies and plantations begun in the seventeenth century—Maryland hardly could be said to have conducted a successful experiment in religious liberty. From Maryland’s inception as a colony, denial of the Holy Trinity was punishable by death; from the 1650s, Roman Catholicism was regularly outlawed, priests were executed, there were religious riots, and indeed there were discriminatory anti-Catholic laws throughout its colonial history. Moreover, in 1692 the Church of England was established in Maryland, which would maintain an establishment until 1810 (it was the last state to disestablish outside New England) and preserve a religious test oath until barred by the United States Supreme Court in 1961. So much for the “exemplary experiment” in religious liberty.

Again, in describing the eighteenth century, we find Witte acknowledging that

government patronized religion in a variety of ways. Officials donated land and personalty for the building of churches, religious schools, and charities. They collected taxes and tithes to support ministers and missionaries. They exempted church property from taxation. They incorporated religious bodies. They outlawed blasphemy and sacrilege, unnecessary labor on the Sabbath and on religious holidays. They established religious test oaths.

Still, when such information is packed in one paragraph and surrounded by flowing narrative arguing to the contrary, most readers will little realize the actual pervasiveness of American public Christianity in the late-eighteenth century with the rise of the evangelical denominations: the Methodists, the Scotch-Irish and New School Presbyterians, and the Baptists. Nor will readers realize that Deism and Unitarianism, the religions of those men so selectively and frequently lauded by Witte and Davis, were dying religions for a minority within a minority.

With the nineteenth century in mind, Witte, like Davis, must find solace in the words of select authors and a handful of Supreme Court decisions. Why? Because, as he again shows in brief vignettes, America continued for much of the century to maintain the close working relationship between church and state that had been practiced, in some places in America, for 200 years before the Civil War. He thus reports that states discriminated, in various ways, against religious minorities. States and localities were comfortable in “endorsing religious symbols and ceremonies,” crosses were common on statehouse grounds, holy days were official holidays, chaplains were “appointed to state legislatures, military groups, and state prisons,” thanksgiving prayers were offered by governors, subsidies were given to Christian missionaries, the costs of Bibles were underwritten, tax exemptions were provided to Christian schools, “public schools and state universities had mandatory courses in the Bible and religion and compulsory attendance in daily chapel and Sunday worship services … [and] polygamy, prostitution, p*rnography, and other sexual offenses … were prohibited. Blasphemy and sacrilege were still prosecuted. … and other activities that depended on fate or magic were forbidden.” Christianity was simply an accepted “part of the common law.”

Yet Witte simultaneously would have us believe that from the seventeenth century, Americans had continually been guided by an adherence to six essential rights and liberties:

(1) liberty of conscience; (2) free exercise of religion; (3) religious pluralism; (4) religious equality; (5) separation of church and state; and (6) [the] disestablishment of religion.

One must suppose, then, that much of the 300 years before his preferred 1940s Supreme Court religious cases, which he seems in a rather tortured fashion to have projected back onto American history, can be seen as a strange aberration from the true but until recently undiscovered liberal pattern of American church and state relations.

In short, both of these Christian scholars seem embarrassed by much of America’s authentic religious past. They write to provide a more “appropriate” portrait that can be used to guide the movements of the United States Supreme Court without their having openly to reject the legitimating but manipulated fiction of “original intent.” But the difficulty these books present arises not just because they are sophisticated polemics addressed to educated Americans and students of the Court, but because they do more than distort the past; that is, as I have shown, they also tell in an encapsulated fashion the true story of the intimate relation between church and state in American history. Thus, they undermine their own theses while at the same time they insulate themselves from ready criticism for entirely missing, as so many others have done, the real story of church and state relations in America.

In one sense they are right: the visions of those authors they have emphasized, from Madison onward, have come to fruition, and much of America, in a nation deeply divided on such issues, has moved in the direction they endorsed. But then, why didn’t Davis and Witte simply tell the story of the prescient and victorious few while admitting that most Americans, at least during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, disagreed with them and lived their lives and wrote their laws accordingly? Wouldn’t that have been more honest and simpler?

I surmise that Davis and Witte couldn’t do that because then they would undermine the democratic legitimacy of their outlook and compromise the hallowed status of being guided by “original intent,” while also providing ammunition to those who defend a more muscular Christian presence in America’s public life. Thus, in the end they had to write the histories they did—incoherent in one instance and skillfully selective in the other.

Lastly, each of these books, in ways I haven’t been able to discuss in any detail, fails to meet accepted intellectual standards. Their descriptions of the Enlightenment, Republicanism, Reform Protestantism, Pietism, and natural law are wholly derivative and dependent on selective editors and secondary scholarship, overly simplistic, and, often, inaccurate in a fashion that forced brevity can’t explain. Is it today too much to ask that busy scholars actually read those works they are going to discuss and write about with assumed authority? Is it too much to ask, with Davis in mind, that they make a concerted effort to ensure that their citations regularly match those of the texts from which they are drawn and that they don’t confuse documents? How curious, if the history of Christian America cannot be regularly trusted to the most highly regarded Christian Americans.

Barry Alan Shain is associate professor of political science at Colgate University. He is the author of The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton Univ. Press) and is currently working on a book tentatively titled Revolutionary America’s Declaration: The Nature of Rights at the Founding.

1. It should be noted that in addition to the period under discussion, Witte devotes nearly half of his book to an exploration of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century state and federal court decisions and jurisprudence as they relate to matters of church and state. Thus, this work, which is more a general survey than a focused monograph, has a much broader focus than can be captured in what follows.

2. Derek H. Davis is director of the J. M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Relations at Baylor University, which offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in church-state studies. In addition, he is the editor of the Journal of Church and State. According to colleagues who know Davis, he is well-regarded within the Southern Baptist Convention and is held in high esteem by the Baptist Joint Committee. The work under review appears in an Oxford University Press series, Religion in America, edited by Harry S. Stout of Yale University. John Witte, Jr., is the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law and Ethics and director of the Law and Religion Program at Emory University. Witte is the author of ten books and 90 professional articles, and has recently been named director of a new Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, which is jointly funded by a $3.2 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts and a $1.6 million grant from Emory University. Clearly, then, Davis and Witte are men of considerable standing.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:• Religion and the Continental Congress, by Derek H. Davis• Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, by John Witte, Jr.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture, by Dee E. Andrews, Princeton University Press, 2000, 367 pp.; $59.50

The title of Dee Andrews’s superb account of early American Methodism, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800, points to the central paradox of this religious history. The Methodists, reviled as Loyalists by the patriots in the mainstream of American evangelicalism in the 1760s and ’70s, only tenuously established themselves in the midst of a Revolution they largely opposed. Yet in the wake of the British defeat, Methodism thrived in the early Republic, and by 1800 was poised to become in the largest denomination in the United States. Indeed, as Andrews puts it, nineteenth-century Methodism virtually became “America’s church.” How a tiny group of British missionaries navigated the rising tides of American nationalism and turned an unpromising beginning into a triumphal success is the story of her book.

There are many interrelated elements to her fascinating explanation. Andrews, like earlier historians, places great emphasis upon the flexibility and discipline of Methodism’s unique organization. Methodism evolved from its origins as a movement within the Church of England. In enlisting itinerant and lay preachers free of the traditional duties and costs of parish priests, John Wesley drew from his experiences both as a missionary in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and as the leader of voluntary societies of clergy and laity in Britain.

Much of the tightly organized, top-down institutional structure of American Methodism was also owed to its English founder’s indefatigable labors and dictatorial style. Beneath Wesley’s overriding clerical authority were placed the leading American clergy, most notably Francis Asbury and Thomas co*ke, who in turn oversaw a growing number of settled local ministers and a cadre of licensed lay itinerants commissioned to ride circuits in areas without regular clergy. Beneath these hierarchical layers emanated a more informal network of unlicensed male and female preachers and of grassroots lay meetings, called classes, often held within private homes.

This Methodist system of organization was at once highly centralized and capable of infinite expansion, for it provided direction and order to its participants while remaining unencumbered by the need instantly to build churches and to recruit highly trained, official clergymen. The formation of Methodism within the interstices of the Church of England gave rise to a new evangelical method, one that proved ideally suited to the denominational competition and expansion of unchurched territory in post-revolutionary America.

Andrews convincingly argues that early Methodism also possessed special appeal to Americans because of its deviation from aspects of mainstream culture. She lays special stress on Methodist household piety and the religious roles of devout women as running against the grain of traditional ecclesiastical and patriarchal structures both. (The brothers John and Charles Wesley, it should be noted, grew up under the religious tutelage of their fervently evangelical mother, Susanna.)

Traveling missionaries commonly used the lay households in which they were invited guests as their theater of operation. The heroic exertions of the passionate, intensely ascetic, and generally young male circuit riders added greatly to their charismatic appeal, especially to those women who devoted themselves to their care. Women often led the men of their families into the faith, at times becoming recognized religious virtuosos, class leaders, and lay preachers themselves. Subtly loosening the strictures of male domination, early Methodism stimulated the participation of women on various levels, sometimes in direct defiance of their husbands. Its household-based piety, moreover, fostered an intimacy among members of both sexes and encouraged the sense that Methodist societies were alternative families.

Andrews shows that the attraction of Methodism in the late eighteenth century was also due to its relative openness to various forms of popular piety. The repeated forays of the British Methodist George Whitefield into the American colonies from the 1730s through the 1760s were part of the larger American revivalist movement known as the Great Awakening, which was especially strong among Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Revivalists of all these religious persuasions assumed newly emotional preaching styles, appeared before mass audiences, and stressed the primacy of heartfelt religious experience.

While Andrews rightly stresses the importance of its emotionalism, what was more distinctive to Methodism was the appeal of its doctrine and rituals. In its emphasis on conversion, Methodist theology had a simplicity and a populism that contrasted markedly with the Anglicanism and Calvinism which dominated early American religion. More important even than doctrine to the success of the movement, however, was the warmth and inclusiveness of its ritual practices, which were replete with sonorous hymn-singing, feasts, and spontaneous raptures of joy. Methodism also departed from other major American denominations by accepting the possibility of ecstatic possession by the Holy Spirit, relegated by cessationists to the apostolic era; from this stream the Holiness movement and Pentecostalism would flow.

On the surface, neither the success of Methodism’s organizational structure nor the appeal of its popular piety had anything to do with the American Revolution. But Andrews amply demonstrates that American Methodism became steeled in the heat of the rebellion against Britain. Always viewed as sectarian and subversive in the eyes of the antirevivalist Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy, now Methodism fell victim to a new and more widespread form of vilification. In 1775, upon the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, John Wesley emphatically proclaimed his loyalty to church and king. Regarded as traitors to the American cause, the small band of American Methodists gained new notoriety, and life under the patriots became increasingly dangerous. A few outspoken Methodist Loyalists were arrested, and others left or ceased their religious activities. In self-defense, those who continued to preach avoided political discourse and claimed neutrality.

American Methodism weathered the storm in large part by strengthening its internal organization while under external attack, drawing less upon the scarce and suspect British itinerants and more from young, American-born lay preachers. In the midst of the Revolution their leader opposed, these determinedly apolitical and energetic young Methodists led a series of successful revivals. The number of Americans in Methodist societies doubled between 1778 and 1783, growing to almost 12,000 by the end of the war.

A second indirect benefit of the American Revolution was the collapse of the Church of England. Despite the damage that the reputation of Methodism suffered from an association with Loyalism, its status as a missionary society that was institutionally separate from the British government spared it the worst wounds inflicted upon the English church. The vacuum created by ecclesiastical disestablishment in the southern and middle colonies gave Methodism, originally the offspring of the Church of England, more room to grow.

In the wake of the Revolution the Methodists detached themselves from their British past still further, taking creative measures to assert their American identity. In 1783, the aged John Wesley finally lost patience with the Church of England for refusing to allow him to ordain ministers, and he declared the creation of an autonomous Methodist church. By this time the Americans, having achieved de facto independence during the war under the leadership of Asbury and co*ke, were poised to follow suit by instituting a separate American Methodist church.

Dee Andrews’s slice of Methodist history, ending in 1800, is only able to anticipate the phenomenal growth of the denomination that occurred later on. Much of the period she covers appears atypical when compared to the main features of the movement in the nineteenth century. Despite the innovation of the circuit rider system, Methodism had yet to achieve its renown as the religion of the frontier. Although the Wesleys in the 1730s first ventured to Georgia, a new colony on the fringes of settlement, the movement only picked up steam in America in the 1760s and ’70s when it concentrated its efforts upon the more settled and urban colonies of the middle Atlantic.

Andrews persuasively argues that the unusual religious and ethnic diversity of this region, combined with the absence or weakness of established state churches, made the middle colonies particularly fertile ground for Methodism compared to colonies to the north or the south. This phase of its history was crucial, for it was only after the infusion of lay Methodist immigrants, many of them Irish, who settled in Baltimore and New York and recruited new followers, that the English Methodist bishopric committed a significant number of itinerants to America. Only later, after the institutional structure of the movement had been shaped, would the Methodist center of gravity shift from the mid-Atlantic to the south and the west.

The creation of the African Methodist Church in the 1790s illustrates the distinctiveness and importance of this early Methodist history as well. In the 1770s Methodist preachers began to criticize black slavery as ungodly, soon demanding that Methodist slaveholders manumit their slaves. Compelled by the force of this message, free blacks and slaves in the middle colonies comprised 20 percent of the Methodist membership by 1790. The population of free blacks in the mid-Atlantic cities rose rapidly toward the end of the century as a consequence of northern abolition and the upward migration of free blacks from the South. Black ministers like Richard Allen of Philadelphia rose to prominence among African American Methodists, who as their numbers increased had become segregated.

Racial frictions arose in the 1790s because white Methodist leaders refused to ordain black ministers. In Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Wilmington, black Methodists formed their own separate Methodist chapels, achieving a measure of autonomy, if not equality, within the movement. This racially ambivalent pattern of partial inclusion and segregation would persist within Methodism into the nineteenth century.

In her description of blacks, women, and lower-class workers in the movement, Dee Andrews judiciously steers between portraying the Methodists as liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian. Throughout her fine study she instead focuses on the astonishing variety of figures and groups who found a home in Methodism. Her story is laced with illustrative biographical vignettes of individual travails and triumphs, as well as studded with a wealth of statistics that document the growth and demographic breakdown of the denomination.

What comes across most strongly from Andrews’s prodigious research are the organizational talents of the Methodist leaders and the extraordinary devotion of the rank-and-file. The book appropriately ends with the Great Revival of 1800 and the election of Thomas Jefferson, events that together marked the beginning of Methodism’s expansion into the new American west and the next, and greatest, chapter in American Methodist history. Without the knowledge of the eighteenth- century history so well provided in Dee Andrews’s book, however, one would be at a loss to understand how Methodism so vigorously seized the opportunities that lay ahead.

Ruth H. Bloch is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge Univ. Press).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:• The Methodists and Revolutionary America, by Dee E. Andrews

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Religion in Colonial America, by Jon Butler, Oxford University Press, 2000, 160 pp.; $22

Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776, by Jon Butler, Harvard University Press, 2000, 320 pp.; $27.95

What “things” one can see on the Minnesota prairie that remain hidden from other mortals, Jon Butler doesn’t say, precisely. But the frontispiece quotation to his interpretive essay, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776, should be taken seriously: “You can see things on the Minnesota praire that you can’t see anywhere else.” Emblematic clues that require reflective interpreters surface in many world religions, and meditation on this inscription can reward the reader of Butler’s latest narratives, too.

In many respects, the unrestricted vistas of Butler’s home prairie offer an apt metaphor for the imagined religious landscape he contends characterized North America even before the emergence of the first modern nation. In his view, religious concerns may have helped to shape the borders and far horizons of American nationhood, but optimism grounded in a decidedly secular, material progressivism provided the real color and texture to the canvas. The implicit teleology in his argument—his real question is Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s “What then, is the American, this new man?”—will surprise students of the early modern world. Whatever else has characterized the evolution of early American studies since the 1940s, the hard struggle to interpret that history in its own terms—and not as mere prelude to the more important “national” story—surely has been of paramount importance. But Butler now seems to be retrieving aspects of that earlier view. In the end, he is really interested in the rational, progressive (and surprisingly areligious) society that he believes paved the way for 1776 and beyond.

Butler is not guilty of reconstructing a narrative of national political triumph. Indeed, he pays commendable attention to the literatures on African and Native American religions, arguing that multicultural and relativized truth claims characterized the “New World” from the very first years of trans-Atlantic and Pacific contacts. Butler explicitly rejects a large historiography dominated by the work of John Murrin and other historians who have argued for an “hourglass” vision of North American settlement. In that account, although early attempts at transplanting microversions of Europe or Britain failed, over the course of the eighteenth century, North America nonetheless became, in political, social, economic and religious life, more strikingly “European” or “British” than had been true in the previous century.

This approach made the American Revolution far more fascinating for being neither inevitable nor under anyone’s final control, especially in its later implications. Butler does not share this view. Neither is he much concerned with the rise of the market and consumerism, nor with the invention of a liberal politics from a quasi-deferential social and political past, the questions that have characterized, in different ways, T. H. Breen’s or Gordon Wood’s synthetic views of the early American story.

Butler’s fascination is reserved for “American society,” described as an essentially “modern” enterprise. Surprisingly, his chapter titles never conclude with “society” as such, but examine “peoples,” “economy,” “politics,” and “things material” before finally turning to “things spiritual,” appropriately almost an afterthought. The concerns that shape his narrative reflect the progressive idealism of his native Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party. He concludes that both Britain and the mainland colonies were “modern,” but America trumped the game by coming down solidly in favor of the “rights talk” of autonomous individuals, to use Mary Ann Glendon’s felicitous phrase.

Yet Butler is uncomfortable with claiming too much modernity and backtracks at the end of his book, admitting that “the modernity that had emerged in America between 1680 and 1770 influenced but did not determine the Revolution. Eighteenth-century America was far from wholly new.” What kept it old was the absence of individual autonomy for women and non-Europeans in general, coupled with the persistently dependent quality of the American economy, a colonial pattern that would not be transcended until the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The American Revolution for Butler was perhaps not inevitable, but almost so, because colonists committed to material comfort and expansion reacted sharply to the stupidity of British policymakers who wanted the colonies to shoulder their part of the imperial debt contracted in the Seven Years’ War. The protest against unjust taxation sprang from the “artisans, laborers, and farmers” and received added impetus from the crisis of western expansion and resultant conflicts with American Indian cultures. Not surprisingly, Butler feels that “religion’s role in shaping the Revolution is easily exaggerated.”

In sum, Butler provides classic progressive historiography. The Revolution, like eighteenth-century American society in general, he writes in Religion in Colonial America, “was a profoundly secular event,” and it’s a good thing too.

Religion in Colonial America is a volume in the Oxford series, Religion in American Life, which is aimed principally at a secondary school audience, though others will surely make use of it as well. (Butler and Harry Stout are coeditors of the series.) From this volume readers will learn how America became the liberal, multicultural icon of modernity. The illustrations are superb, but Butler’s commendably wide reading on both the varieties of Christianity and the religions of Africans and American Indians could have produced a more challenging conclusion for younger folks than touting the importance of “diversity” and the First Amendment’s tolerance of “differences.”

Many readers of Books & Culture may recognize Butler’s arguments, but for others a brief synopsis of his work and the changing face of the historiography of early American religion may prove helpful. Butler came to national notice in the 1970s through the publication of several provocative shorter essays, most notably one that denied the very existence of that much-interpreted eighteenth-century revival known as the Great Awakening, which purportedly transformed the American religious landscape into an “evangelical” topography. This revisionist essay preceded by a few years another in which he insisted that a largely illegitimate elite Christianity inherited from the “imposed” state church traditions of Europe dominated the Protestant experience in colonial British America.

These writings took account of Catholic scholarship in Europe that dramatized the “popular” versus “elite” schematization of European religious life. But Butler refrained from commenting on French or Spanish Catholicism in the New World, and only briefly alluded to African or American Indian religions. He devoted more attention to these issues in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), concluding that the truly transformative “evangelical” character of modern, Protestant America took shape in the “hothouse” of nineteenth-century revivalism.

More recently, Butler has conceded cautiously that pietism, revivalism, and a renewed apocalyptic tradition stemmed from the reinvigoration of Christianity in the eighteenth century. Yet this brief success of institutional Christianity in America, he believes, foundered because of the absence of “physical coercion to support the church, and equally important, persistent suppression of dissent.”[1] For Butler, the eighteenth century remains interesting as a field of conflict between the emerging “rational” claims of modernity versus an internalized, popular form of “real” spirituality that (in his view) repeatedly threatened to derange American social and political stability.

Those who have followed the trajectory of Butler’s work will find little that is new in the two books under review. Or, perhaps even worse, they will discover that Butler’s assessment of pre-1776 America looks here even more insubstantial than in his 1990 account. While Butler continues to argue for a suppressed but vital popular African religion, others have pointed to the remarkably rapid Christianization of enslaved peoples, all the more surprising given the indifference of many European Christians to the plight of Africans even when they begged for spiritual support and attention to the brutality of their circ*mstances. Butler’s fixation on a more “authentic” but forcibly suppressed, subterranean African religious tradition fits his generally negative view of “official” Christianity in any of its guises. Yet, the persistence of African rites surrounding healings, burial customs, and “magic” does not look all that different from what eighteenth-century European clergy often reported about some of their charges.

Butler’s revisionism has laudably forced the careless cheerleaders for “evangelical” or “Christian” America to explain why statistical measurements of church membership reveal a relatively low percentage of population in the eighteenth century, and why membership steadily climbed in the nineteenth and twentieth as direct government involvement or protection of specific religious traditions declined. Yet membership statistics are notoriously difficult to interpret, and interpretive nets must generally be cast wider in order accurately to assess the depth of popular commitment to any religious persuasion. If one acknowledges that in percentage terms the United States is still statistically “Christian”—even in the twenty-first century—the varieties of this faith deserve more specific attention than being subsumed as one among so many competing forms of American “spirituality.”

More important, Butler’s arguments reconfirm his progressive liberal endorsem*nt of Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” letter. The lesson Butler seems most intent on disseminating is his singular interpretation of the First Amendment: we were never better off than we are now, having rigorously decoupled private spirituality from political or social policy. Contemporary worries about a secular, pagan society are misplaced because that’s what colonial society itself always largely was.

It may be perverse to suggest a radical counterperspective, but an alternative vision, even in brief, may help to illuminate how much is at stake in the problematic nature of Butler’s argument. Suppose, therefore, he has it all wrong.

First, Butler’s interpretation of early America depends heavily on a picture of disorderly popular spirituality being held down, dominated, or controlled by elite traditionalist religions. But this picture inadequately reflects the most recent writings on early modern Atlantic societies and faith, including North America.

Although measuring the “genuineness” of faith commitments is always hazardous, the sheer numerical significance of Roman Catholicism in North America today, for example, surely cannot be explained away by references to “imposed” Christianity. A Christian body both numerous and since, the 1960s, including Native American, Hispanic, and African American clerics and hierarchs, fits oddly into Butler’s vision of a triumphant “modernity” having successfully cast off a repressive institutional faith. The eighteenth-century arrival of Russian Orthodox missionaries in Alaska did not produce the same numerical results, but indigenous response to this liturgically and doctrinally rigorous form of Christianity seems equally hard to square with his vision of how “modernity” and belief have intersected in North America.

The predominant historiography of early modern European Christianity has long utilized a shopworn paradigm of “official” religion and its coercive imposition upon a long-suffering populace. Though ancient in origin, this notion received renewed vigor from the Reformation, which endorsed a discontinuous view of history and adopted as its self-image a primitive, restorationist view of “true” Christianity. Dissenters from this tale, especially the British historian Eamon Duffy, have marshaled imposing counterevidence for pre-Reformation England, arguing that attention to liturgical and paraliturgical rituals reveals how much the conventional story, whether written by the Reformation’s apologists or their later rationalist critics, missed about the religious convictions of ordinary mortals.[2]

Some will object that both Orthodox and Roman versions of Christianity are exceptions to the Protestant norm that shaped Christianity’s trajectory in North America. But more recent scholarship suggests that many Protestant Europeans, even after the Reformation, continued to rely upon practices and rituals that Reformed theologians found noxious and did their best to eradicate. That this happened should surprise us no more than should the persistence of African or Native American rituals among Christianized members of those cultures.

Butler’s exhaustive reading acknowledges the real growth spurt enjoyed by the Church of England in the three-quarters of a century before the imperial crisis. Yet his interpretive scheme really cannot account for the popularity of traditional, ritualist forms of Protestant Christianity among Africans, American Indians, or Europeans. Both in rural New England, and in the colonies where the Church of England enjoyed some kind of weak establishment, its disabilities actually paralleled those of the established church in England itself in the eighteenth century: insufficient numbers of buildings and clerics to keep up with popular demand. Nor was this pattern confined to Anglophone communities. While German speakers encountered a different form of the Reformation than that which convulsed England, Scotland, Wales, and eventually, Ireland, attempts to eradicate Catholic lay piety foundered especially among conservative Lutheran villagers. Well into the eighteenth century, many versions of the Lutheran Mass would have been harder to distinguish from the Roman than from Reformed services, down to the presence of images, Latin texts, and paraliturgical lay pieties.[3]

If one turns to these continental settlers in North America, both the successful establishment of Reformed and Lutheran synodical structures by the mid-eighteenth-century and an extraordinary planting of hundreds of their congregations coupled to the impressive accomplishments of the Moravians among Europeans and the Delaware reflect more than a triumph of “heartfelt religion.” Rather, one can discern here the appeal of churches that successfully emphasized liturgy and ritual and thereby managed to appeal across cultural and “racial” lines. Among the Swedes, for example, the apparent early success of a Moravian minister who initially lured nearly half his Lutheran flock away depended upon his claim of Lutheran ordination. His appeal collapsed suddenly when he was confronted with a demand to produce the letters from Upsala and to explain why he increasingly departed from celebrating the Lutheran liturgy according to accepted, traditional forms.[4]

Moravians gave a very good impression that they were a church, a distinction they enjoyed when the British Parliament recognized them as such in 1748; they proudly denied that they were “dissenters.” It was exactly the public face of a noble church that made them so attractive, with clerics wearing gowns and bands, performing a solemn liturgy, introducing the most impressive instrumental and choral musical performances in eighteenth-century North America. They understood the dramaturgy of worship and that the church was expected to be able to present such a public face. That they, like their Roman and Orthodox counterparts, were capable of subsuming selective aspects of African or American Indian rituals and ceremonies into their theological structures is only now beginning to attract the attention of scholars.

Too often, historians of Christianity in early America have emphasized the importance of charismatic preaching or successful appeals to the heart. But the appeal to eye and ear better allows us to appreciate why the importation and reconstruction of an organ at Philadelphia’s St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in 1751 provoked a huge increase in attendance. Similarly, the emergence of trained choirs and the procession of Lutheran clerics at the regular meetings of that body’s synod confirmed in the popular mind that this was a real church. The renewal of these liturgical churches in the eighteenth century should not have occurred if “modernity” was omnipresent; here the evidence clearly contradicts Butler’s assessment of secularity and a “private” and internalized “spirituality.”

Second, Butler can be queried about the picture of African Americans and Native Americans simply suffering under the imposition of a “foreign” faith. No one denies that colonization and Christianization often marched hand in hand. But even among Protestant Moravians and Anglicans by the 1750s, and increasingly thereafter among Methodists and, later, Baptists, Native American, and African groups seized Christianity as their own religion. These people successfully interwove inherited cultural forms to doctrine in ways not all that dissimilar from the manner in which Europeans had integrated an ancient faith of Middle Eastern roots to their tribal ways.[5]

There are two indices, both quite ancient, that have marked the trajectory of Christian churches, both of which are deeply relevant to Butler’s views about early American society and Christianity. Both, I think, are relevant to the issues of Native American and African American religious belief and practice; both are missing from Butler’s vision.

The first of these markers is depth of religious commitment in the face of suffering and persecution. Thomas Jefferson believed that the tree of liberty should be watered every so often by the blood of revolution. In writing this, he merely reprised Tertullian’s observation, “the more often we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow. The blood of Christians is seed.” Seen in this light, the robust “orthodoxy” of American Indian and African American Christians who have perished repeatedly, and unjustly, in the Americas may be one of the most vital indicators of whether “true Christianity” was planted long ago in North America, and worked upon the social conscience of “modern” society.

The second marker is charity. Early pagan reports to the Roman authorities identified Christians as peculiarly inclined to harbor orphans, and widows, and to engage in acts of charity on behalf of the poor. It was this quality, as one report noted, that suggested that “something divine” attached itself to these people.

Butler’s account of religion in American society misses entirely the roots of this marker of religious behavior. Statistically, North Americans, beginning in the colonial era, created a tradition of charitable, private benevolence unmatched anywhere in the world. The best studies of philanthropic giving now suggest that giving as a percentage of disposable income has fallen steadily in the past generation, marking the decay of mainline Christian denominations. Those most willing to tithe and to give of their substance are found today as they long have been, among the poorer Christian groups. The percentage of Roman Catholics in the U.S. population, for example, remains more or less stable only because of the influx of devout but poorer Hispanic immigrants whose giving patterns on behalf of coreligionists do not seem to be departing very much from the pattern earlier immigrant groups exhibited.

Indeed, Butler’s vision of the long secular and “modern” past cannot really account for the continued impact of religious belief upon contemporary American society. In a “modern” society where non-Christian groups may account for no more than 6 or 7 percent of the population willing to identify themselves with some religious ideology, America remains in some vaguely “spiritual” fashion identifiably “Christian.” And rather than diluting the influence of religious commitment, continued high levels of immigration will produce more populations attached to “traditional” religions—especially Roman and Orthodox Christ- ianity and Islam—replete with ritual liturgies capable of subordinating individual quests for spiritual life to conservative values of family and religious community.[6]

Butler, of course, is not entirely unaware of this. He worries about what might happen to secular pluralism if too much religion—especially a revitalized evangelical Protestant or Catholic Christianity—insisted on having a say in shaping modern society instead of remaining safely quietistic and therefore socially and politically irrelevant.

But why should Butler worry? After all, if his historical analysis is right, the progressive liberals can reasonably relax. If the roots of Christianity in North America were already so shallow in “modern” society before 1776, a secular future seems assured. Evangelicals tend to worry that the Yale historian is right; secular progressives are afraid at times, as Butler himself seems to be, that he might be wrong.

Both the future course of “religion”and the quality of Christianity in North America remain deeply controversial topics. Historians agree neither about the nature of society nor about the quality and nature of religious belief during the past 300 years. Both for those who fear that secular diversity and tolerance are under assault, and for those who fear that “traditional” Christianity has no future, one might borrow a final piece of folk wisdom from Jon Butler’s prairie home: don’t bet the farm.

A.G. Roeber is head and professor of early modern history and religious studies at Penn State University, where he is also co-director of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute. He is the author of Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press), which received the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association.

1. See Roeber, “The Problem of the Eighteenth Century in Transatlantic Religious History,” pp. 115-138, for a more extensive review of Butler’s historiographic lineage; the citation here is to Butler, “The Spiritual Importance of the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 101-114 at 110; both in Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson, eds., In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America (Penn State Univ. Press, 2000).

2. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale Univ. Press, 1992), p. 2: “the liturgy was in fact the principal reservoir from which the religious paradigms and beliefs of the people were drawn.” See especially his chapter 8 on “Charms, Pardons, and Promises: Lay Piety and ‘Superstition’ in the Primers,” pp. 266-298. For Orthodoxy in America, see for example Sergei Kan, “Recording Native Cultures and Christianizing the Natives: Russian Orthodox Missionaries in South-Eastern Alaska,” in Richard P. Pierce, ed., Russia in North America (Limestone Press, Kingston, Ontario, 1990), pp. 298-313.

3. For a review of the literature and issues, see Roeber, “Official and Nonofficial Piety and Ritual in Early Lutheranism,” Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol. 63 (April 1999), pp. 119-143.

4. On the Swedish incident, see John Fea, “Ethnicity and Congregational Life in the Eighteenth-Century Delaware Valley: The Swedish Lutherans of New Jersey,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic History (forthcoming). See also Evan Haefeli, “The Origins of American Religious Freedom: Reformation Politics in the Middle Colonies, 1628-1720,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000.

5. See for example Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998).

6. Butler could well retort that the traditional, ritualist religious groups now arriving in North America will prove incapable of resisting the corrosive effects of a modern society driven by mass consumption, not religious conviction.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:• Religion in Colonial America, by Jon Butler• Becoming America, by Jon Butler

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in 18th-Century Connecticut, by Christopher Grasso, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, 524 pp.; $24.95, paper

Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England, by Jane Kamensky, Oxford University Press, 1997, 291 pp.; $19.95, paper

These two studies of power and speech in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England are models of the best kind of historiography. They carefully attempt to reconstruct the social and intellectual worlds of early New Englanders, while at the same time using the critical tools of their trade to understand early American religion and society in new ways. For example, while many historians have told the story of the Salem witch trials, Jane Kamensky’s fascinating retelling argues that the Salem trials—which resulted in the execution of 19 (probably) innocent men and women—marked the first and last time in early New England’s history that magistrates did not suppress the accusations of young women against their elders. The irony is brutal. These were not the good old days.

But neither do these books demonstrate unequivocally the superiority of our own political culture, which conspicuously lacked the institutional resources to express or expiate a national sense of shame during our recent presidential impeachment crisis. Perhaps we could have learned something from seventeenth-century Massachusetts Puritans, who demanded compulsory public apologies to restore respect for those offended by wrongful public speech. Offenders were warned not to make their retractions too short or too general; even if their intentions were not sincere, “expressed shame was public shame.”

While early New England may have had better mechanisms for dealing with some kinds of public wrongs, these books vividly illustrate why most of us would not want to have inhabited that world. Its rigid social hierarchy left very little room for Americans other than educated white males to speak or write in formal public settings. As Kamensky puts it, Puritan women were expected to be content “speaking to God [but] silent before men.”

Hence Boston’s Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Bay Colony because of her “breach of gender roles.” To be sure, that was not her only offense. She had publicly criticized her minister’s sermons, and claimed that God spoke specific words to her heart—an experience of God that many Puritans believed to have ceased with the death of the apostles. But Kamensky suggests that what most deeply rankled the Massachusetts ministers who were her judges was Hutchinson’s presumption that she could teach men and engage in theological debate like a man. Boston theologian John Cotton reminded her that her speaking gifts were to be used solely “to instruct [her] Children and Servants and to be helpful to her husband in the Government of the family.” Salem minister Hugh Peter said Hutchinson’s problem was that she would “have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a Preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.”

Christopher Grasso focuses not on gender but on social class, and limits his study to eighteenth-century Connecticut, showing how elites dominated public speech and writing. In the first half of the century, clergy dominated public discourse primarily through sermons, while in the second half newspapers, essays, and poetry written by lawyers, journalists, and satirists competed with ministers’ speech and writing. Before mid-century, Grasso argues, the “speaking aristocracy” of clergymen spoke to the people, but after mid-century there emerged a “civic conversation” of the people. Nevertheless, political and religious dissenters complained that public speech was still controlled by a few elites.

This was an age that talked incessantly about the need for character among public servants and complained bitterly that most leaders were miserably deficient. (Sound familiar?) According to many orators and writers, this sad state of affairs could be explained by the fact that most politicians were lawyers, whose profession was notorious for self-interest, faction, and skillful deception. As one wag put it, “Their cunning and intrigue is become a bye-word, and their want of honesty an’t much better.”

The character of students at Yale College, who went on to become Connecticut’s leading speakers and writers, did not favorably impress their president, Thomas Clap, whose story may resonate with beleaguered adminstrators today. During the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, after a decade of rising campus hooliganism, Yale students set off bombs in the college yard, poisoned food in the commons, and sent a note to Clap threatening to “skin [his] hide.” Then they attacked his house, broke some windows (slightly injuring the president), and terrorized their professors. Clap resigned the following year. Connecticut’s ministers, said satirist John Trumbull, anticipating H.L. Mencken, were better behaved than the riotous students but intellectually uninspired. The pulpits were filled by “dunces who dozed through four years of college and by barely literate blunderers who were licensed to preach by their brethren as long as they could recite the Calvinist creed. The few clerics with some brains scrambled them with metaphysical speculation and plunged the colony into violent controversies.”

And yet this was also an age of intellectual athletes. Trumbull himself, for example, by his fourth year had read through the Bible, memorized Isaac Watts’s lyrics, and begun writing his own verse. He passed Yale’s entrance exams at age seven, read Milton at eight, and was steeped in Homer, Horace, and Cicero by the time he was thirteen. Timothy Dwight, who was Yale’s president from 1795 to 1813, studied Latin grammar during breaks in his regular lessons when he was six and had read through his father’s library by the age of ten. After starting Yale at the traditional age of thirteen, Dwight studied fourteen hours a day after four hours of sleep, beginning each morning with one hundred lines of Homer. He practiced penmanship during lunch, ate only twelve mouthfuls of vegetables at dinner, and studied by candlelight into the night. This regimen nearly killed him and permanently damaged his eyesight.

Grasso’s massively researched, engagingly written book also makes some important comments on several longstanding debates among scholars of early American religion. The first concerns what is called the “national covenant,” the idea that God calls whole societies (in this case, New England) for special purposes, and rewards or punishes them accordingly in this world. While some scholars have argued that by the time of the American Revolution the idea had largely lost currency, Grasso shows that although ministers less frequently preached that God made covenants with nations (the emphasis hvaing shifted to covenants with a nation’s churches), nevertheless they still taught that a whole people could bear corporate guilt and be punished in this world.

At the same time, however, Grasso finds evidence that the self-conception of America as a “redeemer nation” was not as widespread among New England Christians as many scholars have believed. On another contentious topic, Grasso argues that the Great Awakening, while not the single source of the American Revolution or American democracy or even American evangelicalism, was nevertheless a “contingent,” surprising event that cannot be explained merely by reference to Old World religious patterns, as some revisionist historians have suggested.

Together these books raise many questions about the relationship betwen authority and speech and the ways in which Christians have interpreted Scripture through the often distorting lenses of inherited cultural assumptions. Pondering these questions, we may be able also to think a bit more clearly about the present, not forgetting the possibly distorting effect of our own assumptions. Kamensky suggests, for example, that while early Americans clearly overreacted to wrongful speech, they were right to recognize that “words can kill.” She cites approvingly the slogan from a Planned Parenthood ad, “Words are like bullets—they can be used to kill,” and hints that hate-crime legislation should be seriously considered. She does not point out Planned Parenthood’s studied avoidance of the word “baby” when referring to late-term fetuses, surely a potent example of the way words can be artfully arranged to justify killing. More surprising, she does not discuss the likelihood of hate-crime or hate-speech legislation being used to muzzle dissent—a clear and present danger, it would seem, given the evidence marshalled in her own book.

But if lessons from the past are not easily interpreted or applied, they are ignored only at our peril. We too readily assume, for example, that we could never turn on our neighbors as professing Christians did in Rwanda and Kosovo. We may never be so vulnerable as when we thank God that we are “not like other people” (Luke 18:22).

Gerald McDermott teaches religion at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is the author most recently of Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (Oxford Univ. Press), and Can Evangelicals Learn from the Buddha? Jesus, Revelation, and the Religions (InterVarsity).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:• A Speaking Aristocracy, by Christopher Grasso• Governing the Tongue, by Jane Kamensky

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, by Harry V. Jaffa, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 750 pp.; $35

On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, by John Patrick Diggins, Yale University Press, 2000, 330 pp.; $27.95

Most serious historians will insist that Abraham Lincoln was, on a wide variety of measures, America’s greatest president. He was. The reason is not that he ended slavery, but that he roused the nation to fight for it to end. The “great civil war” of the Gettysburg Address remains, to this day, the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought. Hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed so that the Union might remain together and slavery might end. The exhaustion of that effort afflicted the nation for another century after the war ended, and some aches and pains are with us still.

Lincoln also remains a subject of mystery and controversy. Historians, both professional and amateur, battle over every aspect of the man. Was he for slavery or against it? Did he press for war or was war pressed upon him? Was he a schemer, a villain, an incompetent? Or a visionary, a hero, a genius? Back and forth rages the argument. In a curious way, our continued fascination with the man is a mark of his greatness: nobody (except John Updike, in a memorable play) writes about Lincoln’s immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, under whose administration the Union began to dissolve.

A hot subject of historical debate has been the precise array of forces and personalities that led to the outbreak of the war—and, in particular, the role of the sixteenth president, not in the war’s prosecution, but in its beginning. The historian Harry V. Jaffa of Claremont McKenna College has jumped into this fray with his recent volume, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, an earnest and persuasive effort to debunk recent revisionist history that has attacked Lincoln for purportedly not wanting to end slavery, not wanting to end the war, and not understanding the implications of his own rhetoric. Jaffa offers a serious exploration of both Lincoln’s ideology and his spirituality, placing his words and actions against the moral and religious context of their time. The result is an admiring portrait of a fascinating man.

In recent decades, a variety of critics have offered us a Lincoln who is vague, passive, even pusillanimous, more shaped by the tumultuous events of his era than a shaper of them. Jaffa’s Lincoln is a man of intelligence and competence, whose views evolve, but who knows quite early what it is that must be done, then sets about doing it with the tools at hand. When persuasion will work, he uses persuasion. When politics will work, he uses politics. When only force will suffice, he uses force. It would not be right, perhaps, to say that Lincoln thought he was on a divine crusade; but, certainly, he believed that God was on his side.

Jaffa is, without question, a Lincoln booster. Lincoln, he tells us at the very end of the book, “was the truest heir of [George] Washington, because of both the clarity of his understanding and the strength of his character.” Lincoln’s revisionist critics, he declares, have engaged in “shallow and permissive historicism and relativism.” Jaffa’s book is, among other things, an answer to the anti-Lincoln wave. So let us see how he responds to some of the criticisms.

In the mysterious yet predictable manner of such things, Lincoln’s recent critics have focused on what most historians mark as his greatest achievement: the beginning of the end of slavery. Lincoln, we have lately been told, was a racist, a defender of the status quo who did not really want to end slavery, and who issued his Emancipation Proclamation in a cynical grab for political advantage, in order to win abolitionist votes without actually freeing any slaves.

Jaffa disagrees. He devotes a considerable chunk of his book to demonstrating both the growth and the sincerity of Lincoln’s opposition to slavery. Answering, for example, the claim that Lincoln cared about slavery only for the political advantage it might yield, Jaffa offers a bit of realpolitik:

Are we to say that Lincoln’s reasons for thinking slavery morally wrong are to be discounted because he presented them in political campaigns? … There is reason to believe that Lincoln wrestled long and hard in private with the question of the morality of slavery, as he had with the question of free will and predestination. Having come to a conclusion, however, he could not let the matter rest there. Moral arguments point to moral obligations. Lincoln could advance the antislavery cause only by gaining political advantage for the antislavery argument.

Moreover, as Jaffa points out, Lincoln opposed slavery in public even when taking that position was risky. After all, although it is easy to forget the fact, he lost the Senate seat he contested with Stephen Douglas.

Then there is the matter of the Emancipation Proclamation, once considered among the great political documents of history. Jaffa is unpersuaded by revisionist scholarship insisting that it was a cynical document of little actual effect:

The Emancipation Proclamation progressively deprived the Confederacy of a vast reservoir of slave labor, which had enabled many more Southern whites to serve in the Confederate ranks than would otherwise have been possible. It also added great numbers of emancipated slaves to the ranks of the Union armies, as well as giving them the greatest of all incentives to fight. Notwithstanding the Proclamation’s exceptions and exemptions, which proved temporary, it destroyed the viability of the institution of chattel slavery in the whole Union.

What about the charge that the Proclamation, because justified on the ground of “military necessity,” should not be taken seriously as an assertion of moral authority? Writes Jaffa:

In issuing the Proclamation, Lincoln acted from military necessity. In the Gettysburg address, Lincoln called upon the nation to ratify what had been done, not simply because it was necessary, but because it was good.

This argument does not quite refute the central charge of Lincoln’s critics, who believe that he did as little toward freeing the slaves as he could, but Jaffa may well be right that they are reading his words too literally, not understanding the subtle mind at work beneath it all. Perhaps by doing as much (not as little) as he thought he could, and by justifying his actions not merely as a military necessity but also as fealty due a higher principle, he sought to inspire his countrymen to do what was right once the terrible war ended. Or maybe, as Lincoln’s critics insist, it was all cynical.

But this seems unlikely. Jaffa is meticulous in distinguishing two aspects of Lincoln’s thought on slavery that many of the sixteenth president’s contemporary critics tend to conflate. It is true, says Jaffa, that candidate Lincoln consistently denied any intention of using federal power to end slavery (other than by restricting its expansion). But this was the only possible response to the campaign by Democrats (including Lincoln’s predecessor, the pro-slavery Buchanan) who tried to defeat the Republicans by smearing them with responsibility for John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Besides, argues Jaffa, we must look at Lincoln through southern eyes. And there we see the other Lincoln, the one who insisted, for most of his political career, that slavery, sooner or later, was bound to end. Indeed, Lincoln, according to Jaffa, always desired “to place slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.” This was the Lincoln the southerners saw when they looked, even if many modern interpreters overlook him; and if this was not the real Lincoln, then the southern states were not so much racist as stupid, for they rushed to begin their secession from the Union immediately upon his election, not waiting to see whether his policies on slavery would be as unthreatening as Lincoln’s most strident critics nowadays contend. In short, it is difficult to understand, if Lincoln really was no abolitionist, what the southern states imagined they were seceding from.

Jaffa also has something to say to those who think Lincoln conceded too much to the South in his campaign for the presidency or in his first inaugural address. In particular, he places Lincoln’s explicit endorsem*nt of the fugitive slave clause in a striking intellectual context. Jaffa concedes what others have noted, that Lincoln thought the clause good for the slaves.

But this does not, says Jaffa, have anything to do with supporting or opposing slavery. Lincoln thought slaves better off under the clause because the clause was a mark of a strong central government: the Constitution would never have been ratified without it. The slave states insisted on the clause, so Lincoln believed, precisely because they feared the new federal government would be strong enough to prevent the return of slaves. Only a government of sufficient might to generate those fears would also possess sufficient might to prevent the spread of slavery into the territories. The existence of the clause was, for Lincoln, proof that the power to limit slavery existed. That was the reason the slaves were better off with the clause than without it.

And what about Lincoln’s spirituality? It has become almost a commonplace of writing about the sixteenth President to assert that he was at best a deist, and more likely an atheist. Jaffa, although cautious on this matter, seems inclined to disagree. I have already mentioned Jaffa’s assertion that Lincoln contemplated so crucial a Christian question as the interplay of predestination and free will. Although Lincoln, notoriously, belonged to no church, he often mentioned God in his speeches and writings, and frequently referred to “the Savior.” But he never, as far as anyone has been able to uncover, mentioned Jesus Christ by name.

Still, Jaffa gathers enough examples to persuade us that Lincoln must have been either a religious man or a clever dissembler. To take one of many examples, Jaffa quotes Lincoln’s farewell speech in Springfield as he departed to assume the office of president: “Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you and be every where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.” Hardly the language of deism.

Jaffa also sees Lincoln, in an important way, as the founder of one version of what we have come to call the civil religion:

It is undoubtedly true that Lincoln has become the greatest interpreter of America’s religious destiny in part because of his distance from any sectarian religious identification. Every church or synagogue can think of him as one of their own, because he scarcely ever spoke a word inconsistent with such an assumption. By belonging to none, he belonged to all.

For Lincoln, the civil religion—the public, quasi-official religion of the nation—was “a perfectly nonsectarian Christianity” which he often invoked, during the 1850s, in his repeated references to the Declaration. In Lincoln’s rhetoric, the Founders became “apostles of the justice of the Creator to his creatures.” The Declaration, for Lincoln, restated the Golden Rule. The nation that forgot the Declaration and insisted on the Constitution was turning its back, not only on the Founders, but on the Creator. Lincoln, says Jaffa, always insisted on reading the documents together.

Jaffa offers the example of Jefferson Davis’s theology to show us what, in Lincoln’s view, slaveholding Christians got wrong. Davis argued that God “stamped diversity on the races of men,” either at the time of the Creation or after the Flood. Lincoln answered Davis, not with the Bible, but with the Declaration’s firm statement that “all men are created equal.” The civil religion supposes that it is possible to have public theological disputes that are not sectarian in nature, and that was what Lincoln attempted. The principles of charity and neighbor-love that permeated his speeches, treated by Lincoln as divine commands, would nowadays be of equal appeal to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

Still, it is important to recall the source of those divine commands: they were, for Lincoln, immanent in the Declaration of Independence, and, thus, reflective of the ideals of the Founding generation, ideals not only political but religious. Lincoln did not trust what we might nowadays describe as “legalism”: if one relied on the words of the Constitution alone, the pro-slavery side had at least as good a claim to truth as did the abolitionists—probably better. In an argument over right and wrong, Lincoln thought resort to first principles more productive than reliance on the words of a legal text.

Jaffa reminds us that Lincoln emerged as a political figure in the midst of the era of optimism—whose prophets he interestingly identifies as Hegel, Marx, and John C. Calhoun—a time when the progressive view of history was in vogue, the notion that humanity continues to advance morally, without regard to the actual intentions of the rational actors of any particular moment. Lincoln, however, was inclined to the view that humans must use their reason to decide the direction in which to advance. To Lincoln, the view of progress as inevitable was naive, and could lead to long tenure for great injustice.

Through it all, Jaffa insists that we view Lincoln through the eyes of his era rather than our own. Lincoln’s morality, says Jaffa, was “governed by prudence,” a notion “largely beyond the ken” of his contemporary critics. Like Lincoln himself, Jaffa plainly believes in prudence, moderation, and caution, and perhaps we should, too—not because there are no great moral absolutes, but because moral crusades not governed by moderation lead to excess and destruction.

The striking irony, of course, is that Lincoln, nowadays often condemned for his moderation, sacrificed more Americans for his vision of justice than any leader before or since. Possibly the critics are right, and the Civil War dead were slain for a pack of cynical lies: if so, they believed the glorious lies, and died for their truth.

Another very thoughtful addition to the Lincoln collection is On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History, by historian John Patrick Diggins of the City University of New York. To Diggins, Lincoln the grade-school dropout “became the most profound president in American history … a philosopher-president who felt deeply that modern humankind is tragically condemned to live in a universe of power and sin.” No optimist, in other words, but a thoughtful, politically astute pessimist who believed in the necessity of the assertion of power—government power—to set matters aright.

The Lincoln of Diggins’s tale understood what most of his countrymen did not: that the Civil War was not just about slavery but about history, “a struggle over a foundational consensus that was once regarded as ‘self-evident.'” In that struggle, the nation settled not only the issue of slavery but also the issue of philosophy. America had to decide not so much what it stood for but rather the direction in which it would look to discover what it stood for. The early nineteenth century, Diggins believes, was an era that showed all the weaknesses of a nation that looks only forward; it took Lincoln to remind the people that greatness and mission could also be discovered by remembering the foundational past.

So Diggins invites us to follow Lincoln’s intellectual journey, tracing both the sources and the evolution of the sixteenth president’s ideas on justice. In the course of the journey, Diggins picks up on a theme sounded some years ago by Garry Wills (and mentioned by Jaffa), reminding us that Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, inverted the American rhetorical tradition that prevailed in his day by exalting the Declaration of Independence over the Constitution. Lincoln’s particular contribution was to suggest that the rights which we possess have a source beyond the government itself (as the Constitution implies), that they are inalienable and self-evident, and that they are the endowment of the Creator. If they are natural in this strong sense, then no government can take them away, no matter what its founding documents imply. Consequently, if slavery is a violation of natural law, a Constitution purporting to allow it is also a violation of natural law.

This much of Lincoln’s thought is well known (although some Lincoln critics deny that he thought so deeply). But Diggins adds another level. He argues that what Lincoln really did was to establish in American thought the notion that we owe a degree of fealty, perhaps even allegiance, to the dreams of the Founders. Lincoln’s identification of the Declaration rather than the Constitution as the summary of those dreams was perhaps a useful trope. The important point is that Lincoln brushed aside the brisk moral confidence of the new nation, which thought it could remake itself, in true Jeffersonian fashion, each time a new generation took over. Lincoln dragged the nation forward by turning its attention backward: greatness, it turned out, was to be found in realizing the Founders’ hopes.

There are hints, in Lincoln’s rhetoric, of an awareness of the peculiar forms of sharp political debate in America. In his famous Cooper Union speech, Lincoln told his audience what he thought it would take to reassure the worried South. “This and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. … The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.” What Lincoln said then of supporters of slavery might today be said about supporters of abortion: that in the rhetoric of the pro-choice side, there does often seem to lurk a notion that the correct solution is not only for abortion to remain a right, but for critics to shut up. The debate itself must end for justice to be done.

But ending debate on a contentious moral issues when the nation is split down the middle (or, in the abortion case, often leans to the other side) is no way to run a democracy, and people who want debate to end have no business calling themselves liberal. The liberalism of Lincoln understood the virtue of keeping an issue alive in the face of public opposition, even if one must be politic and circumloquacious in how one does so.

Lincoln’s liberalism has another, deeper lesson, one that today’s conservatives would do well to keep in mind. The “dual sovereignty” that the Constitution of the United States unquestionably created was nevertheless a hierarchy: the state sovereigns and the federal sovereigns were not on the same level. Each had its own sphere—but the federal sphere was the stronger. To argue otherwise was ultimately to justify the “pernicious abstraction” of secession. The way that many contemporary politicians and commentators trumpet the virtues of “states’ rights” as an antidote to “big government” is more reckless than conservative.

Perhaps most important, Lincoln understood that America itself is a special place, marked by a unique understanding of the world, and an unusual vision—some would say a divine vision—of its place in that world. In the contemporary academy, it is somewhere between unfashionable and disreputable to point to the nation’s historical self-understanding as the source of, say, the rights we deem fundamental. One does not, in serious scholarship, suggest that America is unique at all, unless one means to suggest that it is uniquely bad.

But John Patrick Diggins, like Lincoln himself, betrays an affection for what is often dismissed as Americanism—not a nationalist commitment to winning, but an understanding that we are embedded in a historical and cultural narrative that might actually have something to recommend it. America has made great mistakes, but it has also fostered, and often fought for, great ideals. When we forget the possibility of America’s greatness, we miss out on a good deal of history, philosophy, even theology that has important lessons to teach us.

If this is so, then all cultures cannot be equally valuable—not in philosophical or political terms. Diggins is firm on this point. Although sympathetic to the ideal of multiculturalism, he is also grimly aware of its central paradox: “Those who seek to teach an indiscriminate openness to all of history risk misleading students into thinking that one can have the best of both worlds: a culture of lineage and a politics of liberty.”

To celebrate equality and liberty is to make a universalist claim for values that lie near the heart of the Western experience; to celebrate cultures that deny equality and liberty is at war with the claim itself. There lies the puzzle. How is the multiculturalist to treat a traditional culture that sharply disputes Western visions of, say, the role of women or the proper expression of human sexuality?

Actually, the evidence we have suggests that many multiculturalists resolve this paradox by retreating to cultural imperialism. It turns out that we should “celebrate” only the aspects of other cultures that we already happen to like. Those that we do not, we should condemn for their dangerous primitivism and try to change. One sees this, to take a prominent example, in the attitude of the Episcopal bishops of the United States toward their brethren in Africa, Asia, and South America, who, as they dissent from the changing sexual mores of the Western provinces of the Anglican Communion, are seen as not only dangerously wrong but worthy of condemnation. At least on matters of human sexuality, cultures different from our own, it seems, are valued only insofar as they value what we value. Multiculturalism ends where sex begins.

Multiculturalism is not the only place where Diggins faults liberals for their loss of focus on Lincoln. Diggins locates a rejection of Lincoln’s ideas in a place few of us would think to look: consumerism. Diggins, remember, believes that it was Lincoln who turned the nation’s attention back to the Founding generation, and thus to God, and thus to the need for sacrifice, at a time when Americans were coming to see themselves and their values as self-created. A created human possesses obligations different from those that a self-invented human might have. Consumerism, says Diggins, is a fresh repudiation of the Founders, and thus of Lincoln as well:

Consumption marks the end of the primacy of politics and the beginning of the domination of economics, the end of values as something that can be stabilized and preserved and the beginning of change as the only thing that matters, the end of looking back to the founding of the Republic to gain inspiration from its original principles and the beginning of looking forward to a life where circ*mstances prevail over any sense of principle based on historical ideals.

Diggins sees contemporary liberalism as obsessed with freeing life from a “sense of principle based on historical ideals”; the very idea that history and tradition matter, says Diggins, is anathema to modern liberalism. This, he believes, is liberalism’s loss. The Left of a generation ago, he contends, understood America better.

Analyzing such documents as the Port Huron Statement, Diggins concludes that the Left of the 1960s was far more pro-American than the academic Left of the present day. The 1960s Left believed in a set of American ideals that had been lost through an overemphasis on individualism and production, and an underemphasis on community and value. They argued, often, for bringing the nation back to what they saw as its more pure roots; they combed the great documents, from the Declaration to the Constitution to Lincoln’s speeches, for evidence that earlier generations were committed to the “egalitarian ideals” of the era. They were, we might say, Kennedyesque: they wanted to make America the great, free, and equal nation it was supposed to be, and then to export that greatness to the world.

The Left of today lacks both the confidence and the patriotism of the Left of that earlier age. Lincoln’s heirs, says Diggins on the final page of his book, are those “who believe in the gospel of work and try to live for conviction as well as comfort.” Although he does not quite say so, he seems to believe that today’s liberals (to say nothing of today’s conservatives) find conviction an inconvenience, for they too often love their own power and—yes—comfort more than they live the ideas they profess.

Multiculturalism again provides Diggins with fodder when he turns to contemporary critics who have understandably assailed Lincoln’s embrace of the egregious notion, a very common one in the Civil War era, that the slaves, once freed, should return to Africa. Lincoln mentioned this idea often, but he seems to have abandoned it, except as a distant plaything, after he presented it to a group of free black men at the White House and experienced their incredulity. Diggins applauds the free blacks for their rejection of the proposal: “In this instance they, and not Lincoln, understood the meaning of American exceptionalism.”

The point Lincoln missed—and which Diggins wants us to see—is that there was in America then and is in America now a remarkable promise, unfulfilled, to be sure, but immanent, hidden but ready to spring forth, the promise of the Founding era, the promise of a nation that believes itself blessed by God and is therefore willing to act as a blessed nation should. The free blacks who rejected colonization saw in America’s great promise the future they preferred.

Diggins then uses the episode to critique the identity politics of our own era. The black people of Lincoln’s day, he implies, understood the promise of America better than those who today suggest that black youth “should study Africa as vital to knowledge of their heritage.” Otherwise, why should the slaves not have been thrilled at Lincoln’s offer? Diggins denies the equality of cultures, especially in their political ideas, and he thinks the West has right what many traditional societies have wrong:

“[F]reedom is a distinct phenomenon born not in cultural transmission but in political conflict and struggle, and human rights do not grow on trees, nor do equality, tolerance, and democratic self-government drop from the sky.”

His larger point is well taken: not every society has equal regard for the rights and values that have dominated American political thought since Lincoln’s day. There are good reasons, then and now, to prefer living here.

Yet there is more to Africa than what Diggins concedes to it—art and music, he seems to think, are the main reasons to study it. Actually its rich history, with all its violence and contradiction, holds great lessons. One is that skin color has not been, historically, a mark of commonality. In Africa, as all over the globe, bitter wars have raged and continue to rage among groups that, to racially minded Americans, look just the same, even though history, ethnicity, religion, and culture may separate them quite sharply. As Diggins reminds us earlier in the book: “Using history for the purpose of identity is, as Friedrich Nietzsche warned, fraught with unsuspected paradoxes.” The act of citing history may disprove what we are trying to prove. The enormous paradox of Afrocentrism is that there was no Africa until Europe invented it. For black Americans to look to Africa in order to understand blackness is to allow the Eurocentric invention of race-as-color to prevail over both history and common sense.

Diggins also overlooks the rich spiritual gifts of the African continent—a deep sense among so many people that they live very close to the divine. One reason that Pope John Paul II has targeted Africa for special works of evangelism, as have many Protestant groups, is precisely the sense that its people overwhelmingly reject the exclusively naturalistic and materialistic vision of reality that has so destructively taken hold in the West.

Here, then, is Lincoln’s ultimate lesson to us: if all we believe in is what we see and what we build, we lack a firm foundation on which to rest arguments over right and wrong. Today’s secular theorists would argue against slavery on the ground that it deprives the enslaved individuals of their rights, or, possibly, that it constitutes an inefficient use of human capital. Lincoln, like the abolitionist movement whose leader he finally became, was more fortunate. He was not the prisoner of a dry secularism that drains moral argument of its passion. He was, as Diggins paints him, the chief interpreter of an American spiritual tradition that is dismissed today, as it was when Lincoln came along in the middle of the nineteenth century, as outmoded and even reactionary.

Abraham Lincoln demanded more of the nation than the self-seeking that is the predictable result of an ideology of self-creation. By elevating the spirit of the Declaration of Independence above the legalism of the Constitution, he managed what few other American leaders have: he persuaded people to sacrifice for others when they had little to gain for themselves. Today’s politicians, who measure success by opinion polls and win their popularity by feeding voters from the public trough, would do well to heed Lincoln’s example. But they won’t. Winning is more fun than being right.

Stephen L. Carter is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University Law School. He is the author most recently of God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (Basic Books).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:• A New Birth of Freedom, by Harry V. Jaffa• On Hallowed Ground, by John Patrick Diggins

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Evangelical Futures

Thanks to B&C for the generous notice given to our book Evangelical Futures in the May/June number [“How Should Evangelicals Do Theology?“]. I would have been more grateful, however, had the first respondent, Harriet Harris [“Stop Fretting About Sure-Footedness”], herself exercised a little hermeneutical generosity. Instead, I find my own small contributions to this volume—an editor’s preface and an essay—misrepresented every time she refers to them. Determined as she seems to be to sort the essays into just two categories—those she likes and those she doesn’t—she has relegated mine to the latter category. She is entirely entitled to dislike my work, of course. But readers of B&C are entitled to reviewers who play fair with the objects of their criticism. At the risk of testing readers’ patience, I select just two examples out of half a dozen.

First, Harris chides me for dismissing feminist theologians for too narrow a field of theological inquiry, as if I am indifferent both to feminism and to social implications of the gospel. Yet my essay explicitly asks, “Where is the theology … that starts with evangelical premises and pays attention to gender, to power, to women, and to other subjects overlooked by male-dominated theology?” Second, she sidesteps my opening section on the crucial place of Christ and Christology in theology, as if I am determined to champion biblicism as “the kernel” of theology over against Christ himself. Really! To maintain her charge of biblicism, she ignores several mentions of the work of the Holy Spirit and of the importance of spiritual experience in the Church for theology, such as the following: “Recent Christian work in epistemology … has been reclaiming spiritual experience as cognitively important, not merely personally moving. … The worthiness of spiritual experience as a theological resource is not in question here.” I did not say everything I could say about theological method in one essay. That will have to wait for the book on epistemology I hope to complete in a few years. But what I did say is, I trust, worth at least getting straight before one begins to criticize it.

One more thing. Harris finds several of the essays, not just mine, to manifest an evangelicalism she doesn’t like. In turn, however, one might wonder about her own theological location—or perhaps just her acuity—as she concludes her essay with dichotomies—Bible versus God, “wisdom” versus confidence in the tradition—that I expect will discomfit more than a few evangelical theologians: “Scripture is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, but it is not what our theology depends on. God in Christ is what our theology depends on. … In this presence we should hopefully grow in wisdom and relax over sure-footedness.”

The particularly sad thing about all this is that most of Harris’s concerns seem to be mine as well. So I hope Harris’s remarks, however well-intentioned, will not deter too many B&C readers from taking up Evangelical Futures and deciding for themselves about its merits.

John G. Stackhouse, Jr.Vancouver, B.C.

Muslims for Bush

I am president of New York University’s Islamic Students Association and a reader of your magazine (through the Web site). I’m writing to correct an error in the article, “Cracks in the Monolith” [May/June]. In their analysis of the 2000 election, the authors write, “Nevertheless, [Gore] won a narrow national popular majority with overwhelming backing from most religious minorities: black Protestants (96 percent), Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and other non-Christians (80 percent).”

The figure of 80 percent may be accurate for other groups, but it is incorrect for Muslims. In this election, for the first time in our history in this country, American Muslims launched a bloc vote. An estimated 70 percent voted for George W. Bush, who was seen as the candidate most responsive to the needs of American Muslims. In some states, including Florida, almost 80 percent of Muslims voted for Bush.

Haroon MoghulNew York, N.Y.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.