Comment on Marsden

1 6 Historically Speaking · July/August 2004 Comment on Marsden Bruce Kuklick To much of what Professor Marsden has written, I can only say, "Amen," which I hope he will appreciate. At the same time, I thinkthe problems ofa diminished religious history are not so bad as he believes, and would also suggestthathis conceptualization ofthese problems is a little one-sided. Many people have called for a revival of American religious history, and there is even some discussion ofitin the high-level "Interchange " among several prominent historians in the September2003 issue oftheJournalof American History. Indeed, I thought that the "New Religious History," as exemplified in the workofRobert Orsi, waswell underway. Marsden might be a bit uncomfortable with the focus onpopularreligion, and the anthropological slant given to its study, but this is still a healthy sign for all ofus who (justifiably ) recognize howreligious belief—and certainly the kind of belief that Marsden calls "exclusivist"—has been an important and enduring component ofAmerican history. So myown call to studyourreligious history would not be as strong as Marsden's. There are many claims on students, and religious history has not recently been without effective advocates or practitioners. I also think Marsden's approach to the subject may do historians a disservice. For a verylong time NewEngland Puritanismwas atthe beginning and then the centerofAmerican history. And for a very long time historians acknowledged this in an uncriticalway. The great 19th-century narrators ofAmerican life—Bancroft, McMaster, and Parkman —gave prominence to exclusivist Protestantism and read the American experience as ifit were imbued with this Protestantism. In the veryrecent past synthetic interpreters of our international engagements have recognized the influence ofreligion in the secular sphere, using such terms as Righteous Empire, Manifest Destiny, Promised Land, and Crusader Statewhen depictingthe role of the United States in the world. Marsden finds ituseful to juxtapose Benjamin Franklin withJonathan Edwards as a way ofbroadeningthe secularisttilt ofhistorians who have ignored the importance of religion. Examining the contrast between Edwards and Franklin, says Marsden, would enable such historians to see how the concerns for which Edwards stood have colored American history. But contrasting the two is an old and conventional trope in American Studies. Carl Van Doren's Franklin and Edwards: Selections dates from 1920. Van Doren clearly sided with the "victorious" Franklin, as well as inaugurated a popular 20th-century tradition of illuminating the American character by commenting on the two men, their epigoni, and the influence of their competingideas inAmerican life. Walter Isaacson's recent best-seller, Benjamin Franklin (2003) takes up the identical competition . The trouble is that this comparison is too limiting, and thatin partiswhyreligious history went into a decline. One does not have to be a historical interpreter ofgenius to recognize that the focus on Franklin and Edwards is constrainedin tellingus aboutthe experience ofNative Americans, women, African-Americans, or Euro-Americans who did not come from NorthwestEurope. In the last thirty years, especially, these hitherto muffled voices have come into their own and, in the profession, crowded out white males like Edwards and Franklin. But Marsden writes as if it were ever thus, and it wasn't. One could argue that as an organizing principle Protestantism had a good run for its money but lost out because it was unable to interpret new themes that began to capture the interest ofhistorians. Marsden is correct to intimate that religious history has much to offer even these newer areas ofinquiryand needs again to be brought to the forefront of our understanding. But the operative word here is again: Marsden sometimes writes as if historians had never attended to religion; they did and still do today more than he admits. The real issue for Marsden is that he mightnotlike itwhen he getswhathewants, as he surelywill: religious history, I am convinced , will make even more of a comeback than it already has. But Marsden envisages that it should use a somewhat rarified set of suppositions from intellectual history, wherebyJonathan Edwards's ideas get played outin popular culture, as inJoseph Conforti's Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture (1995). Brace yourself. When the New Religious History gets into gear, itmaywell treatthe post-medieval Biblical worldview ofEdwards as an anthropologist would...