Hiatus

After thirteen months and 586 posts I have decided to give myself a break from blogging. I will be taking the next couple of weeks off to vacation with family and make some headway on my forthcoming book on Christian America.

In the meantime, I hope you will not forget about us. Feel free to browse previous posts, get caught up on our recent series on the Texas History Standards, or read The Way of Improvement Leads Home. (I just got a great review from my Dad who claims he "could not put it down," "rushed home from work to read it," and "got a bit emotional at the end.")

I will be back sometime in mid-August. Feel free to e-mail or post a comment, but I cannot guarantee I will respond immediately.

Thanks for reading and enjoy these dog days of summer!

John

Peter Marshall Review of Texas Social Studies Standards--Part 2

We continue with our discussion of Peter Marshall's review of the Texas Social Studies standards. You can get up to speed by scrolling down on this blog and viewing the previous posts.

Due to time constraints, I will not devote as much space to Marshall as I did to Barton. In fact, this will be my final post on the Texas History Standards controversy as I will be taking a brief vacation from blogging while I try to make some serious headway on my book, "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: An Historical Primer for Christians."

In his critique of the Texas Standards's approach to Constitutional government, Marshall writes:

At all levels of education, K-12, attention must be paid to the basic concepts that underlie the American tradition of constitutional law government. Further, it is impossible for students to understand American civilization if they do not learn the sources of those concepts. For example, the separation of powers in our Federal government is rooted in the Founding Fathers' clear understanding of the sinfulness of man. James Madison, one of the chief architects of the Constitution, studied under the Presbyterian minister president of the College of New Jersey, Dr. John Witherspoon. Witherspoon taught Madison that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" and that the only human remedy for this is effective government, which has to be in a "mixed and balanced form." Under the tutelage of Dr. Witherspoon, Madison came to accept the Biblical teaching of the sinfulness of man, and quaintly expressed this belief in Federalist Paper # 51: "But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary." Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Jay, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Elias Boudinot, Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Robert Treat Paine, Richard Stockton, James Wilson, William Patterson, and many other Founding Fathers believed that because of man's sinfulness, no one is to be entrusted with the absolute power of government. Hence, they rejected monarchy and gave us the separation of powers in our form of government.

I am intrigued by this suggestion. Though I would need to go back and look at all of the founders he lists to see if they made arguments for mixed government based on original sin, it would seem that Madison and others may have been indirectly influenced by the kind of Calvinism promoted by the likes of John Witherspoon at places like Princeton. Of course one would have to advance this argument prudently and cautiously. For example, nowhere does Madison say that self-interest is rooted in original sin.

But if Marshall is right here, what do we make of the rather utopian ideas about the nature of humankind proposed by those champions of republican political thought or civic humanism? Doesn't the virtue necessary to make a republic work require a rather positive view of human nature? It would seem,as I and others have argued, that a commitment to civic humanism might require an approach to virtue that requires citizens to embrace more of an Enlightenment understanding of human nature, or at least a view of human nature that meshed Enlightenment and Calvinist views of human nature.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Marshall's report is his discussion of the Social Studies requirements that "seem deficient and should be rewritten." Marshall argues that many of the "ones concerning history seem to be compiled by someone more concerned to be 'politically correct' than to accurately portray American history."

For example:

Marshall does not think Texas schoolchildren should learn about Henrietta King or Thurgood Marshall. He wants to replace them with Harriet Tubman and Sam Houston or "hundreds of others" who might be better suited to teach kids about diversity. So basically Marshall thinks that children should not learn about the NAACP lawyer in the landmark Brown v. Board decision who also happened to be the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Wow!

In a section for second graders on community in which students are asked to "identify some governmental services," Marshall wants to replace "libraries, schools, and parks" with "fire and rescue department, the police, and school buses." I have no idea why he thinks this is an important change.

In a fifth grade standard that asks students to "describe the accomplishments of significant colonial leaders," Marshall wants to remove Anne Hutchinson because she "didn't accomplish anything except getting herself exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for making trouble." So, in other words, Marshall does not want students to learn about the heroic woman who stood up to the quasi-theocratic commitments of Massachusetts Bay and represented the idea of liberty of conscience in matters of religion. If you want to use the colonial era to look for the roots of the United States (which I have argued elsewhere in this series is not always the best approach) then I would think you would look to Hutchinson, not the Massachusetts Council, as your representative historical figure. (In The Light and the Glory, Marshall covers Hutchinson in a chapter entitled "The Pruning of the Lord's Vineyard.").

Like David Barton, Marshall rejects the inclusion of Cesar Chavez in the standards. If the Texas Board of Education adopts this suggestion will they have to rename the several dozen schools in Texas named after Chavez?

According to Marshall, the list of scientists and inventors that fifth graders should study is "pathetic." He wants to replace Neil Armstrong, John Audubon, Benjamin Baneker, and Clarence Birdseye with Thomas Watson, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford and Alexander Graham Bell. Marshall probably has a point here. Students should know about the Wright Brothers, Ford (warts and all), and Bell. But does he really want to remove Neil Armstrong? What about Clarence Birdseye? Most Americans travel by air a lot less than they eat frozen foods.

In the end, Marshall's report is a lot less detailed than Barton's, but it raises many of the same questions. In order to be fair, I would like to also offer analysis of the other conservative reviewer, Daniel Dreisbach and the reports of the three reviewers selected by the more moderate and liberal members of the Texas Board. Since I will not have the time to do this in a timely fashion, I will let you decide.

Peter Marshall on the Texas History Standards: Part One

We now move to the review of the Texas Social Studies standards written by Presbyterian minister Peter Marshall. (You can read his review here). Like David Barton, Marshall is not a historian. Yet many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians think he is a historian because he has written a providential history of early America entitled The Light and the Glory (now available in a revised and expanded edition). This book is a very popular textbook among conservative Christian homeschoolers and has been a steady seller for the Fleming H. Revell Publishing Company (a division of the evangelical publisher Baker Books) since it first appeared thirty years ago. I have written about Marshall before. If you get a chance, take a look at my piece, "Thirty Years of Light and Glory: The Perils of Providential History."

Someone on the Texas Board of Education must really like Marshall. This is the only way to explain how a Presbyterian pastor from New England with no formal training in history became an expert reviewer for the Social Studies standards for one of the largest states in the Union.

After a lengthy section on organization and structure, Marshall stresses the importance of studying the "motivations" of why people acted in American history:

Studying history this way -telling the stories of real people and what motivated the decisions they made, and then what happened as a result of those decisions -gives the present-day student the exciting idea that he or she can influence the course of history. And that is one of the main things we are aiming at in the education of our children. We want them to reach young adulthood with the vision that they can be world changers!

This all seems well and good, until we get to see exactly what kind of "motivations" Marshall wants Texas students to study.

In our American situation it is indisputable that the motivational role of the Bible and the Christian faith was paramount in the settling of most of the original 13 colonies, notably Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The settling of America was not "accidental" but purposeful. For example, the Pilgrims were motivated to risk their lives in coming to America because of their Christian faith, and their desire to propagate that faith in the American wilderness. Even small children need to understand that the Pilgrims were not just "people who liked to take long journeys in ships" (as one elementary history text puts it), but rather a group of people who believed in God and tried to live by the teachings of the Bible. Pilgrim Governor William Bradford made it clear that "they had a great hope and an inward zeal ... of laying some good foundation ... for the propagating and advancing of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world." They were not refugees thrown up on the rocky shores of New England, but missionaries with a strong sense of call and purpose. They knew exactly what they were about.

Whoa! This paragraph reads like something lifted directly from The Light and the Glory. When it comes to Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth I tend to agree with Marshall about motivations. These settlers were motivated to settle primarily for Christian reasons. This, of course does not rule out the other economic motivations that prompted settlers to come to New England and expand into places such as New Hampshire, Connecticut, and the Massachusetts frontier. Marshall needs to read the works of scholars such as David Cressy, David Jaffee, Stephen Innes, Virginia De John Anderson, and John Frederick Martin that have offered much more sophisticated and nuanced interpretations and revisions of Perry Miller's "errand into the wilderness."

In Pennsylvania, "the best poor man's country in the world," the motivation for settlement was mixed. Yes, Penn did want to establish a "Holy Experiment" that he believed would "advance the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ," but he was also a businessman who saw the colony as an opportunity to make money. And why did people come to Pennsylvania? Some came for religious freedom, some came as indentured servants, but most, including the Quakers, came to accumulate land for themselves and their children. The literature on this is endless, but I still think the best book on the subject is Barry Levy's Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley.

And don't get me started about Virginia. Jamestown was a mercantile colony. The settlers came to strike it rich. As T.H. Breen has put it, they were "looking our for number one." Religion was a factor, but it was not anywhere close to a primary motivation.

Something tells me that such arguments will not deter people like Marshall from continuing to promote ideas like this:

Countless other examples from colonial America may be adduced, but the point is that the discovery, settling, and founding of the colonies happened because of the Biblical worldviews of those involved. Only when this is taken into account can America's founding be properly understood. And, if the cause and effect relationship between people's worldview and their actions is made an integral element of the teaching of history, then the study of American history can become inspirational for our students in regard to the formation of their own lives, rather than simply informational.

More to come...

Evangelicals and the Government Funding of Abortion

Dan Gilgoff at US News and World Report has an interesting piece on his blog about the way moderate evangelicals will respond if Obama's healthcare plan provides government funds to support abortion.

It seems that many moderate and liberal evangelicals who support and advise Obama are not happy about a bill that would fund abortions. Joel Hunter, a member of Obama's faith advisory council, worries that the public funding of abortion will "sink" the bill, but stops short of condeming the bill. In other words, he seems to be talking in purely political terms about it.

David Gushee of Mercer University is a bit more overt. He says that he and other pro-life evangelicals will be "very unhappy" if the healthcare bill provides funding for abortions.

Of course several pro-life Democrats, including John Murtha of Pennsylvania and former Tennessee football star Heath Schuler, are also opposed to the bill based on the possibility that it could allow for the funding of abortions.

Meanwhile the president is hemming and hawing about the issue with Katie Couric, talking about "micromanaging benefits" and "frameworks."

In the end, I am afriad Joel Hunter is correct. If this healthcare bill allows for the funding of abortions it will not pass.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part Six

We continue with our discussion of David Barton's review of the Texas Social Studies standards. This will be our last post on Barton. You can get up to speed by scrolling down on this blog and viewing the previous posts.

After Barton's long section on the Declaration of Independence and the importance of American exceptionalism, he turns to the "Founding Fathers." Barton's primary argument here is that students need to learn about all the so-called "Founding Fathers" and not just the "half-a-dozen individuals" so often discussed when we teach about these great statesmen. He wants to expand the pool to include James Wilson, Roger Sherman, Charles Pinckney, Richard Henry Lee, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, Gouvernor Morris, Thomas McKean, Charles Carroll, Henry Knox, and others.

Fair enough. I think it is important that students learn about some of these lesser known Founders; although it does seem that the Founders Barton wants to add to the mix seem to better suit his political agenda. Daniel Dreisbach, Mark Hall, and Jeffry Morrison are doing some good work on bringing some of these Founders to light. What concerns me about Barton's report is that it is so dominated by politics, government and the "Founders." Perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt. He is reacting to the current standards, which he feels do not give enough attention to the Founders. In this case, he may be right. I will have to go back and check. Nevertheless, as I wrote about in my previous posts in this series, it seems that Barton would be entirely happy to let the lives and careers of the Founding Fathers and the documents that they created be all that school children in Texas learn about American history.

The rest of the document focuses largely on non-history social studies topics--economics, government, the free-market system, etc... Unlike Barton, I do not claim to be an expert on these subjects, so I will not comment on them.

Finally, near the end of the report, Barton has a section on "Heroes of History." Here he gives his opinions about what historical figures should be removed from the standards. I will list some of them here. Peter Marshall makes many of the same recommendations in his report so I will evaluate them more fully in my response to it.

In the grade 5 curriculum he wants to remove Anne Hutchinson.

In the grade 5 curriculum he wants to remove Colin Powell because Powell is a "weak choice for a group representing those 'who have made contributions to society in areas of civil rights, women's rights, military actions, and politics.' " In a paragraph that does not read well, he seems to be promoting the inclusion of Harry Truman as a better choice for this category. Why not keep both of them?

Also in grade 5 he wants to remove Cesar Chavez because of Chavez's connection to Saul Alinsky. Barton does not believe that Chavez is someone "who modeled active participation in the democratic process."

Finally, in grade 5 he wants to remove Carl Sagan from the "notable scientists" section of the standards and replace him with the likes of Wernher von Braun, Matthew Maury, Joseph Henry, Maria Mitchell or David Rittenhouse.

Stay tuned.... Peter Marshall is next.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part Five

We continue with our discussion of David Barton's review of the Texas Social Studies standards. You can get up to speed by scrolling down on this blog and viewing the previous posts.

In the next session of his report, Barton focuses on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Here are his suggestions for change:

1. Students should examine the grievances listed in the Declaration. This examination should go well beyond a discussion of "no taxation without representation" to include all 27 grievances listed in the document. This is a great idea. Students need to know a lot more about the Declaration than what they get from movies like National Treasure. Give them a copy of the Declaration and let them go at it.

2. Students should discuss the sacrifices made by the Founders. What did it mean for the signers of the Declaration to pledge their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor" to this cause. Barton believes that this is important because it will "inculcate the elements of patriotism and citizenship required by law." Again, as I have noted in my previous posts, this is another example of Barton's view that history must always serve patriotism. Nevertheless, any additional information students might learn about the framers and signers seems to be a good thing.

3. Students should pay particular attention to the first 126 words of the Declaration of Independence. By doing so, they will learn that "there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature," "there is a Creator," "The Creator gives to man certain unalienable rights," Government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual," and "Below God-given rights and moral law, government is directed by the consent of the governed."

On the one hand, Barton's over-emphasis on the role of God in the Declaration of Independence could lead to a false understanding of what the document meant in its eighteenth-century context. Barton would like to take a document that was meant to announce American independence to the world and teach it as if it were a theological document. Jefferson and the committee who wrote the Declaration never understood this document to set forth theological or religious principles. Barton needs to take a look at Pauline Maier's American Scripture or David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History .

On the other hand, Barton is right when he suggests that the Founders believed that unalienable rights came from God. Even deists such as Franklin and Jefferson could agree with this. In fact, scholars such as John Witte Jr., Brian Tierney, and Nicholas Wolterstorff have argued that the Western idea of natural rights is rooted more in Christianity than it is the Enlightenment.

4. Students should learn that the Declaration of Independence "is symbiotic with the Constitution rather than a separate unrelated document." This idea is open to interpretation. Akhil Amar has made a similar argument in The Constitution: A Biography, but there are also scholars--such as Woody Holton and Gordon Wood--who have suggested that the Constitution was a way to limit popular democracy in states where the inhabitants seemed to take the democratic ideals of the Declaration of Independence seriously. It seems to me that students should, through the use of primary documents, explore both sides of this debate.

5. Students should understand the concept of "American Exceptionalism." According to Barton,
"students must learn that they have a responsibility to defend and protect the fundamental ideas behind American Exceptionalism if they wish to continue enjoying the prosperity, stability, and freedoms to which we have become accustomed." I am not opposed to students learning that the American experiment has been unique and somewhat exceptional in world history. In fact, students should learn this. But any understanding of American exceptionalism must also: a). include the ways in which America has not measured up to its highest standards and b). avoid the theological pitfall of concluding that somehow America is "exceptional" because it has a special destiny from God as the new Israel.

Stay tuned...

What About Rural Churches?

If for some reason I ever left academia, I would seriously consider putting my divinity school training to good use and become a pastor of a small, rural congregation.

This is why I really like Darryl Hart's recent essay on rural churches. Hart begins with Wendell Berry's observation that rural churches have been the places where young ministers get their training before leaving and heading off to more prestigious congregations in cities or large suburbs.

Hart, summarizing and quoting Berry, writes:

This stems from a two-fold disrespect for rural people. First is the assumption that persons not yet eligible for ministry are qualified to shepherd country folk. The other assumption regards successful ministry as one that occurs in conditions of high modernity, such as big cities. In other words, churches encourage young ministers to leave rural parishes as soon as possible and find a “normal” congregation. According to Berry, “The denominational hierarchies . . . regard country places in exactly the same way as ‘the economy’ does: as sources of economic power to be exploited for the advantage of ‘better’ places.” Rural congregations can’t help but gain the impression that “they do not matter much.” Or as one of Berry’s Christian friends put it, “The soul of the plowboy ain’t worth as much as the soul of the delivery boy.”

Hart makes a convincing argument. Christians are becoming more and more concerned about the environment, organic food, and community agriculture, but seem to value the big churches in heavily populated areas over the rural folk who lives on farms.

He concludes:

But is it wrong to wish that Christians, who have discovered the value of wholesome food and the farming practices that produce it, would translate their choices about diet and carbon footprints into congregations and pastors more circumspect about cities and more respectful of the fly-over sectors of the greatest nation on God’s green earth? I hope not.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part Four

We continue with our discussion of David Barton's review of the Texas Social Studies standards. You can get up to speed by scrolling down on this blog and viewing the previous posts.

In the section of his report on "Social Studies Skills" Barton sounds like a real history teacher. He wants to do away with vague Social Studies "skills" and get the students to think like historians.

If the object of this TEKS is to teach students to use their mind, then propose the type of historic forensic problems utilized by students throughout earlier generations of American history. For example, Robert Troup Paine (1829-1851) recorded that a problem students in his day addressed was "Whether the conduct of the patriots who destroyed the tea in Boston Harbor in 1773 is to be condemned." Answering this question would require an application of the skills delineated in these TEKS.

A similar scenario could be proposed relative to the Fugitive Slave Law and the Underground Railroad; of whether to secede or remain in the United States; of whether to remain in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl or move elsewhere; whether to send troops to the relief of the Alamo or hold them to build a larger army for San Jacinto; or a plethora of other genuine historical debates and dilemmas which require analysis and a use of the mind but which also reinforce a knowledge of history, government, and geography.

As I said in a previous post, there is much we can commend about Barton's concern over the way American history gets taught when it is held captive by "Social Studies."

Barton then moves on to what he calls "Prioritization of Source Content." In their current form, the Texas Social Studies standards suggest that teachers "use a variety of rich material" to teach their subjects. Such material should include biographies, poetry, songs, artwork, novels, speeches, letters, folktales, myths, legends, autobiographies, diaries, "landmark" Supreme Court cases, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Barton is concerned that "poetry, songs and artwork are presented to students 11 times more than "the documents creating the country whose history is being studied." He is also concerned that there is "such an emphasis on sources recording the subjective feelings of specific individuals and so little emphasis on official state papers, organic documents, and governing laws that reflect the will of the nation." He proposes that more focus should be given to documents such as the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, the New England Confederation of 1643, the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, the Constitution of Carolina, the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. (He has similar lists of the kinds of speeches and letters that students should read).

It is clear that Barton has little use for social history. The most important sources are political, legal, and government documents. (I might also add that he favors those specific political, legal, and government documents that speak highly of the place of religion in American life).

He explains:

Students must learn that not all forms of information are equally credible and must be taught from the beginning how to prioritize sources and historical evidence: organic documents are of primary importance, legal and statutory documents next; then informational sources such as diaries, letters, biographies, autobiographies, and news sources; with novels and oral sources being toward the bottom of the list. Furthermore, students must recognize hearsay evidence or journalistic opinions and understand that they are given little weight; and even in documentary history, there are levels of sources, including primary, secondary, and tertiary sources; and confirmation from multiple sources is weightier than that from a single source; and sources "interpreting" history are only speculative opinions that are always less credible than authoritative sources presenting tangible documentable fact.

While I appreciate Barton's concern that students should learn how to think critically about primary sources, I am not sure what to make of his idea that some sources deserve priority over others. Priority based upon what? Again, if the primary goal of studying American history is citizenship, then perhaps such an argument might make sense. But if the primary goal of studying history is to teach a certain way of thinking about the past (see my previous posts in this series), then it would seem that past worlds could be just as easily, if not more easily, reconstructed from the kind of "subjective feelings of specific individuals" that Barton does not like.

He concludes that "poets musicians, or artists should be studied in history--but only if they made significant contributions that helped shape the nation." Barton uses the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley as an example. Barton believes that some of Wheatley's poems are more important than others. Poems expressing her feelings about coming to America are worth studying. Students should also be aware of the fact that George Washington promoted her work. Again, Wheatley is only important for how she connects with the development of the nation-state, the ultimate end of the study of American history. Wheatley is not as important for what she might teach us about African-American history or women's history or eighteenth-century culture.

This is Whig history at its worst. It is an approach to teaching history that fails to expose students to historical actors who did not have some connection to the development of the nation--or at least the nation as Barton understands it.

Pruning the Library

Scot McKnight has an interesting post today about my friend Jon Boyd's attempts to prune his library. I tracked down Jon's original post on the pruning project in which he explains his rationale for removing books from his home library.

Here is the high speed video of Jon at work:

Pruning the Leaves from Jon Boyd on Vimeo.

If you watch carefully enough, you will notice that Jon is getting rid of (or at least moving to a new location on the shelves) some pretty good books. I recognized the following books:

Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America

Earl Cairns, God and Man in Time: A Christian Approach to Historiography

E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521-1680.

I am also glad to see that Jon kept, Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part Three

The reports written by reviewers of the Texas social studies standards are now back up on-line. We thus continue with our discussion of the report by Christian nationalist David Barton. For those who are new to this discussion you can get up to speed here and here and here.

I can largely agree with Barton in his concern that the education of high school teachers is too focused on methodology and not focused enough on content. Barton wants teachers who teach history in Texas to have degrees in history rather than "Social Studies." This seems to be a problem across the country, not just in Texas. Most teachers trained in "Social Studies" only take a few required courses in history. As I noted in my last couple of posts, I think Barton and I might have some disagreement on what schools should be accomplishing with such history courses, but the general principle is a sound one.

In a section of the report entitled "Culture," Barton challenges what he perceives to be a multicultural agenda in the Texas standards. He worries that the standards have changed "E Pluribus Unum" to "E Unum Pluribus." To solve this problem, and at the same time teach students about diversity, Barton suggests that teaching about "those who made significant contributions" to American history will inevitably result in coverage of people "from other cultures."

This sounds good, until Barton illustrates his point:

Therefore, when the story of the Battle of Yorktown is recounted, the famous portrait of Gen. Marquis de Lafayette standing with James Armistead will be shown, showing black and white heroes standing side by side – one, the young white general; the other, the black who was the first double-spy in American history who perhaps shaved months off the Revolution. Similarly, when students see John Trumbull’s Battle of Bunker Hill, they will see black hero Peter Salem (one of the most highly decorated soldiers of that battle) standing by white soldier David Grovesnor – the two fighting side by side. And when the picture of Washington crossing the Delaware is shown, students will see Washington standing in the boat with Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell – two black patriots who served with the general staff throughout the Revolution. Or when students see the famous Chicago statue of Revolutionary War heroes George Washington, Robert Morris, and Haym Salomon, they will see two Christians standing with a Jew, all close friends and compatriots throughout the Revolution. The opportunities are endless, but simply providing an accurate view of history will show students both diversity and culture.

If you focus on the great white male leaders of the past and the events that Barton believes contributed to the establishment and growth of the United States , then historical actors of color or diversity will often pop-up in the narrative--almost like an added bonus. Peter Salem or James Armistead or Haym Solomon make cameo appearances in the stories we tell about American history only when they intersect with a dominant Whig narrative.

It seems to me that if Barton really wants to understand the past through the eyes of God, he would argue that diverse voices and historical actors are important simply because they are human beings created in God's image. This is a bit different than defining who is truly important based upon how they related to George Washington or contributed in some way to a national narrative. Is the culture of native Americans, for example, only important for the ways that they contributed to American independence? Or are their voices worthy of study because they are human beings?

Of course if you believe that the United States is exceptional or God's chosen people, then I guess you would place more emphasis on those people who had a more direct role in creating and sustaining the Godly republic or the "Christian nation." They would, after all, be God's specially anointed servants.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on the web that caught my eye this week.

Why Sunday Schools are closing.

Stan Katz: Getting history right.

Obama's dinner with American historians.

Bill McClay offers a short and informative course on Reinhold Niebuhr.

Philip Jenkins on the split in the Episcopal Church.

John L. Jackson on Pat Buchanan and Sotomayor

History as literature.

Front Porch Republic symposium on Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft.

Kathy Sprows Cummings on American Catholic sisters.

David Kennedy reviews Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: On the Uses and Abuses of History.

This looks like an interesting book on "Fordlandia."

Why is "Caritas in Veritate" so poorly written? Peter Steinfels explains.

Wampum belts of faith.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part Two.

In part one of my analysis of David Barton's report on the Texas Social Studies standards I tried to argue that students need to study history for reasons that are not solely connected to citizenship.

We both seem to agree that history has the potential to develop character traits in students, but Barton believes that history develops character through the kinds of historical subjects and figures that students study. I argued in my last post that it is actually the practice of doing history, regardless of the subject matter, that builds character in students and has the power to truly educate and transform them.

Let's return to this point as we take a look at the next section of Barton's report:

Barton believes that history offers training in citizenship by teaching students the following virtues:

Courage; trustworthiness, honesty, reliability, punctuality, and loyalty; integrity; respect and courtesy; responsibility, accountability, diligence, perseverance, and self-control; fairness, justice and freedom from prejudice; caring, kindness, empathy, compassion, consideration, patience, generosity, and charity; good citizenship, patriotism, concern for the common good and the community, and respect for authority and the law.

Amen. I hope that all students might learn these virtues from the study of history. "Respect and courtesy," for example, can be gleaned by learning about fellow human beings from the past--even those with whom we disagree. History teaches "empathy" for people who are different than us. Can a twenty-first century history student show empathy when studying a nineteenth-century slaveholder? I hope so. And yes, history can teach "a concern for the common and the community." By taking us into a world that is not our own, history forces us to leave the present and see ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves. Isn't this the bedrock principle behind any definition of "community?"

But, as I noted above, Barton believes that these kinds of virtues can only be cultivated through the study of the people who exemplify them. Since the real power of history for Barton is in students modeling themselves after heroic and virtuous figures then it certainly makes sense that he wants to pack the Texas curriculum with these kinds of historical actors. He thus advocates removing certain figures from the curriculum based upon their immoral behavior. Their lives do not exemplify the kinds of virtues he wants students to learn.

This, of course, is a blatant whitewashing of the past based upon Barton's own sense of morality. Who gets to choose which figures are worthy of emulation? Granted, I do not want my children spending two weeks studying the history of serial killers, but I do think that they can learn something about courage from exploring the life of Anne Hutchinson, one of the figures who Barton wants to eliminate. Or consider Barton's recommendation to remove Cesar Chavez from the standards. Certainly the people who named several dozen Texas schools after this labor leader must have thought that he was a person from the past who kids should look up to.

And even if one agrees with the basic tenets of Barton's Christian faith and thinks that Christian theology should find its way into school history textbooks, it would seem that such a theology might also include the role of human sin in American society. If Hutchinson and Chavez were, as Barton seems to be implying, sinners who operated in history outside the will of God, does this mean that students should not study them?

But all of this misses the point. In the end, Barton's understanding of the place of history in the school curriculum fails to understand the real power of history in educating students. Students do not learn virtue by modeling themselves after historical figures as much as they learn virtue through the act of doing history.

ADDENDUM: This, unfortunately, may be my last post analyzing the reports of the these Texas curriculum reviewers. Someone has removed the reports from Internet and I did not print them out. Hmmm.... If anyone has copies they can send me I would appreciate it.

David Barton on the Texas Social Studies Standards: Part One

As I wrote about in my last post, the Texas Department of Education is revising their social studies standards. One of the outside reviewers, appointed by the conservative members of the Board, is David Barton, the president of Wallbuilders, an organization that promotes the idea that America is a Christian nation. Barton is not a historian by training, but thousands of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians learn their history from him.

Barton begins his report with a jeremiad we have all heard before. He laments the fact that schoolchildren do not know some of the basic facts of American history, such as who led the Continental Army at Valley Forge or who said "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death." Barton suggests that students do not possess this basic knowledge because history is too often taught under the umbrella of Social Studies. Drawing upon "No Child Left Behind," Barton wants students to study American history as a separate subject apart from "Social Studies."

Barton is right. History should be taught as a separate subject. Students do not get enough history during their K-12 years. But I think students should learn more history for reasons that are bit different than Barton's.

For Barton, American history is necessary to develop good citizens. While this is certainly one of the benefits of the study of our nation's past, I am not convinced it is the primary reason why history is so important to the school curriculum. History is important because it forces us to think differently. As Sam Wineburg has noted, historical thinking is an unnatural act. It requires students to encounter the strangeness of the past and in the process aids them in learning virtues such as empathy, hospitality, and self-denial. When a student engages an idea from the past that he or she disagrees with, good historical thinking requires them to listen first before casting judgment. Listening to the voices of the past can tranform and truly educate students by turning their attention away from themselves and their present moment and seeing themselves as part of a larger human story.

By focusing on the "citizenship" dimension of history we can too easily get caught up in picking and choosing the "right" people to include in the curriculum. Or we can get bogged down with the ways the past serves us and our understanding of national identity. When we study the past solely for its usability in the present, we find ourselves falling into the very "Social Studies" approach that Barton decries. The study of the past teaches students to enter the foreign worlds of different eras. The best teachers help their students imagine the past through primary sources. They lead them into the strangeness of the past and teach them to listen.

If this is the purpose of history, then memorization, historical literacy, and the selection of the "right" figures to include in the curriculum become less important than the teaching of historical thinking skills.

Stay tuned...

History and the Texas Board of Education

A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicles the debate taking place over history standards in Texas. (See commentary here and here). It seems that the Texas Board of Education is revamping their social studies curriculum and they have called upon some "experts" to help them. The conservatives on the board (which, according to the Journal article, are in the majority) have nominated three outside evaluators to critique the existing standards and suggest changes. None of these reviewers are historians. Daniel Driesbach, a professor of public affairs at American University, is a well-respected scholar of religion and the American founding era. The other two reviewers, David Barton and Peter Marshall, are not scholars. Barton is the president and founder of Wallbuilders, an organization designed to promote the idea that America is a Christian nation. Marshall, a New England evangelical minister, is the co-author of The Light and the Glory, a very popular providential history of the United States.

The reports of all three of these men, along with the reports of the three historians chosen by the moderate and liberal members of the Board, are available on-line at the Texas Education Agency website.

Since I am at work on a book about Christian America, I thought it might be useful to blog a bit about these reports. Stay tuned.

New Review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home

The June 2009 issue of Church History is running a nice review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home by Kerry Walters, the chair of the philosophy department at Gettysburg College. Walters writes:

Readers primarily interested in the history of Christianity in late colonial America will find Fea's analysis of orthodoxy and the Enlightenment especially interesting. Fea resists oversimplifying the occasionally compatible but usually uneasy relationship between the two. Because of the hold of Christianity on colonial culture, the Enlightenment never gained a secure foothold in the popular mind (although in the first fifty years of the young Republic, Enlightenment-inspired deism gave Christianity a run for its money). But the influence of the enlightened ethos on the Christian worldview was nevertheless profound, giving rise, as Fea writes, to "compromises between world citizenship and local attachments, and between Christianity and the modern age" that eventually culminated in the emergence of American civil religion (215, 214). Thanks to Fea's careful study, the Presbyterian who called Cohansey home becomes one of our "best windows into the way the Enlightenment in America was lived" (215).

Author Fea, who teaches at a college geographically close to the Upper Susquehanna Valley where Fithian traveled and preached in mid-1775, writes of his subject with eloquence, insight, and obvious affection (he refers to Fithian by his first name throughout the book). The book is well documented, with 35 pages of finely printed endnotes, and is illustrated. One of the most fascinating illustrations is a chalk drawing of Fithian, apparently drawn toward the end of his life. The sketch is disconcerting, revealing a young man with intense, wide-open eyes and determined, pursed lips. It is the face of someone accustomed to living with unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, loyalties.

Carter's "Malaise" Speech

Today is the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter's famous "Crisis of Confidence" speech (referred to by many as the "malaise speech" despite the fact that Carter did not use the "m" word in the speech).

In 1979 the United States was in crisis. Gas lines were long, interest rates were high, and the country was defined by a decadence and narcissism that was seen most clearly in the disco culture of New York's "Studio 54." Jimmy Carter's popularity was at an all- time low. On July 15th Carter told the American people that sacrifice was needed. He spoke with a Niebuhrian sense of realism and human limitation and chided Americans for their "worship" of "self-indulgence and consumption." Carter wanted Americans to see that the nation had problems that ran far deeper than the energy crisis. He urged them to consider a form of happiness and human flourishing that did not require the piling up of material goods. It was a speech unlike any other. It was a reflection on the American condition.

The commentary on the thirtieth anniversary of the speech has been mixed. Gordon Stewart, one of the speech's co-authors, reflects on the events surrounding the speech. He concludes that Carter "insisted on the realities of responsibility and the need for radical change." Marty Peretz says that the speech was "pathetic." Damon Linker describes it as Carter's "kick me" sign. Chris Matthews thinks Carter was "dead on."

To commemorate the anniversary of the speech, I took a break from early America and read Kevin Mattson's excellent narrative history of the speech: What the Heck Are You Up to Mr. President: Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country. Instead of listening to blogging pundits like Linker or Peretz who thoughtlessly rant about the speech from their own political point of view, read Mattson's book for a sustained analysis of the speech and its meaning. Mattson argues that Carter's speech was a success.
Positive letters and phone calls poured into the White House in the days following the speech. Carter's approval ratings went up 11% on July 16th. The speech could very well have changed the nation if Carter had not undermined the success of the speech by firing his cabinet several days later. According to Mattson, "Americans might have been able to take a tough speech about the state of their country and the energy crisis, but they couldn't take a complete shakedown of the government at the same time."

The speech has received largely negative criticism because it was used as a foil for Carter's political opponents. The speech's call for sacrifice and limits ran counter to Ted Kennedy's liberal optimism and Ronald Reagan's conservative optimism. As Mattson writes: "Our memory of the speech comes from those who reworked it, who twisted its words into a blunt instrument that helped them depose a president." Mattson notes how Reagan used the speech to his political advantage, defending a political philosophy that offered "the right to dream 'heroic dreams' without sacrifice." While Carter talked about the "fallibility" of America, Reagan believed that "fallibility only meant defeatism." "There was no place in his world," Mattson writes, "for sin or self-inquisition." Reagan's promised "a combination of guttural self-interest mixed with a utopian vision of the future," a vision "that Carter could never offer..."

In the end, Mattson's Carter is not a very good politician. Carter tended to side with cultural critics such as Daniel Bell, Christopher Lasch, and Reinhold Niebuhr (Bell and Lasch were consulted prior to the speech) in the belief that the problems facing civil society could not be solved by government or politics. Such an approach to culture does not usually win elections. The American people were not ready for this kind of message and, frankly, they never have been or will be. While the "malaise speech" did not help him win re-election in 1980, it did teach Carter that true change must happen on the ground. As Mattson shows, Carter lived out his ideas in this speech through the multitude of service projects and civic programs he participated in and sponsored after he left office.

Carter's speech will remain one of the best presidential speeches in American history because of the courage it took to deliver it. Carter may not have been a great president, but this was a great speech--an exercise in truth-telling. Mattson is right--it could have changed America. Perhaps it still can.

Way of Improvement Leads Home Receives Honor

I recently received word that The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America has been designated a 2009 Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

Each year the NJCH awards a book prize to the best book on a New Jersey subject or by a New Jersey author. The runners-up are designated as "Honor Books." This year's winner was Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello. I will join professor Gordon-Reed and the other Honor Book winners for a book signing at that NJCH annual October Awards Event at the Montclair Art Museum in October.

Ft. Collins Evangelicalism

We are on our way home from a brief trip to Ft. Collins, CO where I did a seminar on the roots of American evangelicalism. The people of the Faith Evangelical Free Church who attended the seminar were very engaged with the subject.

On the first night I discussed the First Great Awakening. I concentrated mostly on the definition of evangelicalism, the role of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, and the impact of the Awakening on eighteenth-century British-America. As expected, the audience was quite interested in this subject.

I started the next day with a session on whether or not America was founded as a Christian nation. I was not sure what to expect from this fairly conservative and very evangelical congregation, but the people were gracious and many of them seemed to agree with what I presented. There were a few "pro-Christian America" types in the audience, but they responded to my lecture with much civility.

I ended the seminar with a session on the way American evangelicalism accommodated to the democratic and market culture of the early republic. We discussed things like "church shopping," the changes that Charles Finney brought to revivalism, and Nathan Hatch's thesis in The Democratization of American Christianity.

Thanks to Ryan Kelly of the "Faith-LED" ministry for inviting me to come and conduct this seminar.

I hope to do more seminars like this in the future in conjunction with my forthcoming book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Primer for Christians. (Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), so if your church might be interested in such a presentation don't hesitate to contact me.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my attention this week:

Mark Bauerlein on how conservatives lost the environmentalist movement.

Bill Gates should start his own university.

Terry Eagleton vs. Atheism

Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin.

Sterling Fluharty on history books

Gordon Wood reviews Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.

Damon Linker on Calvinism and American exceptional ism. Richard Mouw and the "two John Calvins"

A new age of conservative thinkers.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

D0es our global economy need the ethical underpinnings of Catholicism?

Of Papal Medals and Commencement Speeches

Is receiving a papal medal from the Pope any different than giving a commencement speech and receiving an honorary doctorate from a Catholic university? I honestly don't know. (Someone out there please help me on this one).

On Friday, Barack Obama met with Benedict XVI in the Vatican City. As expected, Benedict made the Church's views on abortion and stem-cell research abundantly clear. Obama expressed his desire to reduce the number of abortions and, according to Vatican reports, Benedict seemed to be pleased about this.

The meeting took place three days after Benedict issued Caritas in Veritate, his first social encyclical. Those on the Catholic left have been talking about the progressive flavor of this encyclical. E.J. Dionne writes that the Pope is "well to Obama's left on economics." After reading the encyclical, it is hard to argue otherwise.

But I am still curious. What is the difference between the Pope giving a politician a papal medal and a Catholic University, such as Notre Dame, inviting a politician to speak and giving him an honorary doctorate? Mark Silk at Spiritual Politics asks the same question.

In the meantime, here are a few reflections on the Obama-Benedict meeting and a few more on Caritas in Veritate.

Francis Beckwith, an evangelical convert to Catholicism, at Christianity Today.

Joseph Bottom's analysis of the encyclical has now reached ten installments.

Christopher Blosser has a great list of links to commentary on the encyclical. (Come on Christopher, how about a shout out!).

Steve Waldman on Obama's promise to reduce abortions.

Boston Herald on the letter Obama delivered to the Pope from Ted Kennedy.

John L. Allen discusses the meeting at the New York Times.

Private School Teaching vs.College Teaching

Over at Inside HigherEd, Kevin Brown has an interesting short essay on the virtues of teaching at an independent high school. In this economy, with the academic job market what it is, Brown presents the private school as a legitimate option for those with a Ph.D who cannot find work in a traditional college setting.

As someone who taught for a year at an independent boarding school and lived at one for seven years, I can affirm much of what Brown has to say. Indeed, the classes are small and the students are bright. The class-sizes were definitely smaller than the classes at the college where I currently teach. I taught AP United States history to some very bright students. I was teaching the US survey course at the same time across the street at the big research university and it was obvious that my boarding school kids were better students--much better students. They not only showed up every day, but they had done the reading assignment and were prepared to discuss it.

The salary was not very good at the independent boarding school where I taught and where my wife worked for seven years as a director of residential life and associate dean of students, but we did live in a spacious apartment on campus, had all of our meals provided for us, and were given a very generous benefits. I was told that our entire package was worth, in the mid-1990s, about $60,000 a year.

Brown talks about the limited research time that is available at an independent school. He is right. You will not have time to work on research projects during the academic year. But, frankly, those who teach at colleges with 4-4 teaching loads really do not have much time to pursue research during the academic year either.

I can also relate to what Brown calls the "drawbacks" of teaching at independent schools. There was a brief moment when I considered looking for a job in this type of school, but I soon realized that the independent school--in this case the boarding school--demands a much greater time commitment than does the college teaching job. Boarding schools like to talk about their faculty being "triple threats." In other words, they want someone who can teach five days a week, coach one or two sports a year, and live in the dormitories.

In the end, the level of commitment was too much for me. I had a few job offers at colleges and decided to take one of them. Moreover, I was never completely comfortable working and living with kids of privilege who believed that they were entitled to just about everything. The life of blue blazers, bow ties, and mandatory dinners was just not for me.

Brown is right. The independent/boarding school is not for everyone, but I know many good teachers and scholars who have found it to be a very satisfying and fulfilling place to live out an academic vocation.

Exploring the Roots of American Evangelicalism

I am in Ft. Collins, Colorado this weekend. I have been invited by the Faith Evangelical Free Church to lead a two-day seminar entitled "Exploring the Roots of American Evangelicalism." I am thrilled that an evangelical church is willing to sponsor such a workshop for their congregation. Evangelicals, as Mark Noll has reminded us, do not normally gravitate towards these kinds of topics.

Here is the schedule of lectures:

Friday, July 10
7-8:30pm: "The First Great Awakening and the Birth of American Evangelicalism"

Saturday, July 11
8:30-10:00am: "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?"

10:30am-12:00: "How Did Evangelicalism Become America's Religion?"

Caritas in Veritate

Benedict's much awaited encyclical, CARITAS IN VERITATE, has now appeared. Those expecting a light pastoral read will not find it here. This is Benedict the public intellectual and social critic at work. Here are some of the key themes:

INTRODUCTION:

• Charity is at the heart of the Church's social doctrine.
• Justice is inseparable from charity
• The common good requires justice and charity.
  

CHAPTER ONE

• Without "the perspective of eternal life, human progress... runs the risk of being reduced to the mere accumulation of wealth..."
• There is a strong connection between the Church's teaching on human life and the Church's teaching on social ethics.
• Much of the encylical was a memorial to Paul VI 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, perhaps the most progressive of all modern papal encyclicals.
• The progress or development of society must be connected to an understanding of Christian vocation or what Christians are called to do in this world.
• Globalization undermines Christian brotherhood (and sisterhood?). True human communion is only possible through God's grace.

CHAPTER TWO

• Profit cannot be the exclusive goal of an economy. The common good must be the ultimate end of any economy.
• The downsizing of social security programs will lead to "grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State."
• Governments should not limit the freedom of labor unions to negotiate. Unions and other worker's associations should be respected and honored.
• "Uncertainty over working conditions caused by mobility and deregulation," undermines the family.
• Economic institutions must be created to deal with shortages of food and clean water around the world.
• Governments must invest in rural infrastructures and agrarian reform since food and water are "universal rights of all human beings."
• Infant mortality rates must be lowered by alleviating poverty.
• When a state promotes atheism "it deprives its citizens of the moral and spiritual strength that is indispensable for attaining integral human development."

CHAPTER THREE

• Modern man "is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society. This is a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself, and it is a consequence — to express it in faith terms — of original sin."
• The Church's wisdom has always pointed to the presence of original sin in social conditions and in the structure of society
• The present economy is an example of the influence of original sin.
• Human beings "confuse happiness and salvation with immanent forms of material prosperity...In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom, and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise. "
• The Church has "unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy."
• "Grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution."
• The civil order needs intervention from the State for purposes of redistribution.

CHAPTER FOUR

• Individual human rights presuppose duty to society.
• Affluent societies have a duty to address problems such as food shortages, water contamination, education, and health care.
• Companies need to be created that are "oriented towards social welfare, and the diversified world of the so-called 'civil economy' and the 'economy of communion'."
• "The environment is God's gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole. "
• Nature is not "something more" than the human person. To think otherwise is paganism.
• Natural resources are "squandered" by wars.

CHAPTER FIVE

• Isolation is a form of poverty. "The development of peoples depends, above all, on a recognition that the human race is a single family working together in true communion, not simply a group of subjects who happen to live side by side." Humans establish their worth "in relation to God and others.".
• Citizens should get to decide how to allocate a portion of the taxes they pay to the State.
• Migrants are human persons who "possesses fundamental, inalienable rights that must be respected by everyone and in every circumstance."
• Reform of the United Nations so that is can help to accomplish much of what was said in this encyclical.

CHAPTER SIX: TECHNOLOGY

• Technology must be used in an ethically responsible way.

The commentary has been trickling in. (After all, it does take time to read this document--all 30,000 words). I expect to see more pieces related to the encyclical later today. The folks at Commonweal and First Things have set up pages with links to analysis. As expected, those on the left love Caritas Vertitate and those on the Right have a few problems with it.

The conservative Catholic and John Paul II biographer George Weigel's response to the encyclical in National Review On-Line is the most interesting. Weigel argues that the progressive aspects of Caritas in Veritate were influenced by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the group of Catholics in the Vatican who Weigel claims are bitter about John Paul II's refusal to celebrate the anniversary of Paul VI's Populorum Progressio. According to Weigel, Benedict needed to pay homage to the views of the Council in order to keep the peace in the Vatican. The result was a "hybrid" document. Weigel thinks that the sections of the encyclical that he attributes to the Council are unclear, poorly written, and out of character for Benedict. It should not be surprising that the parts of the encyclical that deal with life issues and the relationship between faith and reason reflect the true, untainted thought of Benedict. It is those sections--interestingly enough the sections that conform to the free-market capitalism of Weigel's brand of conservative Catholicism--that Catholics should take to heart. Weigel puts it this way:

Benedict XVI, a truly gentle soul, may have thought it necessary to include in his encyclical these multiple off-notes, in order to maintain the peace within his curial household. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will concentrate their attention, in reading Caritas in Veritate, on those parts of the encyclical that are clearly Benedictine, including the Pope’s trademark defense of the necessary conjunction of faith and reason and his extension of John Paul II’s signature theme — that all social issues, including political and economic questions, are ultimately questions of the nature of the human person.

As Mark Silk puts it over at Spiritual Politics: "In short, ignore all that stuff Weigel disagrees with. Let's hear it for the Conservative Catholic Cafeteria!"

ADDENDUM: Check out this parody of Weigel's piece. Also, Tim Lacy has called my attention to this response to Weigel's piece by Michael Sean Winters.

It also looks like Barack Obama and Benedict will have a lot to talk about, and agree upon, when they meet this week. If Obama is a socialist (which he is not), then so is Benedict (which he is not).

Religion in Jamestown

I have been doing some reading today on religion in colonial Jamestown, the first successful British colony in America. When it comes to the influence of Christianity on colonial settlement, Jamestown is usually interpreted as the anti-New England. If New England was founded on the bedrock of Puritan theology and culture, Jamestown was a place where religion did not play a prominent role in colonization. Thousands of AP US history students and college freshmen have written essays contrasting Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, an assignment that only feeds the common notion that religion was unimportant in early Virginia.

Yet, as I read some of the early laws from the Jamestown settlement I was struck not by the differences in religious development between Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown, but by their similarities. Both colonies were founded, at least on paper, to spread the Christian gospel to the native Americans. Both colonies had established churches--Anglican in Virginia; Puritan Congregational in Massachusetts. Both colonies understood their colonial experiments in terms of covenant theology. (Although the notion of "covenant" was certainly stronger in New England). If they were obedient to God's commands, God would bless them. If they were not obedient, God would withhold his blessing. Both colonies tended to interpret natural disasters or Indian invasions as signs of God's punishment.

Religion and the state were closely wed in both colonies. Both colonies mandated church attendance and punished sins such as adultery, fornication, and slander. Both colonial governments treated dissenters harshly. We are well aware of New England's track record on this front. Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, Baptists, and Quakers were all banished from the colony for their dissenting viewpoints. But the government of Jamestown could be just as harsh. Roman Catholic priests, for example, were not permitted to stay in the colony for more than five days. When Puritans from New England arrived in Virginia in the 1640s the House of Burgesses passed laws forbidding Puritan ministers from settling in the colony and forcing Puritan laypersons to conduct worship with the Book of Common Prayer. When Quakers arrived at the same time, a law was passed requiring them to be arrested without bail and held in prison until they agreed to leave the colony. When we think about religious dissenters in Virginia the eighteenth-century Baptists usually come to mind, but the persecution of dissenters in the colony started much earlier.

Though religion did not permeate the culture of colonial Virginia in the way that it did in New England, neither was Virginia an entirely secular place in the seventeenth century.

NOTE: Let me recommend two excellent sources on the culture and values of colonial Virginia. The first is Edward L. Bond's Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Mercer, 2000). Bond's book has not received the attention it deserves. This is an excellent and well-crafted study of religion in Jamestown and beyond. The first chapter makes a compelling case that religious life in early Virginia was characterized more by government enforced behavior than personal belief. The other source is T.H. Breen's essay "Looking Our for Number One: Conflicting Cultural Values in Early Seventeenth-Century Virginia." It is the best thing I have ever read on the individualistic culture of early Jamestown Though it was published in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 1979, I still assign it to my students.

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things on-line that caught my attention this past week:

The Bebbington quadrilateral is under attack.

Sean Wilentz reviews some new books on Lincoln.

Peter Steinfels on John Calvin.

Financial advice from Abigail Adams.

H.W. Brands reviews Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

R.R. Reno: Nice little piece on localism and cosmopolitanism and the buzz it has created.

A year with the Harvard Classics--all five feet of them.

Is Wendell Berry going to jail?

The American Revolution Center is moving to Philadelphia.

The cool historians.

The July issue of Common-Place is up.

Religion in American History blog has a new look.

Wilfred McClay on grit.

Barack Obama: Cosmopolitan.

A reflection on the life of Wallace Stegner.

Top 400 universities on the planet.

Marie Arana reviews John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington.

Wither early American women's history? Historiann reports from the Omohundro conference.

More historians are studying religion than any other category. At least this is what the AHA reports. Randall Stephens offers some commentary.

Fourth of July Op-Eds

Here are some reflections on July 4th, courtesy of this weekend's national newspapers and other outlets.

The New York Times offers three op-eds related to this patriotic season. Kathleen DuVal examines the way the American Revolution impacted Indians and slaves. Adam Freedman shows how the American Revolution cast British traditions in a new mold. John McCurdy on our bachelor founders.

The New Republic is running several old essays on the Founding Fathers, from Charles Beard to Gordon Wood.

William Bennett and John Cribb sing the praises of the Declaration of Independence.

Silvio Lacetti laments the loss of historical places to development.

Washington Post editorial: The rebellious opportunistic spirit of Americans.

Vic Henningson on what kind of government the Founders really wanted.

The Wall Street Journal celebrates David McCullough. (With a great shot of him working in his writing shed!).

Susan Jacoby reviews Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism.

Peter de Bolla on some "small falsehoods" about the Fourth of July.

An encrypted message to Thomas Jefferson is cracked.

Garrison Keillor: Unalienable rights include a decent potato salad.

Finding a Sense of Place in Arlington, Virginia

Patrick Deneen has posted this hilarious video over at Front Porch Republic.

More on the Pope's Yet to Be Released Encyclical

Debate continues to rage between conservative and progressive Catholics over the meaning of a papal encyclical, "Charity in Truth," that is yet to be released. (Perhaps early next week, according to most reports). Hat tip to my colleague Jim LaGrand for passing along this piece from Fr. Robert Sirico which appeared today on the National Review Online. Fr. Sirico, who is the president and co-founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religious Liberty, issues a very reasonable message of "let's wait and see" to progressives eager to use the encyclical to gain political points in the battle to define the Catholic church in America:

Will the document draw attention to the weaknesses of Western-style capitalist systems? One hopes so. We might expect the pope to call on market forces to be regulated by moral concerns, within a strong juridical framework, and an exogenous apparatus of standards to curb excesses. But here is the operative question: In what sense would such a call be a blow against the idea of free economic institutions? The short answer is that it will not be.

I think Sirico is probably correct here. At least this is what one Italian newspaper is reporting. But who knows? I guess bloggers like me who continue to write about this encyclical need to take Sirico's advice and be patient.

He continues:

On the one hand (doctrine, liturgy, and sexual morality), progressives tend to take dissenting positions from defined and binding Church teaching. On the other hand (economic and social policy), they want to boast of the Church’s "best kept secret," especially to the extent that they think it coheres with any number of secular-left platforms, while ignoring those aspects of Catholic social teaching that clearly don’t fit the leftist nostrums.

It is quite a spectacle to see Catholic progressives — who in other circumstances contort themselves into exegetical pretzels when they want to undermine clear, emphatic, authoritative, and repeated magisterial prohibitions on same-sex relations, female “priests,” and contraceptive acts — morph into virtual Ultramontanists on prudential matters such as the precise level of a minimum wage.

I wonder if when it comes to ignoring those aspects of Catholic social teaching that don’t fit its agenda the Catholic right is just as guilty as the left. There does seem to be a side to Catholic social teaching, especially as it relates to workers, that we might legitimately call "progressive." I subscribe to First Things, but I do not see much of this side of Catholic social thought being defended on its pages. (I am more than willing to be corrected on this).

I should also give kudos here to one of my readers, Tim Lacy, for his prophetic insight. In response to my last post on this subject, Lacy wrote:

I can tell already that I'm going to be amused by the gymnastics of pro-market theory, hard-right U.S. Catholics who try to dismiss this as the pope merely speculating, as is his right as the leader of the Church (i.e. an encyclical is not ex cathedra, so not binding teaching). They will say that Catholics are free to agree-disagree here. It's their modus operandi.

Compare Lacy's comment to Sirico's words:

Let us be clear: The Church explicitly makes no such claims of infallibility on those policy matters that it considers a matter for prudential judgment (i.e., most policy issues) but allows for Catholics to hold a variety of viewpoints on such questions such as the exact size of the state’s share of the economy. Clearly no Catholic can be an anarchist or a communist — but there is a lot of room for prudential disagreement within these parameters. Benedict XVI has followed the model of John Paul II in saying that the Church has no infallible model of political economy to impose on the world.

Good job, Tim. You called it.

Finally, Sirico warns about getting too loose with the way we use the term capitalism:

I am not sure who such conservative defenders of "unbridled capitalism based on greed" are supposed to be. I think it is a fair prediction to say that any pope would come out against any system "based on greed."

But again I wonder if the entire system of capitalism is not inherently based on greed. Isn't it redundant to use the term "greedy capitalism?" I appeal again to my last post where I questioned Michael Novak's assertion that the great American capitalists of the nineteenth and twenty centuries were driven less by greed than the "sheer romance of conquering the deserts and the Rockies." I remind you of the words of "Chris," one of the commentators on Novak's original blog post: "The radically self interested individual, rationally seeking his own material comfort; scarcity; unlimited desire for consumption. None of these are things that Catholics can believe in if we take seriously the church's teachings, and yet every economic model is premised on their being true as a matter of fact." (I think Chris would be pleased to learn that I just picked up a copy of William T. Cavanaugh's Being Consumed. I hope to read it, and perhaps blog on it, soon).

I remain a capitalist for many of the same reasons that Michael Novak remains a capitalist. It seems to be the only economic system that celebrates the creativity and dignity of the human person. But I also agree with John Paul II when he wrote in the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) that "The Church's social doctrine adopts a critical attitude towards both liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism.” (BTW, I just found a 1988 piece from the New York Times where William Safire blasts this encyclical). The kind of corporate, consumer-driven capitalism that we currently have today in the United States tends to undermine many things that Christians (and many non-Christians) hold dear, not the least of which are family and community. I hope that this is something we can all agree upon.

If you have managed to read this far, please let me know where I have gone wrong.