Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity ed. by Andrea Sterk, Nina Caputo (review)

Is religion a uniquely, or even particularly, problematical subject for historians, as is argued by the editors of this collection of papers? Questions of objectivity and the role of the personal opinions and commitments have occupied the discipline of history for decades, as has the challenge of the rhetorical and narratological turns. Indeed, this volume would seem to indicate, if only through its title, that religious historians are finally catching up with the rest of the profession.

Notwithstanding that such problems and issues are the same for every scholar who studies the past, historians of religion may well experience them in a more acute form. Because followers of most of the major world religions are prone to insist that the history of their particular faith is intrinsic to that faith, they often feel threatened by the critical work of historians. Adherents to, say, a particular tradition of political thought usually do not object to the demonstration of shifts in that tradition in response to changing circumstances; nor do they generally suggest that only true believers in that tradition are qualified to comment on its history. Not only believers but also lay observers of all kinds are far more likely to discuss the place of religion in the contemporary world in historical terms than to discuss political or social problems in that manner. Certain primarily historical themes arouse passions similar to religious ones—the Holocaust and American slavery come to mind—but they are exceptions.

Readers who are persuaded by this argument, and by the issues raised by the editors in their introduction, will likely find this volume a disappointment. If the impressive group of eminent and authoritative figures in the field who contributed to this volume were given a brief to engage with these theoretical and methodological issues, most of them chose to ignore it. Instead, they explore different aspects of a broad subject throughout a vast period, with little interconnection. Many of the chapters are fascinating in their own right, covering such topics as ancient and medieval ideas about labor and poverty, early modern Jewish culture, and the development of nineteenth-century Islamic studies. But instead of theoretical discussion, they tend to be concerned with internal matters, like the conceptual frameworks of religious historians (for example, different approaches to characterizing the Reformation).

The wider issues in the study of religious history today, and their implications, are at best implicit in the various chapters. Even those chapters that address contemporary topics directly, such as the development of modern African Christianity or the role of the Bible in U.S. public life, assume historians to be separate, disinterested observers. The sole exception is a provocative piece by David Nirenberg, which engages directly with the idea of religious history as a battlefield in a “proxy war” about the present, arguing that historicism can be a means for religions to generate critique and to acknowledge ambiguity and complexity from within their own traditions (64). This approach could be seen as an attempt at engineering a less threatening, more Westernized Islam (an idea that Nirenberg dismisses rather than analyzes). At any rate, Nirenberg’s polemical call for engagement might seem less anomalous if the other chapters had offered similar examples of reflection on the role of religious historians in contemporary society.

The editors claim that religion is marginalized as a topic in history. This contention is true for neither classical antiquity nor the medieval period; if it is true for other periods, it may be in part a self-inflicted problem, just as the contributors to this collection have apparently avoided some of the most important issues raised by the chosen theme. The alternative explanation is that a collection of unconnected chapters, full of gems of analysis and insight for historians of religion, has been over-sold as a coherent response to important theoretical problems.