Historian of Religion vs. Religious Historian

     Hello, my name is John Howard Smith, and I am a Secular Humanist.  I am a specialist in the history of religion in early America, and when I introduce myself to my classes every semester, I am very careful to refer to myself as a "historian of religion," rather than as a "religious historian."  At first glance it would seem that both phrases mean exactly the same thing, but in fact they are very different things--or at least they ought to be understood to be very different things.  When I began my teaching career, I called myself a religious historian because I thought I was cleverly blending the facts that I study the religious with a tendency to think about my discipline in the way that a faithful believer thinks about his/her religion.
    However, I soon discovered that my students presumed that I meant to identify as a religious person who is a historian.  I teach at a mid-sized state university in Texas, a state where 93% of its citizens profess a belief in one deity or another, and only 2% are willing to identify as atheist.  My university is located in a semi-rural part of Northeast Texas, where evangelical Protestantism is especially dominant and Catholicism has a sizable presence.  It is safe to say that the numbers of avowed atheists are at or below 1%.  I realized that I needed to clarify my introductory statements when, after a lecture about Calvinism, a student asked me if I was a Calvinist!  I tend to explain religions and theologies in terms that adherents would use, and thus tacitly adopt the persona of an adherent.  This, I think, allows me to let particular theologies speak for themselves, but I am apparently so good at this that I can fool some of my students into thinking I am by turns a Taoist, a seventeenth-century Congregationalist, or a Mormon.

     I learned during graduate school that my chosen subfield is largely dominated by religious historians--historians who are nominal or professed Christians.  The vast majority of the greats in the historiography of religion in early America, men and women who have essentially defined interpretations of the role and importance of religion in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, include Sydney Ahlstrom, David D. Hall, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George Marsden, Amanda Porterfield, and Catherine Brekus.  Along with others whose specialties were in political history or other aspects of social or cultural history, such as Perry Miller, Edmund S. Morgan, Bernard Bailyn, Richard Bushman, and Pauline Maier, while never explicitly stating it, nevertheless presume two basic premises:

       1. Religion in and of itself is a beneficial element of civilization, and Christianity is a critical, defining pillar of Western civilization; and

           2. Christianity is fundamentally correct in its singular truth claims.

These two concepts suffuse practically all of twentieth-century Western historiography to such a degree that it can be difficult to realize that they are there if you have never questioned them.

     However, since the rise of the "New Left" in the 1960s, more scholars have begun to doubt these presumptions, but in the realm of early American historiography of religion they remain stubbornly pervasive.  As I explained in the introduction to my The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725-1775 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), the treatment of non-Christian religions practiced by Indians, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans brings the pro-Christian bias into bold relief (7).  The Christianization of these groups is detailed in a quietly triumphalist fashion (cf. Mechal Sobel's Trabelin' On and Linford D. Fisher's The Indian Great Awakening), as a great achievement for all concerned, whereas individuals who proved immune to the religion of their conquerors and oppressors are treated with the same disappointed disdain felt by the likes of David Brainerd in the middle-colony backcountry and Samuel Davies in Virginia.  I have characterized the use of Christianity to spark a revival of traditional Indian religions, and the use of Christianity by African Americans to create a kind of faith that proved capable of eroding the institution of slavery, in a way that acknowledges the corrosive influence of colonial religion upon non-white peoples, rather than tacitly thanking God for Christianity and praising the syncretists for their ingenuity.  The rediscovery of elder beliefs and practices sustained the Indians and African Americans, not the acceptance of Christianity or elements of it.

     A testament to the influence of professing Christianity upon American historiography is presented by Darren Dochuk,  Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt W. Peterson in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History (Notre Dame University Press, 2014).  An early festschrift dedicated to Marsden, they assert in the introduction that "the rise of religion in America's new historical consciousness and the attempt by some scholars to write history from a faith-friendly perspective" represents a positive turn away from "scientific hegemony" and "postmodern perspectivalism" (7, 9),  The ultimate goal, they are brazen enough to claim, is that the celebration of the influence of evangelical Christianity upon American history will lead to a reassertion of fundamentalist Christian principles in American political life, epitomized by the rise of the "'Tea Party' movement that has countered President Barack Obama at every turn" (4).

     Activist scholarship is nothing new, and nothing necessarily to disparage, but contrary to religious historians' claims, the influence of secularism in early American historiography has been practically nonexistent.  Nobody had ever written an article or book asserting that religion had no significant influence upon the development of American society and culture.  The closest that one can get to such an assertion is Bernard Bailyn's and Gordon S. Wood's interpretations of the American Revolution as being, as Jon Butler summarized it in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990), "a profoundly secular event" (192).  Butler had earlier declared the First Great Awakening to have been a non-event, but his claim was difficult for him to support, and roundly rejected by the early Americanist community--both secular and religious (myself included).  The debate is not over whether or not religion shaped American identity, but over the degrees to which it has during specific periods of history.

     So, I am a historian of religion, and I think that my nonbelief gives me a far more objective, clear-eyed view of the past than those who cannot see beyond their various religious and denominational filters.  My own scholarship is activist in opposing the agenda beginning to be advanced by Kidd and his compatriots, who seek to out-Marsden Marsden and tear down what little there ever was of the wall of separation between Church and State, and put forward a distorted vision of early America to bring that about.  I realize that I have much in common with Don Quixote, but just as one eats an elephant one bite at a time, I shall tear down as many windmills as I can, one lance-blow at a time.