Can One Be Both A Historian and A Person of Faith? ...
In a review of Holifield's work for Books and Culture, however, Penn's Bruce Kuklick puts a challenge to the whole enterprise. He notes that these Protestant historians have dodged the revolution brought on by Darwin and Higher Criticism."For committed Christian historians to give anything like what they believe to be an adequate analysis of Darwin and the Higher Criticism requires that the scholars draw on their living faith," he writes;
this is not permitted in the secular academy. Readers of Books & Culture may have noted the same fearfulness if they have read George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards (2003) or Mark Noll's America's God (2002). These two outstanding volumes similarly dodge around without tackling secular presuppositions that pervade the writing of professional history but that might be appropriately examined in their books.Kuklick's challenge puts the issues quite fairly. The"axioms of secular, ‘critical,' history" may not be altogether coherent. In the last generation, history as a discipline has grown more tolerant of biases of various kinds. But faith is no mere bias. It moves from premises beyond mere bias and it is by no means obvious that one can write history faithfully any more than one can write history objectively.
The principles of Christian, and more specifically, Protestant scholarship, especially in the field of history, fit uncomfortably with the premises of the academy today. We are not consciously allowed to display bias as professional historians, but when work is analyzed and bias turns up, it is conceded that it may be inevitable, and in any event the assumption is that ongoing inquiry will uncover it—if not immediately then in the future. But the display of faith as a mechanism of explanation is not allowed at all. It is mistaken (and degrading), however, for the faithful to argue that faith is a form of bias, and that mainstream historians only exhibit their hegemonic blinders when they rule it out. Faith is different from bias. For one thing it concerns the supernatural world, and not the natural. And just because it is faith, ongoing inquiry will not falsify it—that is the whole idea of faith. Reflective historians began to recognize this more than 150 years ago; that is what the Higher Criticism—to which Holifield does not attend—is about. But he also ignores that the victory of the Higher Critics left many problems about the nature of the past and of history unresolved. It is by no means clear that the axioms of secular," critical," history are coherent.
With the rise of committed history over the last generation, the response of Protestant thinkers has been awkwardly and nervously to adopt many of the secular conventions on offer. Yet the kind of history they have written—they must know in their heart of hearts—avoids confronting the deepest issues of their faith, indeed denies that these issues are relevant to history. It may be that the contemporary collegiate world is not the place for robustly Protestant historians. But if it is, it may be that they need to rethink their connection to what happened in the intellectual history of the United States in the last part of the 19th century.
Update: Bruce Kuklick writes in (Kuklick to Luker, 03/23/04) to accept"honorary" or"associate" membership in the"evangelical mafia" and notes that, prior to Kazin's critique, he was highly critical of Zinn's text for ignoring religion in a piece in The Nation, 24 May 1980, 634 ff. The Little Professor offers an extended gloss on this discussion here.