Completion or Revision?

July/August 2004 · Historically Speaking1 7 world in the 20th century. Cold War Protestants who determined to shape the world abound: Truman, Acheson, Dulles, Rusk, Nixon, Carter, and surely George W Bush. These are not men known for their meekness ; they are rather men like the Edwards who was certain that his enemies were instruments ofthe devil. It occurs to me thatMarsden is trying to imply that we would have had a kinder and gentler America were the Edwardsean outlook —in contrast to the Franklinian one that has been somewhatmore prevalent—to have been even more pervasive in American historythan ithas been. Ifthis supposition about Professor Marsden is true, a new religious history maywell surprise him. Bruce Kuklick is NichobProfessor ofHistory at the University ofPennsylvania. He is writinga book entitledIntellectuals and War, 1945-1975. Completion or Revision? Wilfred M. McClay I would like to begin byexpressingmyenormous gratitude to George Marsden for all he's done to expand and challenge our sense of whatAmerican historical writingis, and what it could be. I know that in saying such things I speak for many others, and I'm hardly the first to saythem. But they still need to be said, and acknowledgmentneeds to be made ofthe courage, generosity, and gentle tenacity he's shown in pressing these issues, constantly seeking freshways ofarticulatinghis concerns. He could have played itsafe, the waymostof us do. There's no doubt that he would be ranked one of the outstanding historians of his generation solelyon the basis ofhis superb work in American religious history, ranging from his foundational early studies of evangelicalism and fundamentalism to his extraordinary new biography ofJonathan Edwards. Why then complicate matters by venturing out into the murky and unpredictable waters of theory, where so many promising enterprises seem to lose their way? Well, forwhatever reason, he has notbeen content to hug the shore. Having established himselfthrough his scholarship as, so to speak, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a professional historian beyond reproach, he has elected to "use his tenure" to raise provocative questions about the limitations of his profession and explore the possibility ofa more intimate and holistic relationship between religious conviction and historical scholarship. I doubtthat anyone else could have raised these questions with the same credibility. Lesser scholars who have soughtto infuse theirreligious commitments into the process ofwritinghistoryhave found themselves quickly (and often quite deservedly) pushed to the margins. But it is much harder to dismiss a historian with George Marsden's massive accomplishments, particularly when he has sought to treat his own explorations of the integration of faith and scholarship not merely as a personal matter , but as an undertaking with wider significance for the entire profession. Still, his principal contention—that selfconsciously "Christian scholarship" should not be regarded as an "outrageous idea"—is far from having carried the day, even among Christian scholars. From the beginningithas caught prodigious flak from all sides: from mainstream secular thinkers who believe that the de-Christianization ofthe American academy is one of the 20th century's greatest achievements; from scholars who happen to be privately Christian but are entirely content to keep the spheres ofreligion and scholarship rigorously separate—they have made their careers that way, and are thoroughly uncomfortable with the idea offooling with the status quo; and, from a very different direction, hostile fire comes from post-secular thinkers, Christian and otherwise, as well as some religious conservatives, who find Marsden's goal of seeking a "place at the table" for religiously informed scholarship too timid, precisely because it buys into too manyofthe outmoded Enlightenment-project rules ofthe game, rules that these writers believe to be hopelessly problematized and compromised. Other more traditionally minded scholars are similarlydissatisfiedwith Marsden's propositions, but for opposite reasons . Many would like to see a more fullthroated defense ofJudeo-Christianitys foundational place in the enterprise ofscholarship, as the original and unacknowledged "host" ofthe dinner party. And nearly all are made uneasybyMarsden's resort to the strategyof multiculturalism—ifwe are to have feminist scholarship, gayscholarship, disabilityscholarship , etc., then why not Christian scholarship ? But such a move, they feel, goes much too far down the fatal road of relativism and embraces the disordered pattern ofcontemporary scholarship at precisely the point...