“Whiggish” Histories and Historians
June 10, 2005
Whether they knew or not, / Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne / All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery? / A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind / That never looked out of the eye of a saint / Or out of drunkard’s eye. –W. B. Yeats
Keith Sewell, professor of history at Dordt College, has a fine review of Mark Noll’s The Rise of Evangelicalism in the latest issue of Pro Rege, an excellent quarterly journal I have recommended before. (And it is free.) Professor Sewell has a new book out from Palgrave Macmillan on Herbert Butterfield, the historian known for The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), a classic of critical historiography. (The whole text is online.) In the main, Butterfield critiqued the uncritical projection of self-servingly retrospective, partisan, teleogical narratives on history. (The preference now is to try to regard figures and moments from the past from within their own horizons in a present understood as a manifold of multiform contingencies.) Specifically, Butterfield rejected “whiggish” history–“the tendency of many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.”
Part of Professor Sewell’s concern is to explain how Butterfield reconciled his desire for a technical history free from bias and reductionism with his Christianity and advocacy for a Christian view of history. This is also the main challenge for Christian historians like Mark Noll, who have given that problem much thought. Sewell’s review of Noll’s book considers Noll’s handling of that very problem, particularly with respect to what Sewell sees as Noll’s attempt to delineate divine and human agents as authentic vs. more contrived causes for the “Great Awakening” or American “Evangelical Revival.”
Although Sewell is pleased that Noll ultimately disdains to extricate human and divine causes for the Great Awakening and the rise of Evangelicalism, he seems properly concerned that the question is posed at all, in such terms. While I think it is likely that Noll’s book, published by InterVarsity Press and thus not addressed to the academic mainstream, poses the question of Providential guidance in American Evangelicalism because he believes it is something integral to his Evangelical audience’s inherited self-understanding, the quest for a scientific history of Providence (in which Noll has had some personal interest) strikes me (and apparently Professor Sewell as well) as being completely wrong-headed in its dualistic view of what Sewell refers to, in neoreformed parlance, as “the order of creation.” (For a tNP review by D. G. Hart of Noll’s recent, academician-oriented study of Evangelicalism, see our last issue.)
I have long been under the influence of the “holism” of perhaps the greatest philosopher and historian to take up the problem of articulating the divine-human relationship in history. He writes, “God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience in so far as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience in so far as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it….” (More can be found here at the bottom of the page.)
Professor Sewell hits on this same point by noting the responsive nature of human beings. All creation and its creatures respond, in all their thoughts and actions, to the Creator. This presumption underlies not only the Abrahamic religions but also the vast majority of all non-western, premodern cultures. The differentiation of the divine from the human, creator from creation, is a development of post-animistic and post-pantheistic theisms, but it reaches a deformative extreme in western modernity when “the human” and associated attributes (such as “reason”) are divided from “the divine” and “faith.”
What worries Professor Sewell most, however, is the potential for providentialist historiography to ascribe divine approval and perfection to every or any given “response by believers.” This gets at an anxiety deep in the hearts of many Evangelical intellectuals, Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and certainly secular liberals, many of whom possess their own historic tendencies to direct the divine arrow of history in directions they approve. Accordingly they are perturbed when others seem inclined to point the arrow elsewhere and on that basis tend to see Evangelicalism as the bulwark of a neofundamentalist religious right that currently backs a president who, like his supposed fundie constituents, does not understand (or cynically exploits those who do not understand) that “God is not a Republican.” (That is the Jim Wallis slogan recently deployed at Calvin College by various faculty, students, and alumni protesting President Bush at their recent graduation commencement. For more in-depth scrutiny of the present political and identity conflicts among and between Reformed and Evangelical historians and public intellectuals, see my “Evangelical Self-Fashioning.”)
This is and is not a legitimate anxiety. Even such an icon of the Evangelical right as James Dobson has a chronic history of castigating Republican party leaders and threatening to withdraw support for them. The infamous “Bush tapes” released to the media by an indiscreet minister did much to humanize the President (and raise his IQ) in the public opinion, in part by showing his guarded comity for people like Dobson.
I suspect that a great deal of voting and political positioning by people smart enough to know better is most strongly influenced by their desire to perform a personal disassociation from some gauche right-wing bogeyman. I also suspect that many readers of tNP, to say nothing of various editors and writers, are menaced by the same sort of reactive tendency, a species of something Richard John Neuhaus has in the past identified as the “close call with fundamentalism” “narrow” or “near-escape syndrome.”1
To my mind, if greater goods can be accomplished through people with less than accurate or admirable ideas and motives–as is almost always the case–this may be the best realistic hope one can have if one is pursuing those same goods oneself. (Indeed, this seems to be the essence of the divine-human relationship in history: divine condescension.) Yet many Christians, conservatives, and others more or less comfortable with either of those labels and their conflation, are not at all sure that the seemingly ascendent Evangelicalism can be trusted. (Hence Ray Pennings’ “sartorial” concerns, which I recently addressed.)
For those of the Reformed persuasion, this distrust and anxiety doubtless has some origins in the steady evangelicalization and/or confessionally distinctive softening of their churches, some denominations more than others. But as this overall situation of anxiety and (to various degrees) distrust contributes to a less than substantially united Christian front in the political and cultural arena, it is really in the interests of all parties to bring real differences and concerns to the fore in the interest of achieving a pragmatic concord sufficient to prevent future historians from taking as their own big question, “Why, in the late 20th to early 21st century did religious conservatives fail to achieve the major cultural and political ends that had animated them for decades despite their positions of seeming influence and key role in bringing into power political actors ostensibly inclined to favor those ends?”
For his part, Professor Sewell seems poised to take on in his next book, Evangelical or Reformed: A Question for Bible Believing Christianity, the points on which Calvinists and Evangelicals part company. No doubt a foretaste of this other project, his review of Noll’s book faults Evangelicalism for a lack of concern with civil society, a predilection for subjectivist individualism and other “romantic” and “enlightenment” habits of thought. In Sewell’s view, “Arguably the scandal of the evangelical mind is not that there was not much of an evangelical mind – it is rather that there was and is an evangelical mind, but it is nothing as scriptural as evangelicals believe it to be.”
Perhaps there is something to be gained in the long-shot effort to unite Evangelical, Reformed and other Protestant groups in a “biblical” conception of their proper relation to the cultural and political arena, but the time may be short for even pragmatic as opposed to academic initiatives. As “biblical” truth and identity is such a historic dividing point among Protestants, laden as it is with whiggish opportunities for one group to lecture others about the true path which it alone represents, it is hard to be optimistic about continued projects on that front, as Greg Johnson is in his survey of “Evangelicalism’s Insecure Calvinists.”
Note:
1.Father Neuhaus’s analysis of the “syndrome” is worth recounting here at length:
FT 70: “‘The Tillichian Spell: Memories of a Student Mesmerized in the 1950s.’ That’s the title of a reflection by Tom F. Driver, who was for many years the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Seminary, New York. Tillich was known as an apologetic theologian. Driver writes, “I felt that his apologia was not addressed to unbelievers nearly so much as to persons like me who had been Christian all our lives and had now come to a time when we did not really know what Christianity was about, for it seemed so at odds with our culture.” The comment reflects the confusion of generations of liberal Christians brought up to assume a neat fit between faith and culture. When culture and Christianity were at odds, it was Christianity that was thrown into question. Although Driver says his background was in liberal Methodism, “that was in the South where the surrounding population tended toward fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism was in the 1950s and is now the great bugaboo for liberal Christians. Oldline Protestantism is riddled through and through with the consequences of “the narrow escape syndrome.” Press the most flamingly liberal theologian and he will almost always have a story to tell about having narrowly escaped from fundamentalism of one sort or another. And it is usually evident that he fears the possibility of being drawn back into its thrall. The same is true today of liberal Catholics who regale all who will listen with stories about the bad old days of “the pre-Vatican II Church.” Catholic priests and religious fret, too, about any association with conservative Protestants on questions such as abortion, lest they be drawn into the orbit of what they view as the fundamentalism of the unspeakable “religious right.” For Catholics who think of themselves as victims of the narrow escape syndrome, the new ecumenism with evangelicals poses the double threat of both Catholic and Protestant fundamentalism. Tom Driver’s long career almost perfectly exemplifies the liberal propensity to split the difference between Christian faith and cultural respectability, with the benefit of the doubt usually given to culture. Driver’s reminiscence ends with a story. Twelve years after Tillich’s death, Driver published a book that was somewhat critical of his teacher. At a discussion of the book at Union, a colleague contrived a telegram from Tillich, with accent and all, and read it at the beginning of the meeting. ‘Dear Tom Driver: I am zo zorry zat I cannot be wiz you ziss evening, because I am detained elzevere. But I haf read ze book zat you haf written, and I zend my congratulazions. It is good to know zat you do not follow your teacher like a slave but zat you haf ze courage to go into ze deep waters and to sink for yourself. [signed] Paul Tillich.’”
FT 95: “James Wood is perhaps suffering from what I have called “the narrow escape syndrome,” which means defining one’s life by a narrow escape from a stifling childhood religion, and by the fear that the escape is not entirely successful.”
FT 118: “With respect to the mix of religion and morality, [Benjamin] Franklin is a representative of what I have elsewhere described as “the narrow–escape syndrome.” All his life long, every time he felt the encroachment of religious orthodoxy combined with moral rigor, he recoiled, lest he be caught again in the world of Cotton Mather from which he had narrowly escaped.”
[G.J: I would say that with respect to the leading Kuyperian and NeoCalvinist folk afflicted by the “syndrome,” the “60s” generation is most prominent, and they react to Evangelicals (and both groups react to Catholics) along similar lines as those observed by Neuhaus with regard to Franklin. Each represents to the other (NeoReformed to Evangelicals; both to Catholics) a more moralistic, pietistic, and repressive practice of the faith that characterized (and still characterizes) their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The accuracies and inaccuracies of the comparison (and the other influences that are at play) are not so important as the psycho-cultural import of the phenomenon as a reaction that is more passionate than it should be.]
This, finally, is quite appropos to the discussion aroused by Mr. Pennings’ essay:
FT 56: “The experts who aver under oath that Mapplethorpe is high art in the tradition of Michelangelo, the confused producers of such as The Wright Verdicts, the writers in the New Republic and the Nation who declare that the Christian Coalition is a proto- fascist threat-all are driven by fear and loathing. Many of them are acting out what might be called the near-escape syndrome. They are, or in some cases pretend to be, people who were once caught in the clutches of fundamentalist religion. They believe their escape was a narrow one, and letting up on their hostility for even a moment might lead to their succumbing again. In fact, of course, many of them never were fundamentalists or Catholics, or even Christians for that matter, but they think they know the face of the enemy. Evangelicals lynch colored folk and Catholics burn heretics at the stake, don’t they? Alright, so they haven’t done that for a long time, but they’re still against abortion, aren’t they? Same thing.
“Many Catholics and some evangelicals (evangelicals do not feel as culturally secure) wear the hostility of the New York-Hollywood axis as a badge of honor. That’s one reason Dr. Donohue has such a hard time marshalling Catholic indignation. They feel more complimented than offended when, for instance, ACT-UP invades St. Patrick’s Cathedral and desecrates the Mass. At least the enemy recognizes its enemy. While there is a little to be said for such an attitude, it easily slips into smugness and self-satisfaction. Donohue is right. Anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bigotry must be protested not because it cripples the Christian cause but because it is bigotry. The ignorance, hatred, perversity, and violence cultivated by the people who run the industries that run much of our popular culture are evils that coarsen our common life, encourage moral delinquency, and bring innumerable individuals to ruin. Plus it has to be doing something terrible to the souls of the people who produce and peddle this stuff. Those are all reasons enough to protest.
“Care is needed to make sure that protests such as those of the Catholic League, or Don Wildemon’s boycotting of advertisers, or Bill Bennett’s chiding of media executives are not seen as self-serving. It is a mistake to depict such protests in the model of the Anti-Defamation League. ADL lives off the perception, albeit a mistaken perception, that Jews are an imperiled minority in an essentially hostile culture. That is a not very believable assumption on the part of the ADL, and it is thoroughly implausible in the case of Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and the conservative political movement. The latter three are all part not of an imperiled minority but of an ascendant majority. From that perspective of confidence, we should devote at least as much attention to understanding as to protesting the New York-Hollywood axis and its industry of cultural devastation.”
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