How to Serve Time
There is a Christian way to study the past without weakening the truth.
Preston Jones | posted 4/02/2001 12:00AM
There are probably as many opinions about history as there are people. "History. … is a nightmare," says Stephen in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. According to Oscar Wilde, "Anybody can make history" but only "a great man can write it." Depending on whom you consult, history could be "the biography of great men" (Thomas Carlyle) or an "excitable and lying old lady" (Guy de Maupassant). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that history is "the belief in falsehood." T. S. Eliot called it "a pattern of timeless moments." French philosopher Ernest Renan concluded that "the whole of history is incomprehensible without [Jesus]." A new claim about the nature of history isn'tneeded, and I am not interested in formulating a Christian philosophy of historiography. But as a Christian and a historian, I am concerned about history consciously written or taught from any particular perspective—"feminist," "Marxist," "conservative," or "liberal."
I'm just as concerned about history written from a "Christian" perspective.
Eager to uncover the depths of America's Christian roots, some Christian writers have embraced the Founding Fathers' references to God without acknowledging that the god of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams is one most orthodox Christians would not recognize. Similarly, Christian writers of history have sometimes failed to distinguish between civil religion and casual Christianity, on the one hand, and biblical Christianity on the other. Thus some of the same people who resist casual Christianity in contemporary America endorse it in historic America.
The Unorthodox Mr. Roosevelt
One example should suffice. "Theodore Roosevelt stood foursquare on the legacy of biblical orthodoxy," writes George Grant in his 1997 book Carry a Big Stick: The Uncommon Heroism of Theodore Roosevelt. But late 19th- and early 20th-century American nationalists merely ransacked the Bible for verses that could justify various political causes. Grant's claim is false; Teddy Roosevelt had little use for "biblical orthodoxy," and to spin Roosevelt as an orthodox Christian is to get him wrong.American Christians should want to avoid wrong historical conclusions, even when that means giving up cherished ideas about their nation's past. Historians and history teachers will inevitably bring their personal commitments to the archives and into the classroom, but it is fundamentally corrupting to turn to the past to merely vindicate preconceived judgments. If a Christian wants to applaud Roosevelt's manly patriotism, that is a matter of fair choice. But Christian students of history should avoid casting Roosevelt's nationalism in strictly favorable—or Christian—terms.
To be fair, the expansionist movement Roosevelt promoted did some good: illiterate peoples in America's colonies learned to read, people without medicine gained the advantage of Western technology, and Christianity did "uplift" many of the colonized. But Roosevelt's brand of nationalism also made him a late 19th-century warmonger and led to a vicious conflict in the Philippines—a conflict protested by, among others, the devoutly Christian William Jennings Bryan. One long-term consequence of America's military presence in the Philippines is the United States' involvement in the massive and still growing market for East Asian girls and young women—a skin trade in which the U.S. military is still entangled and which in many cases amounts to modern-day slavery.
George Grant claims that Teddy Roosevelt "led the world into a remarkable epoch of peace," but to say that is to do an injustice not only to the plain historical record but also to Roosevelt himself. Roosevelt approved of war. He reveled in battle. For him, conflict weeded out weak people who stood in the way of progress.
April 2 2001, Vol. 45, No. 5
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