Christian Scholars on the American Century

In 1997, historian George Marsden issued a call for Christian scholars to begin writing from an explicitly Christian point of view. Much as scholars had fruitfully examined history through lenses such as race, gender, Marxism, and postmodernism, he wrote in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, so too could Christians offer fresh insights by examining history from their own perspectives. The goal of such scholarship was not necessarily to advocate for Christianity (at least no more than gender historians used their works to advocate feminism, or Marxists to promote communism), nor was it to cite supernatural causes or other forms of evidence outside the bounds of professional scholarship. Marsden simply wanted his fellow academics to recognize that Christian scholars, whose faith is central to their worldviews, experiences, and understandings of history, may view the past differently than more secular historians, and they could offer innovative new interpretations of all varieties of topics as well as contribute to a more diverse and vibrant intellectual atmosphere on the nation’s campuses.

Both of the works reviewed here can be considered Christian scholarship, with arguments shaped by the authors’ openly theistic beliefs. However, the authors take significantly different approaches to their Christian scholarship. In The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, Marsden extends the basic premise of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship from America’s universities to society more generally. Although nominally more committed than ever to diversity, he argues, America’s opinion leaders continue to exclude religious voices from major public conversations. He traces the roots of this problem to a “crisis of liberal belief” in the 1950s.

Although it is common to look back at the 1950s as a golden age for the white middle class, writes Marsden, such nostalgia masks the “great cultural anxiety” of an era when modernity was rapidly overtaking tradition (p. xii). Public intellectuals sought to tease out what was wrong with American society below its placid surface and offered prescriptions for maximizing prosperity and happiness without threatening individualism, which remained the paramount social good.

Marsden builds his case by focusing on a familiar roster of prominent mid-century social thinkers—Riesman, Whyte, Bell, Schlesinger, Niebuhr, Hofstadter, Friedan, Spock, Lippmann, Fromm, and others recognizable by last name alone—writing on topics such as mass culture, the individual in society, conformity and alienation, the “American character,” the proper scientific basis for progress, and other common postwar intellectual concerns.

A major problem with both American culture in the 1950s and these public intellectuals who critiqued it, according to Marsden, was that U.S. society lacked a shared, transcendent moral center rooted in natural law. Even as liberal thinkers embraced and attempted to further the enlightenment values of America’s founders—freedom, self-determination, equality of rights, faith in science and reason as engines of progress, and the celebration of the autonomous individual—they eschewed the foundation upon which the American enlightenment had been built: the belief, central to America since its founding, that “there was a Creator who established natural laws, including moral laws, that could be known to humans as self-evident principles to be understood and elaborated through reason” (p. xxi).

To intellectuals like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Daniel Bell, liberal values were not rooted in any higher law, but were based on what had proven to best contribute to human fulfillment over the centuries. Truth (and the good, just, and prosperous society that followed) would be found by applying scientific methods (like psychology and sociology) to better understand humanity and society. Such “empirically tested views could provide the basis for an evolving consensus of opinion among right-thinking people” without the need to resort to any notion of natural law imposed from above (p. 155). From this perspective, the American way, if still a work in progress, was...