"Does American religious history have a center?" reflections.

Williams, Peter W.

The three essays presented in this session raise issues that remind me of two classic representations of the problem of interpretation. In the Japanese film Rashomon, four differing and incompatible accounts of the same event are presented by the central characters, leaving the viewer to wonder which, if any, is the "true" version. Similarly, in the "Doubloon" chapter of Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Ahab nails a Spanish gold coin to the mast as a potential reward for the first man to spot the white whale; subsequently, each member of the crew gazes at the doubloon and falls into his own unique chain of associations that it evokes. Each of these fictional situations evokes the dilemma of the historian in general and the religious historian in particular: how can I deliver an accurate, persuasive, and satisfying account of my material, given the inevitable differences in perception and value that separate me not only from my professional peers but from the vast numbers of individuals and groups whose account might well be different from mine? As Stephen Stein indicates, the dilemma is not purely "academic," since our students expect a coherent narrative from us, and will inevitably go away frustrated if we simply give them fragments that seem to form no discernible whole.

The roots of this difficult quest for narrative wholeness are themselves historical, and a brief glance at their development might be illuminating. Most writing about religion in America, from Cotton Mather to Leonard Bacon, has been very much in the mode of church history, written by and for members of a particular worshiping community--whether defined narrowly as, say, Methodists, or more broadly as evangelical Protestants. (Mather's Magnalia, in fact, might be more strongly described as Heilsgeschichte, or "providential history.") During the earlier decades of the twentieth century, telling the story of American religious development became more professional, as in William Warren Sweet's accounts of westward expansion, with a vigorous nod towards the "secular" historiographical emphases of Frederick Jackson Turner and his "frontier thesis." Catholics and Jews began to produce similar accounts and documentary collections for their own constituencies, but held aloof by some combination of choice and necessity from contributing to broader syntheses. Native American religion was the domain of ethnology, African Americans were studied primarily by sociologists, and Asian Americans were scarcely a blip on the religious radar screen; their traditions were the province of practitioners of Religionswissenschaft--comparative religion or history of religions--who focused on the Asian rather than the North American scene.

One of the first ambitious and influential examples of a comprehensive, professionally written history was Winthrop Hudson's Religion in America, originally published in 1965 and since then reissued in several newer editions updated by John Corrigan. Although Hudson consciously attempted to be inclusive, the interpretive framework which underlay the work of this Baptist seminary professor becomes clearer in the title of another of his works, The Great Tradition of the American Churches of 1953. More irenic treatments of the subject by Martin Marty and the "two Si/ydneys"--Ahlstrom and Mead--began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s as well, with a partial shift of venue from denominational seminaries and (largely Protestant) interdenominational divinity schools to university history departments, which had seldom been hospitable to religious issues in the past. Even here, though, the interpretive thrust was towards a centripetal "consensus history," in which historians emphasized the commonalties that conduced towards national unity rather than stressing the sources of dissent that the events of the 1960s and 1970s now brought to consciousness.

Although Ahlstrom, in his massive Religious History of the American People of 1973, attempted with considerable success to include as many religious traditions and communities as possible, his paradigm was that of the ongoing cultural dynamic of Anglo-American Puritanism, and the progress of the Reformed tradition was in many ways central to his narrative. He himself was aware, however, that the period in which he was writing could well be the end of the "Great Puritan Epoch" which he was then describing, and that a new paradigm might be needed to account for the demographic pluralism and shifts in political consciousness that the Vietnam era engendered. (1) His many students, especially during the 1970s and early 1980s, represented among themselves a highly diverse set of backgrounds and interests, including Princeton's Albert Raboteau in African American religious history, Harvard's Robert Orsi in ethnic Catholicism, and Brandeis's Jonathan Sarna in American Jewish history. Much the same could be said about students of Chicago's Marty, Union's Robert Handy, Harvard's William Hutchison, and Princeton's John Wilson.

The centrifugal thrust of the 1960s and early 70s corresponded not only with the diversification of the ethnic, religious, and gender identities of future scholars being trained in the graduate programs of the time, but also with the ideological pressures that shaped the topics and interpretations with which those students would work. The various social and political movements which had their roots in the period--those of African Americans, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and Native Americans--all, in their more radical manifestations, emphasized an exclusive concentration by members of each identity group on their own concerns and argued that only they had the right to interpret their own histories. Earlier issues of political, social, and economic equality had now been joined by a quest for control of historical interpretation as well, and European theoreticians such as Gramsci and Foucault, though influential especially in literary circles, also provided ideological aid and comfort to religionists who shared the belief that the identification and counteracting of prevailing fields of power ought to be the task of the intellectual. Closer to the center of the academy, interdisciplinarity began to come into fashion, and such previously distinct fields of study such as history and cultural anthropology now began to cross-fertilize.

Changes in immigration patterns sparked by the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 also began to change the American religious landscape itself as Hindu and Buddhist temples and Islamic centers began to appear in many metropolitan areas, even those in the "Bible Belt." As a result, the study of American religion passed from the nearly exclusive hands of self-identified and institutionally identified "church historians" to those more broadly identified as scholars of "American religious history," "religion in North America," or "religion and American culture." The division of academic labor between the two institutions that converged to produce this session, the American Society of Church History and the North American Religions section of the American Academy of Religion, whose memberships overlap considerably but whose characteristic "takes" on the enterprise differ in perceptible ways, is indicative of the methodological pluralism and porosity of intellectual boundaries that have come to characterize the enterprise during the past two or three decades.

As a result of this convergence of transformations, it is no longer possible for most scholars to present in good conscience a unified narrative of American religious development in which one set of ecclesiastical "players" sets the rules for and dominates the game. Religious and ethnic pluralism are highly visible realities, even in such insular enclaves as southwestern Ohio, and one neglects to account for these realities at the peril of one's academic integrity and one's internalized professional mandate to chronicle and interpret phenomena, present as well as past, as closely as possible to wie es eigentlich gewesen war. Yet, unlike the more ethnologically minded, the historian finds it difficult to focus on small or neglected groups, however intrinsically interesting their stories or sympathetic their causes, to the neglect or exclusion of larger forces whose influences have set the terms in which the issues of each era are to be played out. The plausible story that, as Ahlstrom put it, was the historian's task to tell, has to include both the weak and the strong in its dialectic if it is in fact to be plausible. To relegate the story of each group to its own membership is, in this broader view, a cop-out, since it implies despair of the possibility of constructing a comprehensive narrative that is at once inclusive, accurate, and fair. This may require a leap of faith in asserting that a logos of comprehensibility informs human affairs, but such a leap does not seem to me beyond the pale of reasonableness.

One underlying philosophical problem that these arguments raise is the question of the possibility of attaining Truth through the study of history or, for that matter, anything else. The historian, when confronted with any goal beginning with a capital letter, is well advised to play the pragmatic fox rather than the idealist hedgehog. Truth thus becomes a goal or limit to inquiry rather than a finitely achievable possibility, at least for humans. The historiographical truths of earlier generations--of William Warren Sweet, of Perry Miller, of Sidney Mead--have become not today's falsehoods, but rather essays towards understanding that are still useable for their positive contributions and that have been relativized rather than refuted by subsequent scholarly investigation. As Charles Sanders Peirce once characterized the scientific quest, our goal is the advancement of knowledge through the cumulative ongoing work of a scholarly community, rather than the sudden appearance of final truth in the work of a discrete individual. Although such individuals as those cited above have advanced the cause brilliantly through their successive paradigms, their work is part of a process rather than an end to such a process. To scorn them as irrelevant today is to scorn the very intellectual foundations which have made our own work possible, just as to accept them unqualifiedly is equally irresponsible.

The term "process" itself also suggests a further clue for interpreting the character of our own work. Instead of interpreting American religious history, or American history itself, as having some sort of unchanging essence, we can rather regard each as involved in a process, or combination of intertwined processes. Although each of the separate religious communities, imported or indigenous, that has developed within the United States has its own distinctive and irreducible character, each has also participated in broader processes both internal to and outside the realm of religion as such. Max Weber and other sociologists and historians of religion have identified a considerable number of patterns, such as the "routinization of charisma," that apply to the religious history of America as well as to the development of complex religious systems anywhere. And, although religions have their own internal logics, they are also subject to the particular cultural and social logics of what one might call their "host culture"--in this case, that of the United States itself. The development of the American nation has been inexorably tied in with a number of social, political, economic, and ideological forces--democracy, capitalism, racism, immigration, and, most saliently, religious non-establishment, to name a few of the most important--which individually may not be unique to this nation, but which in their distinctive combination have powerfully and uniquely shaped the course of national development, including that of the nation's religions. By invoking these processes, we can both respect the individuality of the religious traditions and communities that we seek to interpret, while simultaneously providing a broader frame of historical reference that makes these religions intelligible and interrelated within a broader context. American religious history can thus be presented, to our students and anyone else who may care to listen, neither as the inexorable march of Protestant progress nor, as my colleague Alan Miller was wont to remark, as just "one damn thing after another."

(1.) See Sydney E. Ahlstrom, "The Radical Turn in Theology and Ethics: Why It Occurred in the 1960's," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 387 (1/70): 1-13.

Peter W. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.