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We live in a wonderful time for Christian academics, perhaps especially for Christian historians. So many barriers have dropped, and we have ranks of spirited pioneers to thank for making possible opened doors to graduate study, wider freedom and subject matter for research and teaching, comparatively deep springs of funding, and perhaps even a tenure-track job now and then. Academic hostility toward Christian belief is still deeply entrenched, but there's also much to be encouraged about.
Especially as an object of study is religion basking in something of a golden age. Despite some understandable grousing from specialists about being underappreciated, most would agree that the subfield of American religious history is undergoing a modest boom. More significantly, there is widespread agreement across the discipline that religion ought to be widely studied. Most academics seem to be reassured that religion can be safely handled, at least if contained inside the resilient bubble of academic historiography. Even though it's only in this limited sense, historians can truly be said to have "got religion."
Not only is religion relatively safe in historiography, but religious believers seem to be increasingly safe in history departments. The Christian faith of widely read American historians like Timothy Smith, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and Harry Stout has become common knowledge and an inspiration for younger cohorts of scholars, within and without the religious-history subfield. What's more, it is even relatively safe these days to talk about being a Christian academic (especially if you're tenured), and to do so before a wide audience. Not long ago, in the words of Mortimer Adler, "theology and metaphysics [were] either despised or, what is the same, degraded to topics about which laboratory scientists pontificate after they have won the Nobel Prize." That's no longer true, and we can thank the likes of Mark Schwehn and Marsden for plunking down on the academic barrelhead substantive essays like Exiles from Eden (1993) and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997). Books like these are hard specie indeed upon which we can capitalize many a serious conversation with our colleagues about Christianity's role in learning (not to mention in living). We have advanced rapidly in our ability to talk openly and in print about religion in the university.
Into this setting arrives Religious Advocacy and American History, compiled by Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart from papers delivered at a 1994 conference. To borrow the editors' own words, "this volume makes clear [that] scholars can, and do, talk about personal religious belief and historical scholarship." Kuklick and Hart have finessed the original program by supplying an introduction as well as fore- and afterwords from noted historians, and by arranging the papers into three parts. The first part focuses on Christianity's utility, or lack thereof, for grounding and revising historians' scholarly practice. The second assesses ideologies and institutions that have competed with Christianity for power to explain the past. The third gathers essays addressing the problems of advocacy in writing and teaching religious history. But the 14 contributors, whether Christians or not, are all eager to discuss the stature of Christianity in the historical profession.
So with all the open doors, for all the ways we may be truly thankful for a modest loosening of the modernist gag order on religion, is there anything left for Christian historians to pray about? Certainly.
Despite the pockets of warmth I've described, the secular university is still a chilly place for theists, or for anyone who might be uncomfortable with academic naturalism—a tricky term that merits close attention. Naturalism is the sine qua non of academic discourse: all phenomena are spoken of as obeying strictly natural laws and forces, with strictly natural origins and consequences. But notice, naturalism can be either a philosophy of the world ("nature is all there is") or merely a mode of discourse ("we're here to talk just about natural things"). One is not "unchristian" for participating in naturalistic discourse, as we all routinely do. Nor does measuring the world implicate us in worldliness; after all, "Honest balances and scales are the LORD's; all the weights in the bag are his work" (Prov. 16:11). Academics no less than merchants need an open medium of exchange, so among colleagues we converse in the same lingua franca as everyone else. The gains of the last decades have been made by playing by the rules and trusting that "methodological atheism" can remain merely methodological.
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