Page 1930 – Christianity Today (2024)

If you were packing for a trip to Hawaii in the 1820s, you wouldn’t be bringing swimsuits, surfboards, and snorkel gear. You’d be dragging Bibles, dried meats, and household goods. When the newlyweds Peter and Fanny Gulick boarded the Parthian on November 3, 1827, to set sail for the Sandwich Islands, what awaited them was anything but a vacation. They were leaving a life of relative ease in New England for an arduous career as missionaries in Hawaii, a post they held for 46 years.

According to Clifford Putney, assistant professor of history at Bentley University, the Gulicks influenced the history of the 50th state in profound ways. In Missionaries in Hawai’i: The Lives of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797-1883, Putney turns his undivided attention on this displaced Puritan clan not simply because they lived fascinating lives but also because the Gulick family is “a window that offers a unique view of Hawaiian history and the American missionary enterprise.” Seven of their eight children went on to become missionaries in other parts of the world, “creating one of America’s most important evangelical dynasties.”

Another book that has recently opened a window on the same subject, albeit from a different vantage point, is Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, a meandering survey of Hawaii’s Americanization. Vowell, the irreverent historian who keeps Jon Stewart on his toes, “tells the story of how … Americans and their children spent the seventy-eight years between the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1820 and the American annexation in 1898 Americanizing Hawaii, importing our favorite religion, capitalism, and our second favorite religion, Christianity.”

While Putney plods through the chronology of a single family, from revivals and epidemics to adventures in ranching, sermonizing, and child-rearing, Vowell breezily paddles among Hawaiian religion, customs, and economics, touching on everything from whale oil, eating taboos, and environmentalism to sugar cane, incest, and plate lunches. Ever present in her account are the “finicky Protestant” Bible thumpers who had “drunk the Jesus juice” and were trying to get the natives to drink it too. Vowell is all over the place in her narrative; Putney remains focused solely on the events experienced by the Gulicks. Putney humanizes the missionary movement that Vowell gets at only through stereotyped shorthand. But both get caught in the limitations of trying to portray an undertaking as charged as the Hawaiian mission.

Vowell, who leaves the Gulicks out of her account, acknowledges her partiality: “my research into Hawaiian culture had made me more aware of my own biases and prejudices than any project I’d ever worked on.” But this self-analysis doesn’t take her very far. Unfamiliar Fishes is replete with unbridled biases, and Vowell’s portrayal of the Hawaiian missionaries comes closer to contempt than it does to the cheeky but endearing curiosity with which she regarded the Puritans in Wordy Shipmates. Mission work, she pronounces, is “inherently patronizing to the host culture. That’s what a mission is—a bunch of strangers showing up somewhere uninvited to inform the locals they are wrong.” Every once in a while she’ll spare a kind word for the mikanele (i.e., missionaries), but her overall feelings for them are not always charitable. Consider this backhanded compliment of Mercy Whitney, one of the women who boarded the first missionary ship to Hawaii: “Scrape off every irritating trait that mars Mercy and her shipmates—xenophobia, condescension, spiritual imperialism, and self-righteous disdain—and they have an astonishing aptitude for kinship and public-spirited love.”

Not that Vowell’s disdain is entirely without foundation. Even the Gulicks didn’t get along with all the other missionaries. Samuel Whitney and Peter Gulick “heartily disliked each other.” Peter complained about Whitney’s “high spirit” and “rather dictatorial” habits. Putney himself concedes that the missionaries were a mixed lot, but he warns against stereotyping: “Some scholars are far more respectful of the non-Western world than they are of Christian missionaries, who are frequently depicted in academic works as ignorant or reactionary,” Putney writes. “These terms undoubtedly suited a number of missionaries, but they do not accurately describe Peter and Fanny Gulick.”

Yet this is precisely where Putney runs into certain limitations of his own. While doing an admirable job painting an honest, unsentimental portrait of a Christian family who truly sought to live for Christ and expand his kingdom, Putney isn’t opening a window onto the missionary enterprise so much as a peep-hole. The extent to which the Gulicks were representative of the work of their agency, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), is by no means clear. In fact, Putney’s account suggests that Peter and Fanny were notable precisely because of their integrity and reasonableness in dealing with the Hawaiians, traits that often brought them into conflict with other missionaries and the ABCFM.

What Vowell and Putney both demonstrate is that missions are terribly complex enterprises, often fraught with interpersonal quarrels, cultural snobbery, and religious intolerance. Even the dear Gulicks’ “religious zeal and cultural parochialism acted as blinders, preventing them from seeing much of the value of traditional Hawaiian society,” Putney admits. They were convinced they knew what was best for that foreign land, and strove to make it resemble New England, sometimes all too successfully.

Along with Christianity, the missionaries brought complications such as measles, small pox, commercial agriculture, and the problematic privatization of land. But on the flip side, they saved lives with new medicines. They, and particularly the Gulicks, built a seminary and schools for boys and girls, including Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou School, which President Barack Obama attended, though admittedly it was built as a means for the missionaries to educate their children without risking contamination from the natives. And the missionaries converted Hawaiian into a written language and taught the Hawaiians to read and write, taking them from having no written language to high literacy in 41 years, an astonishing achievement that was almost solely a result of the Protestant conviction that every Christian should be able to read his or her own Bible.

In more ways than can be recounted here, the missionaries played a vital role in the chain reaction that led to Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and eventual statehood in 1959. The missionaries seemed unaware that they were contributing to Hawaii’s metamorphosis from a sleepy tropical archipelago to a turbulent naval and economic playground. Some of that unawareness was culpable naïveté, and some of it was sheer human inability to predict the future. But any ulterior motives they had were secondary to evangelism, as even Vowell points out: “The mission’s priority—first and last—was to save as many souls as possible.”

In Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell captures the wild array of factors swirling around Hawaii’s reinvention. Despite her prejudices, she tells the story wittily and well. Putney, on the other hand, provides an inspiring account of a faithful family, one that offers a useful corrective to Vowell. Together, they show that the impact, good and bad, of American missionaries is not to be minimized.

Kristen Scharold is an editor for Wunderkammer Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men is a film about faith, community, martyrdom, and monks. It’s also a film that became something of a phenomenon in France last fall, garnering box-office numbers more typical of an American blockbuster import than a contemplative film about religion. Perhaps that’s due to the film’s timely subject matter (Christian-Muslim relations), or maybe it’s because there’s an increasing hunger for films unafraid of sincerity. In the midst of a contemporary cinema accustomed to cynicism and despair, Of Gods and Men—the Grand Prix award winner at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival—stands out as a luminous testimony to hope. It’s a film that speaks directly into our present situation, and yet also transcends it.

Directed by Beauvois and written by screenwriter Etienne Comar, Of Gods and Men is based loosely on the experiences of a small group of Cistercian monks in Tibhirine, Algeria in 1996. [1] As the film begins, we observe the peaceful rhythms of life within the monastery: a group of about eight monks, led by Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), pray, sing, worship, and serve the Muslim community in which they live. The elderly monastery doctor, Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale), offers free medical treatment to the ailing in the nearby village. Several monks attend local Muslim ceremonies and celebrations to show their love and support. The monastery’s homemade honey is sold in local markets. It’s a vision for how Christians and Muslims can live alongside and learn from one another in a peaceful, mutually beneficial way.

But this community of peace is under threat, as Algeria faces violent civil war between government forces and Islamist insurgents. Early in the film—in one of its rare moments of bloody violence—a group of European construction workers are ambushed and brutally slaughtered by the terrorist insurgents. This event, coupled with warnings for all foreigners to exit the country or risk a similar fate, catalyzes the main conflict of the film for the protagonists: Should they stay in Algeria, steadfastly committed to their mission at the monastery but knowing that terror will one day come knocking, or should they save their lives by fleeing the country?

Whatever they decide, one thing is clear: The monks are committed to making the decision as a group. Several conversations between the men ensue, revealing a model process for how tough decisions can be reached in community and how issues of individuality, sacrifice, and hierarchy can peacefully be negotiated with wisdom and charity. It’s an environment of openness, where all perspectives are welcomed, including fear and doubt. One younger monk in particular (Olivier Rabourdin) struggles with apprehension about staying and lets his frustrations show. Eventually the monks do arrive at a conclusion: They’ll stay.

In one of the film’s most remarkable sequences, the monks sit silently at the U-shaped communal dinner table, pondering the decision they’ve made together. One of the monks puts on an old tape of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which, as it builds and climaxes, leads the men to a state of sublime contentedness. Letting the music wash over them, sensing the Last Supper solemnity of the occasion, they seem united by the conviction that—even in the face of death—beauty prevails. Cinematographer Carline Champetier captures the moment by tenderly observing the monks’ faces in gradually closer framing, so that by the climax of the music we get glimpses of each man’s face in extreme closeup, revealing joy, tears, resolve, and oneness in Christ.

Though it serves as a historical testament and instructive commentary on contemporary culture, Of Gods and Men is more. It’s a transcendent film. In Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader argues for a three-step process whereby transcendence is achieved stylistically in cinema: 1) Meticulously representing the banal and everyday; 2) Confronting a disparity or disunity between man and his environment, which culminates in a decisive action; and 3) Ending with stasis, a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it.

Beauvois’ film certainly seems to fit the bill. Shot in a monastery in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the film adopts the point of view of the monks and intimately tunes its ear to the rhythms of life in a Cistercian monastery. Reminiscent of 2006’s Into Great Silence, another great “inside the lives of monks” film, Of Gods and Men takes time to observe the offering of prayers, the singing of hymns and chants, the making of honey, the writing of letters and the passing of food at dinner. This sort of meticulous interest in the monks’ simple existence not only provides the viewer with a believable portrait of monastery life but also “prepares reality for the intrusion of the Transcendent,” notes Schrader.[2]

There is also clear disparity: the building tension between the monks’ peaceful way of life and the terrorists outside the monastery doors. Schrader says this sort of disparity “extends spiritual schizophrenia—that acute sense of two opposing worlds—to the viewer,” building up an unresolved tension.[3]

Finally, there is a conclusion of stasis, which Schrader says is the trademark of religious art in every culture: “It establishes an image of a second reality which can stand beside the ordinary reality; it represents the Wholly Other.”[4]

The final shot of Gods certainly suggests this sort of stasis. In a snowy, foggy setting in the mountains of Algeria, we watch as our monks are led away to an unknown place. Clad in white, the monks blend in with their surroundings, and as the static camera observes them growing gradually smaller and fainter as they march away, we understand that it is not necessarily a physical place we are seeing them enter but a place of rest, peace, oneness—the glorious fulfillment of the Tchaikovsky foretaste. It’s a sublime ending, leading the audience as well to a place of quiet contemplation. But Gods is transcendent not only in the way it reflects upon the martyrdom of the monks, but also in its portrayal of how they live.

These Christian monks, living quietly in a hostile land, flourish in a way that is thoroughly incarnational. Place matters for them. They are not cloistered hermits, hidden away from the world around them, existing in some isolated spiritual reverie. Rather, they are actively seeking to understand their neighbors, their surroundings, to thrive in and through their physical context. They embody a theology of “faithful presence,” as James Davison Hunter writes in To Change the World: “When the Word of all flourishing—defined by the love of Christ—becomes flesh in us, in our relations with others, within the tasks we are given, and within our sphere of influence—absence gives way to presence, and the word we speak to each other and to the world becomes authentic and trustworthy.”[5] Hunter adds that “faithful presence” prioritizes “what is right in front of us—the community, the neighborhood, the city, and the people of which these are constituted.”

The monks in Of Gods and Men are mindful of their surroundings, rooted in the place where they’ve been called to be light. They are so present, so committed to the Algerian people, that ultimately they find it impossible to leave, even at the risk of death. As Brother Christian expresses in a written testament heard in voiceover near the end of the film: “I know the contempt the people of this country may have indiscriminately been surrounded by. And I know which caricatures of Islam a certain Islamism encourages. This country and Islam, for me, are something else. They are a body and a soul.”

For these monks, the Word and the world are intimately connected. Who they are in Christ necessarily has bearing on how they manifest themselves in the world. As such, they endeavor to live out the humility and sacrificial love of Christ toward each other, their Muslim neighbors, and even their terrorist enemies. In the midst of war and turbulent civic unrest, the monks carry on, faithfully present to the end. As Brother Luc wrote in a letter during his last months in the monastery: “We are in a ‘risky’ situation but we persist in our faith and our confidence in God …. I don’t know when or how it will all end. In the meantime, I perform my duty.”

Brett McCracken is managing editor for Biola University’s Biola Magazine. He is the author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (Baker).

1. The story is told by John Kiser in The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria (St. Martin’s, 2002).

2. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 39.

3. Ibid., p. 43.

4. Ibid., p. 49.

5. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), p. 252.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I was privileged recently to attend a conference on Marxism and Christianity in China. The venue was Tiantan University, close to the birthplace of Mao Zedong in Hunan province. More than ninety papers were given by philosophers and comparative literature scholars from universities all over China; of the eight “keynote” speakers, four were Chinese academics, four Western. Strikingly, the Chinese intellectuals presented papers with a more distinctly favorable view of historically normative Christian theology than did some of the Westerners. There were a large number of similarly positive presentations also in the concurrent sessions. In the keynote sessions, I was struck not only by the clarity of theological command and crisp formal argument but also by the warmth and vigor of response engendered from the floor. Each of the Chinese speakers addressed Christianity as a comprehensive intellectual system, a body of knowledge grounded in theological convictions with inescapable metaphysical as well ethical entailments. Most presenters showed extensive familiarity with Christian intellectual works from the patristic period through to the present, often quoting from Chinese translations of works as ancient as those of Augustine and as current as Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Paul II, John Macquarrie, Alister McGrath, and Charles Taylor. More frequently adduced were contemporary philosophical and theological writings of important Chinese intellectuals such as are represented in Yang Huilin and Daniel Yeung’s Sino-Christian Studies in China. The Bible itself was clearly regarded as an important philosophical as well as theological resource in these papers, and engaged with respect and understanding reflected also in conference conversations both in and out of the formal sessions.

Our perspective on Christianity in China is typically shaped by reports such as this article, the refracted view of a particular Western observer, and divergences among such accounts tend to reflect attempts at characterizing the swiftly evolving culture of China from the stance of a particular set of narrative presuppositions. Yet the experiences such as are reported by weiguoren (non-Chinese anywhere) are liable to fragmentation and distortion overdetermined by their presuppositions. This is evident in a spate of books addressing the character of life in urban China that have appeared in the last year or so; among them are David Aikman’s Here Comes China (2010), Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2010), and Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of the New Global Order (2009); all are pitched to an apprehensive Western readership and unavoidably charged with a weiguoren point of view.

One of the two books I review here, Nathan Faries’ The “Inscrutably Chinese” Church: How Narratives and Nationalism Continue to Divide Christianity, provides a valuable guide to some of the current realities in the church life of China. Faries is an American, a Catholic convert from evangelicalism. He taught English in China between 1999 and 2004, including a year at Peking University; currently he teaches English at Dubuque University. His book is rich in illuminating detail, and it offers important correctives to typical characterizations by Western Christians with lesser experience and capability in spoken and written Chinese. His overriding theme is that our prevalent American Christian meta-narratives, both national and theological, govern the way we have been interpreting individual accounts which emerge from China, often distorting our perspective to the point of causing us to miss their point altogether.

The second book under review, Sino-Christian Studies in China, is a collection of academic essays by 22 mostly established Chinese intellectuals, published in English translation in order to provide Western scholars the opportunity to overhear internal philosophical reflection amongst Chinese intellectuals themselves on the emerging role of Christianity in Chinese culture. It provides a still more important corrective for the sort of popular misconceptions Faries addresses. Edited by Yang Huilin, academic vice-president of Renmin University, the most prominent Marxist institution in China, and Daniel H. N. Yeung, director of the Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong, this excellent book is intelligently conceived and intellectually rigorous. Directly reflecting internal debate among educated Christians in China today, it is indispensable reading, I would suggest, for anyone wanting to understand theological thought among the rapidly growing cohort of Christian intellectuals in China. Sadly, it has attracted surprisingly little attention in this country or Britain since its publication; ironically, given his own worthy purpose, Faries neither mentions it nor lists it in his generally excellent bibliography, inadvertently instancing one of his own more important themes, namely that we tend to get our impression of Chinese Christianity almost exclusively through one or another species of Western filtering.

Faries’ book is nonetheless an excellent place for an interested Christian reader in America to begin to appreciate both the realities and their filtering. In ways that are corroborated by the research of others as well as by experience on the ground, he shows clearly how the tendency in America to focus primarily on stories of persecution tends to occlude a larger Chinese Christian reality. In fact, he argues, there is more toleration and even cooperation from the government than, on these accounts, we might imagine. While his strong thesis disposes Faries to appear inattentive to abuses and contradictions of the professed freedom of religion that are frequently in our news about China, it seems to me that he is also largely correct in his view that the missiological narratives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—in which a combination of mythic heroism and conflation of the political gospel of American-style democracy with the good news of liberty in Christ is characteristic—have frequently caused misestimations of what is transpiring more generally. Amongst intellectual Chinese Christians in particular, Western preoccupation with highly visible individual cases of conflict with the Chinese government is typically thought to overlook the larger pattern of their principled witness and engagement of mainstream Chinese thought and practice. Sometimes our almost exclusive Western focus on cases of abuse inadvertently creates unhelpful pressures upon that most vital internal conversation, which, in the end, is likely to be more fruitful than foreign pressure in reducing the abuse.

Some perceptions of weiguoren observers afford a reliable index to Chinese Christian experience; some are misleading. Thus, what many foreign visitors have observed, namely that the quality of biblical preaching and teaching in the patriotic (registered) churches and in the study groups and house churches typically seems much higher than in evangelical churches here in America, is confirmable by anyone from the West who spends time with Chinese students and younger faculty converts; one may expect to find much higher levels of biblical literacy and theological clarity by three to five years post-conversion than amongst American counterparts after two or three decades in the church. In urban house churches, the teaching is often led by young women, professional university teachers (laoshe) with doctoral degrees in literature and philosophy. This teaching is learned, yet marked by an evangelical urgency and commitment to obedient practice rather than simply intellectual assent. Yet another common perception among Western visitors, that membership in both Catholic and Protestant patriotic (registered) churches suggests a worshipping Christian community in China predominantly female and aging, is fundamentally misleading. Chinese colleagues regularly tell us that in urban house churches since the beginning of the past decade, gender distribution is about even, and more than half of congregants are between the ages of 18 and 40. [1]

Faries reports on the widespread and longstanding Chinese view that historically the gospel moved west from Jerusalem, largely around the northern hemisphere, and that a special calling of the burgeoning Chinese church is to complete this heliotropic movement westward through Muslim lands until the church comes back again to Jerusalem. This sense of mission outward, with its eschatological consciousness, provides an important qualifier to another dimension of theology in the Chinese context less frequently discussed in the West. It also has a natural point of contact with Marxism. David J. Bosch has noted that Marxism is also “intrinsically missionary,” having universal rather than merely local aspirations. A very large proportion of the intellectual Christians one meets in China today were once Marxist idealists; disappointment since the Cultural Revolution and the turn to market economy have created conditions in which the utopian eschatology of Marxism has in the end proven less compelling than the biblical ideals of justice, truth, and love. In this way, a substantially failed Marxist historiography has prepared the way for a growing sense of China’s distinctive place in the historia humanae salvationis. That this should lead to important divergences from American Christian eschatology and historiography is hardly surprising, and it deserves a more thoughtful consideration.

The Chinese version of national calling is not unproblematic theologically. Faries does an admirable job of contextualizing the extremely rapid growth of Christian adherence within the reality of a rising Chinese nationalism in which there is a near consensus view that China in this century has a “manifest destiny” every bit as inevitable as that attributed to the United States in its earlier history. His analysis of Chinese fiction is particularly effective in this regard. One of the characters in novelist Li Ping’s When Fade Away the Colors of Dusk describes the Chinese metanarrative (what we might call Chinese exceptionalism) as “the basic and unshakeable belief in the mind of every Chinese,” stronger and more enduring than any form of government, a cultural bond which unites diaspora Chinese everywhere with their Chinese roots. Faries comments pertinently that, “If evangelical American Christians tend to be patriotic, Chinese Christians (evangelicals themselves, by a wide margin) also have strong ties to their homeland and are probably even more uniformly nationalistic than their American counterparts.” The view advanced by some Westerners (David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing among them), that a more Christian China will almost automatically be an ally of the United States, is not well supported by this reality.

The essays in Yang and Yeung help greatly to qualify further some of the assumptions Americans are likely to make about the political implications of Christian theology. One of these pertains to the American conception of freedom so often advertised both commercially and even by our politicians. Zhang Xian, observing our general disposition to regard personal liberty of the more or less autonomous self as the highest political good, notes that in fact ,”Christianity has a very different understanding of freedom … [not] to seek to be excused from restriction, but to seek a freedom which can transcend the self, to be willing to forebear and to sacrifice, i.e., the freedom to love.” His view carries with it a convincing biblical warrant. Among Chinese Christians generally, and Christian intellectuals particularly, democracy of the Western sort is seen neither as an entailment nor a primary goal.

It may be amongst intellectuals (academics, lawyers, physicians, and bureaucrats) in particular that the divergences from our own predilections become most interesting. For example, Faries surveys literary criticism of both Chinese and American literature on both sides of the Pacific and finds that in China, the Christian dimension of literary texts—novels, plays, poems—is paid much greater critical attention, and this amongst secular as well as Christian scholars. He does a good job, I think, of analyzing the intellectual engagement of the representations of Christianity one finds in non-believing writers such as Li Ping, Zhang Xiaotian, and Wang Anyi, and also in well-known Christian novelists Shi Tiesheng and Bei Cun, author of the celebrated novels River of Baptism and, more recently, Divine Covenant (2007). There are many more highly regarded Chinese Christian artists than he mentions now emerging—Bing Xin, Hu Shi, Lao She, Yu Jiu, Yu Dafu, Xu Dishan, the contemporary Catholic poet Jian Chua, among others—all of whose work is largely unknown in the West. Faries notes of Bei Cun something that, mutatis mutandis, more widely applies, namely that “his conversion has lost [him] foreign readers but has not apparently done any great harm to his reputation at home.” Lack of interest among Western literary scholars in depictions of Chinese engagement with Christianity means that we shall probably wait awhile yet for English translations of many fine Chinese Christian literary works—unless, perhaps, Christian scholars and publishers in the West begin actively to seek out and translate them.

If we turn from Faries’ overview of literary writers to reflect on the writings of Chinese Christian intellectuals in philosophy and theology, we also encounter the problem of a gap in translated work. That is what makes the collection of Yang and Yeung so valuable, for in its pages we find principled essays by some of the most formidable intellectuals in the larger Chinese Christian national dialogue. Many of these people would once have been called “cultural Christians,” associated as such less with the worshiping church than with study of Christianity as a cultural vector. “Cultural Christian” as a term and concept has led to Westerners paying far too little attention to the evolving reality, and should now be used with caution, since many such intellectuals have become highly active in local congregations.[2] In his essay in Yang and Yeung, one of the most prominent of such “cultural Christians,” the Renmin University philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, sharply challenges this now clichéd conception:

The term “cultural Christians” does not refer to those involved in the historical and cultural studies of Christianity in the universities and academic institutions of China. Rather, it refers to intellectuals and culturalists [e.g., artists] who have experienced individual conversion in religious faith. It goes without saying that only one who believes in Christ, rather than one who is engaged in the cultural studies of Christianity, can be properly called a Christian.

Liu, himself having been described in the past as a “cultural Christian,” goes on to insist that from the point of view of Christian confession there is no substantial difference between ordinary and intellectual Christians, and that while prominent intellectuals may not always identify with a local congregation, there can be reasons for that which impinge in no way on serious confessional belief.

Liu’s point is crucially important, given one widespread popular misconception in the West. It now appears that some of the heaviest theological lifting in the Chinese church is being done by intellectuals in secular academic settings. This is reflected even in house church publications such as the online Chinese Beijing house church site Aiyan, which contains articles on theological and ecclesial matters of heft and substance to which more academic discussions directly contribute. As with much else in China, the reality is more complex, more fluid, and more characteristically Chinese than our impressions and familiar categories can adequately represent. This makes even the best-intended efforts of Western observers prone to misprision.

Perhaps the most famous historical instance of this shortcoming is the monumental work of Matteo Ricci, the 16th-century Jesuit. His “creative misreading” (as Sun Shangyang puts it) of Confucianism, intended to effect a Christian synthesis, led in the end to a cultural collision rather than an integration or even syncretism. For Liu Xiaofeng, one of the most prominent Chinese Christian intellectuals in our own time, the history of Christian missions in China is in fact characterized by versions of such well-intentioned error; the so-called “Nestorian” Christians of the 7th century, the Franciscans in their first incursions in the 13th century, and even some of the Protestant missionaries from the West in the 19th and 20th centuries saw in Confucianism or Daoism what they thought was similarity, and tried to adapt Christian theology accordingly, with disappointing results. Some syncretism is inevitable, Liu argues, but legitimate only in a first stage of engagement; it must be succeeded by “a second type of Sino-Christian theology” which seeks to apply Christian theological precepts from the scriptural sources directly to contemporary ethno-geographic realities without much mediation from previous efforts at synthesis, domestic or weiguoren in origin. “Integration” in the Chinese context, as You Xilin in part suggests, means something very like what it meant to Augustine in the 4th century, when he was writing about the “Egyptian Gold” principle by which the contemporary resources of Greek and Roman learning might be properly ordained to a fundamentally Christian worldview. As his sermons show, Augustine was forging this approach even whilst he was preaching to animists (and Donatists) who represented a still more venerable cultural paradigm. So in contemporary China: when a young intellectual tells you (as often happens) that she is striving for an effective integration of her Christian faith with her work as a Chinese scholar, she is likely to be talking both about the intellectual presuppositions of her discipline (often, whether Marxist or not, derivatively Western and secular) and the predispositional heritage of Confucian thought (Chinese and secular) in terms of which Christian theology can be seen as a fruitful dialogical partner.

As with Augustine, there is a candor in these intellectuals at almost every point at which Christian theology proves to be in contradiction to the secular culture in which it appears; for You Xilin, for example, Christianity most fruitfully both creates the conditions for the modernization into which China has so dramatically emerged and yet remains as a vital source of modern humanism that criticizes modernity. Zhuo Xinping’s fascinating essay on this topic shows how in a way not anticipated by Confucianism, Christianity is characterized by its understanding of transcendence, a perspective which permits a “rising above politics” and “a dialogue of affirmation and negation in human conduct.” The conventional Chinese notion, popular since the 19th century, that Christianity is a “Western religion” is rejected by these intellectuals not only on historical but on fundamentally theological grounds. (After all, many of them know far more about the West than do we about China.) Liu appropriates Karl Barth’s appropriation of Karl Marx to say plainly that the Christ-event is in fact “a critique of all religions.” Similarly, You Xilin insists that “Christianity thoroughly criticizes secular society when such a society does not allow a good person to live in a righteous way.”

It should be unsurprising in this light that these essays offer a tacit critique not only of Marxism but of capitalism (Zhang Xian; Zhuo Xinping), the latter in terms of the immediate Chinese market economy as much or more than the Western version critiqued by African theologians. Indeed, all prevalent systems of thought in China, from Confucianism, with its own perdurable secularist ethics, to the dominant rival modern secularisms of Marxism and capitalism, East and West, fall under the theological scrutiny of the 22 writers gathered here.

The analysis in this volume is incisive and often brilliant, but certainly not monochromatic. In one essay, for example, Kwan Shui-man criticizes Liu Xiaofeng’s Sino-Christian theology for a dependence on Barthian categories that Kwan considers both culturally askew and outdated. Moreover, these academics are quick to warn each other about the characteristic disposition of Christian intellectuals to an ineffectual élitism on the one hand and, on the other, a complacent failure to achieve a rigorous dialogue within the universities with “other disciplines” (Liu). Yang Huilin is emphatic that theological thought in philosophical dialogue cannot be effective as witness where the conversation is limited to confessional Christians: he cites Bonhoeffer to highlight what many see as a need to “be able to articulate continuously a non-religious interpretation of Christianity” in public discourse:

Of course, it is not a bad thing that the Christian faith has helped to normalize ethics and social order in today’s environment, and has helped to regulate people’s mentality or spiritual imbalances. In fact, this is probably the real reason various secular powers have been able to accept Christianity. However, the problem is that, if Christianity itself also acknowledges this as its main function and believes that filling up society’s “structural gaps” can take the place of efforts to achieve “profound comprehension of life,” it will not be able to escape the fate of the “results negating the premise,” and will fail to achieve structural influence in terms of basic concepts.

What he means by this is that social witness and even social change, deprived of active conversation with a vital philosophical theology, is likely to run out of gas in China just as it has tended to in the West. A merely therapeutic Christianity is a Christianity doomed to demise.

The essays in this volume are indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand what is happening in Chinese Christian intellectual life today. There is no hint in them either of triumphalism or of condescension. Rather, as Guo Shining puts it, all of us who seek to follow Christ live under one marker for authentic delegation: “When people use the phrase, ‘that person must be a Christian,’ it highlights … behavior [that] conflicts with the main trend of profitable,worldly, self-centered, materialistic value-systems.” To be a sign of contradiction, says Guo, is both natural and necessary to a Christian in any walk of life. Addressing the wider church of which he is a part, he notes the corollary: this requires all believers to “strengthen their faith,” since “it is much harder to be a Christian in China.” Well—yes. And perhaps that particular reality works to the advantage of our Chinese brothers and sisters.

David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University and, since 1996, Guest Professor of Peking University.

1. See also Yang Fenggang, “Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2005).

2. See Gerda Wielander, “Bridging the Gap? Intellectual House Church Activities in Beijing and Their Potential Role in China’s Democratization,” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 18, No. 62 (November 2009); also, Fredrik Fällman, Salvation and Modernity: Intellectuals and Faith in Contemporary China (Univ. Press of America, rev. ed, 2008).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Like many people living overseas, I like to keep up on events back home. A subscription to The Economist gives me the pulse of English politics, the London Review of Books helps me keep my English academic feet wet, and regular visits to the BBC Sport website allow me to follow the disappointments of the England football/soccer team. But there is nothing like a trip home to find out how home is really doing.

On a visit last summer, I met Raymond Elliott. Mr. Elliott is an affable fellow who cleans my parents’ windows. But of late, his visits to my parents’ house have become longer as he and my now-retired father discuss a shared enemy: squirrels. Gray, North American squirrels to be precise. Introduced to Britain in the 19th century, they have long been fauna non grata because of the harm they cause to native species. My dad hates them because they steal the nuts he puts out for the birds. To my utter surprise, he bought an air gun to attack the blighters (no luck there). Traps work better, and there is an ominous barrel of water at the side of the house in which many furry rodents have swum briefly and then expired.

At least there was a barrel. I think it is now out of commission due to conversations with Mr. Elliott, another bird-lover, who was on trial for cruelty to animals because he trapped and then drowned a squirrel. When I met him, he had just had his first court appearance; as I sit down to write, he has a criminal record, the first person to be convicted under the 2006 Animal Welfare Act for harming a non-domestic animal.

I took some perverse enjoyment in listening to Mr. Elliott and my father discuss different ways of disposing of squirrels. You can’t release them into the wild: that is forbidden under the 1981 Countryside Act. Apparently, putting them in a bag and whacking them with a shovel is humane and therefore allowed. You can also attach the bag to the exhaust of your car.

I thought of this story as I read the first two volumes of David Kynaston’s wonderful history of Britain.[1] They take the reader from 1945 to 1957, and are the start of a series of undisclosed length that will finish when Kynaston has made it to 1979. Both are long books, and certainly not for the time-pressed student looking for clear arguments to incorporate into a paper or dissertation. Rather, reading these books feels like a visit to the past. Many historians will give you the equivalent of The Economist or the BBC, with lots of detail on politics, economics, social trends, and the like, but Kynaston wants to do more than that. He wants you to know what life was like for the people who lived in Britain in the 1940s and ’50s.

It’s not an easy task. Historians will always tell you that their sources are too patchy to give a complete picture. But Kynaston has done an excellent job. The research behind his books is extraordinary. He has pillaged autobiographies, diaries, surveys, newspapers, and the archives of Mass Observation, an organization that used hundreds of volunteers to record what they saw and heard on the streets of mid-century Britain. Occasionally, there is still the problem that we hear more from the people at the top of the pile: Kynaston’s account of working-class culture depends heavily on autobiographies of those who made it big and therefore left that life behind. On the whole, however, he does as good a job as I have seen of bringing Britons of the recent past to life.

Whether charming, quirky, or poignant, Kynaston’s stories are not mere color. He uses them to illumine broad social trends. To return to squirrels for a moment: I found Mr. Elliott’s woes intriguing, but the real interest lay in what they revealed about contemporary Britain. Sitting here in my office in California, I could keep up on British debates about intrusive government, personal liberty, and the state of the legal system, but it was a conversation with Mr. Elliott that brought all these to life. So in Kynaston’s books. The stories are illustrative and highly evocative.

Kynaston begins volume 1 on May 8, 1945: VE Day. He contrasts the riotous scenes of singing and celebration in central London with the more subdued mood elsewhere, reminding us of the many whose joy carried a heavy tinge of grief. He also points to the hatreds the war had bred, telling of a children’s street party where a maid charged people sixpence a time to spit on a Nazi flag. After hundreds of pages, one gets used to this sort of thing: lots of detail and complexity portrayed through the accounts of everyone from diplomats to dressmakers.

After his account of VE Day in chapter 1, Kynaston sets out his stall on the first page of chapter 2 with a delightful and instructive list:

Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles [cell phones], no duvets, no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian Restaurants. Shops on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street … trams, trolley-buses, steam trains …. Suits and hats, dresses and hats, cloth caps and mufflers, no leisurewear, no “teenagers.” Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed, sugar rationed, tea rationed, cheese rationed, jam rationed, eggs rationed, sweets rationed, soap rationed, clothes rationed. Make do and mend.

The rest of volume one describes the immediate postwar years. Americans are often puzzled by the British electorate’s dismissal of Churchill in 1945, their seeming ingratitude to the man who had urged them to fight on the beaches and so on. But Kynaston explains why most British people have long been able to be grateful both to Churchill and to Clement Attlee, the Labour party leader who replaced him in 10 Downing Street that summer. “There’ll have to be more equalness,” said one working-class Londoner. “Things not fair now. Nobody can tell me they are. There’s them with more money what they can ever use. This ain’t right and it’s got to be put right.” And here, the Conservative Churchill did not look a safe pair of hands. Attlee did, and most British people still regard the welfare state brought in by his government as one of the greatest political achievements of the 20th century.

The focus of volume 1 is on the appalling living conditions in Britain after the war. Rationing is a major topic. The end of the war did not mean the return of plentiful food; bacon and egg rations were cut further in February 1946. Kynaston records people’s responses to the idea that some of their food should go to help people in Germany who were even worse off: “I don’t think we could do it”; “It’s Germany’s turn to do without”; “I think it’s up to America—when you read in the papers about what they eat”; “I think the Germans ought to go short, after all they’ve done”; “I suppose we’d do it if we had to. I hope it won’t come to that.”

Kynaston uses postwar discussions about housing to very good effect. Thousands of properties were destroyed in the Blitz, and there were big debates about how to rebuild. What they reveal is that the people running the country often had a firm and yet very poor understanding of what everyone else wanted. In this case, the planners put their faith in high-rise apartment buildings, believing that people would eventually come around to them despite their stated preference for houses and privacy. (They didn’t.)

The rebuilding of Coventry was a case in point. Here, Donald Gibson won approval for a modernist-inspired, improving city on the bombed ruins, but the reception was very mixed. Some were enthusiastic, but other letters in the Coventry Evening Telegraph included sentiments such as “Give us Coventry back as we knew it” and Herbert E. Edwards’ panning of “the hard, rigid lines of those monstrous buildings.” What I found especially pleasing, and convincing, was that Kynaston also made room for those who didn’t have the energy to care. “Whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding, you sort of went along with it in a sort of zombie-like fashion, at least I did,” recalled Celia Grew. ” ‘Cause you see I had got things happening in my own life with my husband getting wounded and being brought to Bromsgrove Hospital and me going over there to see him and all that kind of stuff.”

Here, the size of the books is a real asset: Kynaston has space to give Celia Grew her say. But the reader feels an odd tension: on the one hand, the rich description invites you to relax and wallow in the 1940s, but if you don’t pay attention you may miss the big points that Kynaston is trying to make. Occasionally, he flags particular debates as he goes along, as in chapter 9 of Family Britain, for example, where he spends 26 pages on the debate over whether working-class community really existed in postwar Britain (his answer: somewhat). But for the most part, Kynaston expects his readers to absorb his arguments. Thankfully, they are rather conventional anyway: there is no major reinterpretation of postwar Britain to worry about.

Family Britain picks up the story with the 1951 Festival of Britain, long lambasted as an élite attempt at moral improvement for the masses, and the by-now predictably varied responses emerge. Kynaston covers the coronation, the New Towns, smoking, Churchill’s return to power, Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile (when his time was announced, the crowd drowned out everything after “The time is 3 …”), education, West Indians, churchgoing, greyhound racing, the end of rationing, Hungary’s famous defeat of the England football team, and the Suez Crisis. To name a very few. The picture is the standard one of the conservative 1950s, a hierarchical society where most people were glad to have enough food and unlikely to grumble much. Family Britain also includes the tales and testimonies of innumerable individuals. Kynaston, born in 1951, includes one personal reminiscence from a visit to his uncle and aunt’s house to illustrate the growing popularity of chicken as factory farming made it more affordable: “Oh no, not another bloody chicken!” were the words of his cousin when it was poultry again for Sunday lunch.

Even British readers, let alone American ones, will stumble over some of the details. A Wykehamist is someone who attended the prestigious boarding school in Winchester; Ernie was the name of the computer that generated the winning numbers in a weekly savings lottery. People on this side of the Atlantic will recognize many of the they-grew-up-to-be-famous people, such as Mike [sic] Jagger and John Lennon; other British household names will elude them (Kenny Everett, anyone?).

These books have been very popular in Britain, with The Times naming Austerity Britain as its Book of the Decade in December 2009. It is not hard to see why so many have read at least some of one or the other of these books. Most readers are, I imagine, people like Kynaston, who lived in Britain during these years and who want to visit again. Thankfully, however, the books are not simply an exercise in nostalgia. Kynaston likes the country he describes and the people who lived there, but he is honest about the injustices, indignities, and dirt. I doubt that he or any of his readers would really want to go back and live in the world he describes. We rather like our washing machines, our chicken tikka masala, our mobile phones, our bananas, our clean air, our cars with windows that open. Although back then no one would have troubled Mr. Elliott for drowning squirrels.

Alister Chapman is associate professor of history at Westmont College. With John Coffey and Brad Gregory, he is the editor of Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (Univ. of Notre Dame Press). His book Godly Ambition: John Stott and the Evangelical Movement is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

1. The first volume was reviewed by Bill McKibben in the September/October 2008 issue of Books and Culture.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Entrepreneur. The word evokes heroic images. A creative, hardworking risk-taker with a vision for a new and improved product, an innovative marketing strategy, a revolutionary technological or organizational breakthrough that allows us to do more with less. Someone with the judgment, the ingenuity, the leadership skills, the networking abilities, and the courage to overcome obstacles and put a plan into action. A fierce competitor beset by opponents in a contest to serve customers.

In recent decades, this conception of the entrepreneur has begun to reemerge as the benign face of business, the paragon of the free market—even the essence of cool capitalism. There is good reason for this recent celebration of entrepreneurship. A growing body of evidence links entrepreneurship to the one thing that modern society seems to want most: rising material standards of living and the elimination of absolute poverty. But what makes some societies more entrepreneurial than others? How can a society become more entrepreneurial? Unfortunately, economists have found it nearly impossible to answer these questions. Our standard approach is to develop mathematical models of economic interaction and to use statistical firepower to estimate the size and impact of each relevant variable. Entrepreneurship—which is all about the dynamic interactions between people with keen, unexpected insights—has proven too subtle and slippery for this approach. Some of the actions of entrepreneurs are quite predictable and easy to model, but the important ones aren’t. Moreover, the heterogeneity of entrepreneurs means that they can’t be easily quantified, counted, and added up. When theory and statistics fail, economists turn to the underused third tool in their bag of tricks: history.

The Invention of Enterprise is a bold, exploratory attempt to answer our most important questions about how entrepreneurship has evolved and what makes it flourish. The volume brings together a stellar cast of economic historians. The important questions and the available evidence for the periods and places analyzed vary tremendously, so authors’ approaches must too. Their scope is almost beautifully and absurdly vast, their insights are numerous, and their conclusions are restrained, yet the book will have a hard time reaching a wide audience; it is written primarily for scholars. In addition, virtually nowhere in these 500-plus pages do we witness the drama and passion of individual entrepreneurs struggling against obstacles, acting creatively, and being human. If that is what you seek, I’d recommend reading some biographies of individual entrepreneurs like the recent Pulitzer Prize-winner, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by T.J. Stiles (Knopf, 2009), or my classroom favorite, The Frozen Water Trade: A True Story, by Gavin Weightman (Hyperion, 2003).

Michael Hudson opens The Invention of Enterprise with a provocative chapter on the ancient world, describing forms of entrepreneurship that will be alien to most modern readers. He argues that Mesopotamian entrepreneurship, which developed fundamental commercial practices like the use of money; uniform weights, measures, and prices needed for account-keeping; and the charging of interest, emerged from the region’s palaces and especially its temples. He paints an idyllic picture of the Bronze Age Near East, which is contrasted with the nasty, predatory entrepreneurship of ancient Rome: “Roman affluence—literally a ‘flowing in’—stemmed largely from slave capture and booty hunting, usury, and tribute from defeated realms.” Thus emerges the volume’s most important theme: there are two kinds of entrepreneurship: productive and unproductive. The key to societal health is giving the right incentives so that the well-organized, well-connected, creative, intelligent, and even ruthless people in society will add value and not subtract from it. This seems like common sense, but throughout the millennia the people who make and shape the rules of the game haven’t generally seen it this way.

The ensuing chapters examine Babylon in the 7th and 6th centuries before Christ, the Islamic Middle East, Medieval Europe, Europe from 1540 to 1640, the golden age of the Dutch Republic, Britain from the Industrial Revolution to the present (three excellent chapters), modern France, modern Germany, the United States (again three excellent chapters), colonial India, late imperial China, and Japan in the century before World War II. The implicit and often explicit conclusion of these authors is that latent entrepreneurial abilities—intelligence, judgment, willingness to take risks and innovate, leadership skills—can be found in virtually every time, place, and group, so that the key to success isn’t particular individuals but the institutions of a society and the incentives offered to potential entrepreneurs. If we want to spur entrepreneurship, we need to take Ronald Reagan’s advice to Mikhail Gorbachev and tear down the walls that imprison it.

As this framework suggests, the institutions that unfetter entrepreneurship can be obvious—for example, the rule of law, which prevents the emperor, king, dictator, or majority voting bloc from confiscating the property of successful entrepreneurs—but they can also be much more subtle, such as the gentlemanly code of behavior that Joel Mokyr identifies as crucial to explaining why Britain was the site of the first successful industrial revolution. In 18th-century Britain, “a businessman’s most important asset was perhaps his reputation as a gentleman even if he was not [by heredity] a gentleman … breaking the rules of gentlemanly conduct was costly …. It was, above all, important not to come across as greedy and rapacious.” This gentlemanly code allowed for trust in a wide range of business relationships, which allowed entrepreneurship to flourish. In contrast, Michel Hau shows how the attractiveness and prestige of gentry status and high public office in nineteenth-century France was an important roadblock to entrepreneurship, as talent was continuously seduced away into these less productive arenas, as was the prestige given to intellectual and artistic élites who derided, misrepresented, and misunderstood the accomplishments of entrepreneurs.

In the volume’s conclusion, editor William Baumol expresses the standard economists’ view that studying history is of little use, mere entertainment, unless we can draw some practical implications or “useful knowledge” from it. Baumol concludes that the primary determinants of a society’s entrepreneurial success are cultural—especially religious and other attitudes and beliefs. But because we know so little about how to change a culture, he turns to public policies that can be legislated—with a tepid discussion of the patent system, antitrust law, bankruptcy protection, and banking laws. I found these conclusions disappointing. Where are the bold—dare I say “entrepreneurial”—proposals for spurring American entrepreneurship? (See below.)

Naomi Lamoreaux and Margaret Walsh in their chapters on entrepreneurship in the United States conclude that the “golden age” of entrepreneurship was the era between the Civil War and the Great Depression. The prestige of entrepreneurs plummeted with the Great Depression and didn’t begin to rebound until the past few decades. The enemies of entrepreneurial renewal today remain strong—a coalition of misinformed, envious, and rent-seeking individuals.

Jealousy and self-interested attempts to steal a piece of the pie from entrepreneurs are, alas, inevitable. However, I believe there is considerable hope for the misinformed. Because of deficiencies in our educational system, this group simply lacks an understanding of how the economy functions, an understanding about how successful business ventures generate immense benefits that spill over to the rest of society. Take the case of poverty reduction. What individual did the most in the last decades of the 20th century to alleviate poverty in the United States? Economic evidence would suggest the hero in the “war” on poverty was probably an entrepreneur—perhaps Sam Walton. Estimates by a range of economists suggest that typical Wal-Mart customers save about $1,000 per year, and the biggest savers are low-income people. Yet detractors see Wal-Mart as a scourge, underpaying its employees and driving “mom and pop” out of business, a low-brow blot on the landscape. This indictment is based on gut reactions and prejudices, not careful economic analysis, which shows that Wal-Mart pays its workers on par with competitors, barely influences the overall labor market when it enters a locality, benefits those who don’t even shop there because competitors must cut prices—and the $1,000 or so that Wal-Mart’s loyal customers save each year ends up being spent on something else, thereby supporting the local economy. Wal-Mart isn’t perfect, but the vast majority of economists have concluded that its benefits to society clearly outweigh its costs. My point is that a clear-eyed, balanced assessment of the impacts of an entrepreneur like Sam Walton or entrepreneurship in general can’t rely on knee-jerk reactions and superficial analysis. And notice the moral implications. Sam Walton did an immense amount of good in the world; entrepreneurs—when given the incentives to add value and not destroy it—are doing God’s work of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, curing the sick, and serving the rest of mankind.[1]

If we want a more entrepreneurial society, entrepreneurs like Sam Walton need to be cultural heroes. Instead they are depicted as “robber barons” in so many one-sided public school textbooks and classrooms. Bold proposal time. Perhaps a separation of education and state would help revitalize American entrepreneurship. If parents were given real choice in their children’s education—say a universal school voucher system which would make entrepreneurs out of educators—would our dysfunctional school systems turn away from preaching their anti-market fairy tales and begin to teach young people how and why to become successful entrepreneurs? Worth trying.

Robert Whaples is professor of economics at Wake Forest University and book review editor for EH.net.

1. This case has been made superbly by the Acton Institute. See www.acton.org or works like Michael J. Miller, “Business as a Moral Enterprise,” in Christian Theology and Market Economics, edited by Ian R. Harper and Samuel Gregg (Edward Elgar, 2008).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

American politics is a ruin today. We suffer an economic crisis that widens the rift between rich and poor. Rather than pursue genuine reform, civic leaders resort to words such as “liberty” and “rights” to protect selfish interests. Where can we find a historical example of a social policy that resists such corruption, that promotes equity or fairness without legitimating authoritarian regimes? Perhaps, David Hall suggests in his latest book, we should take another look at the Puritan founders of New England.

Hall’s stunning suggestion cuts against the grain of long-standing and still prevalent opinions about the Puritans. These 17th-century reformers left a voluminous record that has evoked lavish praise and severe censure. Hall argues that many of their admirers, including historians of evangelicalism, have misidentified them with modern notions of democracy that valorize individual rights. In the 19th century, writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and the great American historian George Bancroft idealized the founders of Massachusetts as hardy individualists and proto-democrats. Such readings, by Hall’s account, ironically echo Anglican opponents who warned Crown and Parliament that the Puritans favored a radical polity that promoted democratic sedition and anarchy.

Hall is quite critical of the opposite position as well: that the Puritans instituted a theocratic and profoundly undemocratic regime. Here again we have modern observers, including early 19th-century Unitarians, writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later literary critics who oddly replicated 17th-century complaints that the Puritan ministry had turned the colonies into an inhospitable oligarchy of the saints. This image of fanatic authoritarianism persists. So, as any teacher of the period knows, most students who read the Puritans fasten on tales of power abused: persecution of women such as Ann Hutchinson, execution of witches, banishment of Quakers, and warfare against Indians. As Hall laments, much recent historical writing has wrongly reinforced the caricature of the Puritans as inhumane reactionaries. Hardly the resources to recover a sound politics.

Hall confronts these widespread misperceptions by focusing his argument on everyday social exchange in New England during the first two decades of settlement, 1630 through 1650. He does not dwell on political theory, nor does he offer detailed narratives of the social history. He provides instead snapshots of social institutions that mediated power—that is, restrained power through participation and popular consent. He draws heavily on rarely read sources: political manifestos, sermons, law codes, platforms for colonial governments, town covenants, church records, and civic petitions. These show, by Hall’s account, that the Puritans were “the most advanced reformers of the Anglo-colonial world.”

The Puritans were not modern liberals. Like other English people, they assumed that submission to some sort of hierarchy formed the basis of social solidarity. Yet shaken by the Stuart monarchy’s absolutist designs, and offended by the Church of England, they absorbed the conviction that civic rulers held only derivative, what some Puritans called “ministerial” rather than “magisterial” authority. Consent of the people, expressed through local institutions such as courts and boroughs, keyed proper governance. In England, the full implications of these ideas were never realized. Hall repeatedly observes that Parliament, even when led by the most progressive reformers, the Levellers, did not successfully promote the mediating, consent-driven, participatory institutions that Puritans wanted. His case therefore is not that the American Puritans were radical democrats but that they were comparatively progressive—more reforming than their English contemporaries. The New World gave them space, as it were, to make godly politics a reality.

Hall’s account of this reformist program begins with the establishment of five colonial governments during the 1630s: Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, New Haven, and Rhode Island. In each case, Hall argues, Puritan leaders attempted to balance authority with liberty, reducing the possibilities for either tyranny or anarchy. Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, to be sure, favored authority. Yet a series of political contests during the 1630s resulted in pragmatic compromises, encoded in the 1641 “Body of Liberties.” It gave the governor a veto over legislation but established annual elections for governor, magistrates, and deputies (representatives from the towns to the General Court). It asserted that people had fundamental, inviolable liberties and denied the right of the executive to dismiss the assembly. Hall reminds us how innovative these provisions were. New Englanders erased the institution of aristocracy, empowered the common voter, and denied claims to special privilege.

Just as remarkably, Hall shows, the governance of New England towns reflected “an everyday experience of majority rule and a broadly inclusive civil society.” The law restricted voting privileges to church members and property owners, but such requirements did not prohibit widespread participation and rule by consent at nearly every turn. Most residents received property. Although the town apportioned land according to social status and civic leadership, it gave special consideration to poor people and residents with large families. Townsmen looked the other way when non-church-members voted, explaining the relatively high level—above 50 percent—of suffrage. The town meeting elected selectmen but also created special committees to oversee their work. Residents deliberated how taxes would be assessed, property distributed, pastors’ salaries determined, and roads and fences maintained (the fences better to restrain wandering pigs). Every resident, church member or not, could speak at town meetings, as they could at church meetings and court sessions. Petitions that expressed grievances, letters, handwritten texts, books, and gossip about the latest sermon or town meeting circulated widely. Hall especially emphasizes how public speech rested on appeal to principles of moral fairness rather than legal right.

The church exhibited similarly reformist agendas. Puritan writers in England and America used anti-Catholic rhetoric chiefly to critique, as Hall puts it, “the power of vested interests,” and to “cast off every corrupt form of authority.” While the Puritans did not promote anything akin to open freedom of religious conscience in public affairs, they did eliminate structural and procedural hierarchies in their churches. Members of individual congregations elected pastors and determined policies such as poor relief. Churches created covenants that implied voluntary participation rather than coerced membership. Casting off the state-church, New Englanders abolished ecclesiastical courts, tithes, and public office-holding by clergy. Moral discipline in congregations tended to promote confession and reconciliation rather than exclusion or punishment.

As they did in church affairs, so New Englanders attempted to infuse civil law with principles of equity: notions of justice, compassion, fairness, and brotherly love. The key text for Hall is the 1649 Book of the General Laws and Liberties, the first printed code of laws in the New World. In itself, this publication reveals how the Puritans intended to create transparent, accessible, and amendable laws—subject to review and popular critique. Some of the statutes, such as the one that defined adultery as a capital crime, were severe; but these were rarely enforced. More important for Hall’s argument, New England’s legal systems reflected deeply democratic and ethical values. Unlike English practice, they established the right of self-representation (a knock against lawyers), instituted local courts so that cases could be tried in the context of neighborly oversight and opinion, required the selection of juries by vote, abolished torture, demanded full record keeping, excluded theft from the list of capital crimes, curtailed imprisonment for debt, impeded the confiscation of property, provided for partible inheritance, and allowed women to convey property. Puritans turned the courts into instruments for equity, where laws were applied pragmatically, flexibly, and, for the most part, compassionately.

A Reforming People is not a history of New England Puritanism as a whole. It reveals what the Puritans did in their attempt to create a reformed and participatory social order. It highlights the immense possibilities of a politics infused with ideas of consent and equity rather than with notions of liberty and right. In order to make this case, Hall focuses especially on the dispersal of authority, popular consent, and especially on the economic aspects of godly rule: the abolition of aristocratic privilege, distribution of land that accounted for people’s needs, poor relief, humane treatment of debtors, and the ideal of negotiation and compromise in cases of economic dispute. In such terms, godly rule promoted the common good far in excess of anything ever done in England.

To be sure, New England’s Puritan history suggests the limits of such a religiously shaped polity, as evidenced by the social status of unbelievers, religious dissenters, women, and witches. (The mistreatment of Indians and importation of slaves belongs to a later stage in New England’s history, when imperial politics and the decline of godly rule, rather than its apex, came into play.) The cost of a cohesive, equitable society fashioned out of Christian principles, we might conclude, amounted to an incomplete assertion of civil liberties. New England Puritans subordinated freedom of conscience and individual rights to the collective.

This marvelously documented, sometimes difficult-to-read but reliably smart book thus leads to big questions about the relationship between our different social and political priorities. How are we to pose the virtues of an economically humane order against our aspirations for individual freedoms and liberty? How do we inject moral imperatives into our political discourse without recourse to explicitly religious assumptions? Hall’s revisionist history of the Puritans shows that they valued equity over liberty. Our call is to ponder how to promote such a humane polity in a society long distanced from the premises of godly rule.

Mark Valeri is E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education. He is the author most recently of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan New England (Princeton Univ. Press).

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Editor's note: To celebrate Independence Day, we've reached back to the July/August 2011 issue for Matt Reynolds' review of Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution. And if you're in the mood for more reading about the American Revolution and the Founding era, Thomas Kidd himself has a number of pieces on the B&C website examining the subject from multiple angles—not to mention pieces by Mark Noll and many other scholars: more than enough to occupy your entire holiday weekend.

For all the heated debate over the Founders' faith—or lack of faith—the American Revolution is often treated as exclusively a political affair, overlooking how thoroughly a range of religious convictions, yearnings, and forebodings suffused the spirit of '76. Reckoning with the Revolutionary era's many religious dimensions is the mission undertaken, and carried off marvelously, in Thomas Kidd's God of Liberty. A prodigiously productive professor at Baylor University, Kidd—already the author of a Great Awakening history and a forthcoming Patrick Henry biography, among other volumes—has established himself as a leading student of early American religion. In all likelihood, he'll soon be mentioned in the same breath as luminaries like Mark Noll, George Marsden, and Harry Stout, all of whom grace the book's star-studded roster of endorsers. God of Liberty effortlessly straddles the divide between scholarly and popular history, uniting academic rigor with a pleasing readability. It deserves, and hopefully will receive, an audience well beyond the ivory tower.

Readers might naturally expect an explicitly "religious" history of the Revolutionary period to challenge certain secularist interpretations, and if so, they will not come away disappointed. In particular, Kidd debunks the notion that the founders sought to immunize American politics and public life against the influence of religion. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the early statesmen most habitually invoked by contemporary advocates of rigid church-state separation, would have recoiled at the dogmas promulgated by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. Elements of secularist mythmaking, then, receive a solid thrashing, however politely administered. Nor, it should be added, does this unfailingly fair-minded book hesitate to puncture extravagant conservative claims about the Christian character of the American experiment. Kidd wisely refuses to portray the Revolution as a merely religious or merely political episode. Categories the modern mind instinctively segregates fused too tightly in the Revolutionary mind to permit any facile disentanglement. To the American colonists, Kidd writes, "political and religious liberty were intertwined and inseparable." No less than British encroachment on their pocketbooks, they feared British encroachment on their consciences.

Religiously and politically, the American founders were a diverse lot. Emory University scholar John Witte has helpfully assembled them into four groups: Puritans, who favored the Godly commonwealth model of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut; civic republicans, who synthesized non-sectarian Protestant morality with an ethic of public spiritedness redolent of ancient Greece and Rome; evangelicals, who preached the redeeming power of the new birth; and Enlightenment skeptics, who sought the scientific axioms behind a divinely-ordered cosmos. In Witte's telling, the Puritans and civic republicans united on behalf of government support for religion, setting aside divergent perspectives on the specifics of Calvinist theology. And the evangelicals and Enlightenment skeptics, reaching across a more pronounced theological gulf, fought to dismantle structures of state sponsorship and control.

Nowhere in God of Liberty does Kidd refer explicitly to Witte's classification scheme, but the echoes shouldn't be missed. For the signal achievement of this book is to re-create the religious atmosphere—the matrix of principled alliances, marriages of convenience, bitter feuds, and surly standoffs—within which a common set of Revolutionary ideals arose and gained momentum. Especially in the unlikely collaboration between devout evangelicals and their deistic detractors, Kidd locates the genesis of remarkably durable beliefs about American identity and purpose. At no point, he insists, was the struggle with Britain "simply about unfair taxes and colonial politics." Rather, "religion, both during the Revolution and afterwards, provided essential moral and political principles to the revolutionaries and forged the new American nation."

Kidd enumerates five major precepts around which evangelicals, skeptics, and other Revolutionary compatriots coalesced: the campaign to disestablish state churches, the belief in a creator God who endowed all men with inalienable rights, the reality of human sinfulness, the corresponding need to foster private and public virtue, and the certainty of Providential governance over the affairs of mankind. Although evangelical and Enlightenment rationales often differed dramatically, both camps could identify common ground—and, in the British threat, a common enemy.

Underpinning these individual ideals was a ferocious, all-encompassing devotion to the "sacred" ideal of liberty: Coercive religious establishments trampled on it; divinely anchored human rights safeguarded it from tyrannical abuses; restraints on sinful passion and exhortations to virtue slowed its descent into selfishness; and God, in his good judgment, might restore or rescind it based on a nation's faithfulness, or lack thereof. Many of Kidd's finest passages revolve around anguished speculation, during this or that pivotal battle, that God—angered by a retreat from righteousness—might suddenly withdraw his protection.

To communicate the odd-couple quality of the Revolutionary coalition, Kidd periodically juxtaposes Jefferson against the Baptist minister and religious liberty champion John Leland, who embodied the evangelical ethos as unmistakably as our third President embodied the Enlightenment alternative. Although they "could not have been more opposed in their personal religious views," both men "believed that government should afford liberty of conscience to its citizens and should not privilege one Christian denomination over another." While battling to secure religious liberty in Virginia, Jefferson assiduously courted evangelical support. And Leland, mirroring the sentiments of his Baptist brethren, rejoiced in Jefferson's ascent to the presidency, believing it portended a waning of persecution.

Of course, as Kidd readily acknowledges, Revolutionary ideals commanded nothing like universal assent, and not infrequently did entrenched interests and ingrained prejudice conspire to thwart their full flowering. Established churches, clergy tax support, and religious tests for public office lingered on for decades. And slavery, despite the Declaration of Independence's ringing endorsem*nt of equality, endured even longer, provoking the bloodiest conflict in American history. Still, Kidd shows how the evangelical-Enlightenment consensus set in motion religious and political forces whose progress, if halting, was nonetheless inexorable.

If God of Liberty forces us to rethink the religious nature of the American Revolution, it also forces us to rethink its historical scope. To say that the Revolution began at Bunker Hill and ended at Yorktown is pitifully insufficient. Even including the French and Indian War and the ensuing Parliamentary taxation schemes leaves too truncated a picture. Kidd's narrative doesn't shortchange battlefield history, and he provides a riveting chapter on the beleaguered band of chaplains who helped boost morale, preach virtuous conduct, and meditate on the war's providential meaning. But he recognizes that any genuine history of this period must transcend the military showdown and its proximate political causes. Kidd's vision is capacious, stretching back generations before gunfire rang out over Lexington and Concord, and peering ahead to the revivalist upsurge of the early 19th century.

Without descending into anti-American hyperbole, Kidd's epilogue ponders certain tensions and dangers within the Revolutionary mindset bequeathed to subsequent generations. Providential awareness, for instance, can inhibit self-criticism: If God smiles upon the American cause, by what standard can imperial misadventures be questioned, or brutalities condemned? Kidd seems most interested, however, in thinking through the possible permutations of liberty, virtue, and religion in American life. This leads him to a sustained discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville, who so famously limned the early American synthesis of Christianity and liberal democracy. Liberty, by its nature, chafes at moral constraints. With Tocqueville, Kidd finds in religion's virtue-generating potential an essential solvent for selfish appetites.

Somewhat offhandedly—and forgivably, in a book so blessedly free of contemporary political allusions—Kidd links "rampant greed and deception" to America's recent recession. Leave the experts to decide whether this suffices as macro-economic analysis (when, one wonders, have greed and deception not been rampant?), but there's no gainsaying the underlying point: Untrammeled self-interest undermines the common good.

Though he might have, Kidd declines to mention the vast financial overhaul enacted last year, purportedly to prevent just such greed and deception from again running rampant. America's founders knew well the fanatical libertarian impulse, but they were ill-acquainted with disciples of the modern technocratic temptation, fondly "dreaming," in T. S. Eliot's memorable words, "of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."

Greed confounds a regulatory behemoth as surely as it exploits a regulatory vacuum. Whatever the vice, it will elude a thousand legislative snares and outwit a thousand bureaucratic busybodies. This is not to nitpick at Kidd's recession diagnosis, much less to countenance the overthrow of sensible laws and regulations, but to reinforce his powerful conclusion: Religion "retains unmatched power to motivate believers to do good." For Massachusetts militiamen, Wall Street investment bankers, and Americans of sundry talents and dispositions, nothing else will do the trick.

Matt Reynolds is an associate editor at Christianity Today magazine, where he presides over the Books section.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

As a devout midwestern Catholic in the first two decades of the Cold War, Andrew Bacevich imbibed the Manichean mythology of American good and Soviet evil. After graduating from West Point, Bacevich became a seasoned and learned warrior in the holy cause: combat service in the Vietnam War, duty in Germany and the Persian Gulf, teaching at his alma mater while completing a doctorate in history at Princeton. Shortly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, having served for 23 years as a professional soldier and officer in the U.S. Army, Bacevich retired at the rank of colonel. The American Century could not have had a more courageous and scholarly member of its legions.

Yet all along Bacevich was growing wary of the faith, and in the elegant, wise, and sardonic memoir that opens Washington Rules, he recounts how he slowly and painfully realized that “orthodoxy might be a sham.” The inept and butcherous prosecution of the Vietnam War had triggered his initial suspicions; but, as Bacevich tells it, he was too ambitious to let his doubts mature into sustained intellectual and moral reflection: “Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies.” (Pursued out of the same careerism, graduate study was “a complete waste of time”—a claim that’s belied, I should note, by the historical erudition of his work.) But then he saw the shabby state of the former East Germany after the fall of Communism: the ragtag remnants of the fabled Red Army (Russian soldiers were peddling their shoddily-made medals, watches, and uniforms), a physical infrastructure that had clearly not recovered from World War II. Like General Smedley Butler—a decorated Marine Corps veteran who had confessed in War Is a Racket (1935) to being “a high class thug for Big Business”—Bacevich began to wonder how he’d fallen for the hype of the Evil Empire.

Now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich has become one of the most incisive critics of U.S. imperial folly. (His articles, it’s worth noting, have appeared across the spectrum, from New Left Review to The American Conservative.) In an indispensable historical trilogy—American Empire (2002), The New American Militarism (2005), and The Limits to Power (2008)—Bacevich narrated the steady expansion and corruption of our national hubris, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama. In Washington Rules, a kind of capstone to the trilogy, he traces the origins of this madness to the end of World War II. Since the early years of the Cold War, a Beltway-Wall Street axis—”Washington,” in Bacevich’s shorthand—has constructed and expanded a constellation of institutions that comprise the imperial state. Headquartered in the Imperial City, it embraces the upper reaches of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal government; the tentacles of the national security establishment; the clerical archipelago of think tanks and policy wonkery, from Cato and American Enterprise to Heritage, Brookings, and RAND; the pecuniary-industrial complex of finance capital, defense contracting, and high-tech manufacturers; the imperial mandarins at the Council of Foreign Relations and the Kennedy School of Government; and what C. Wright Mills once called the “cultural apparatus”: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the major television networks, all serving as the imperial Ministry of Truth.

Not all Americans have genuflected before the Washington rules, and Bacevich points to a thin but resilient lineage of apostates and heretics. He rounds up the usual suspects: Randolph Bourne, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Christopher Lasch. (I missed A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan.) I’m surprised by the absence of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Bacevich has taken as a spiritual preceptor in some of his recent work. Nor is there any mention of William Appleman Williams—like Bacevich, a military veteran, diplomatic historian, and public intellectual. But the most compelling witnesses against the American Century are those who once labored in its service. George Kennan, who coined the term “containment,” came to bitterly excoriate the insatiability of American powerlust and consumerism. David Shoup, Marine general, Medal of Honor recipient, and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the protests against the Vietnam War.

The two most unforgettable dissenting insiders are Eisenhower and William J. Fulbright. We all know of Eisenhower’s warning, in his 1961 farewell address, about the “military-industrial complex.” What most of us don’t know is Ike’s earlier warning, given shortly after the start of his presidency. Call it the “Cross of Iron” speech, and it’s far more absorbing and morally substantial than any of Obama’s fulsome homilies. Every gun, warship, and rocket signifies, Eisenhower asserted, “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Such a way of life, he rued, is “humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Fulbright, the learned and cantankerous Democratic senator from Arkansas, was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1960s. A meticulous and unwavering critic of the Johnson administration’s Vietnam policies, Fulbright routinely exposed their moral and strategic inanity in his hearings, speeches, and essays. Despite the dated quality of its immediate concerns, his 1966 remonstrance, The Arrogance of Power, has lost none of its urgency. Surveying the poverty and desolation of American cities and rural communities, Fulbright declared it “unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades … while neglecting the needs of its own people.” Adding that a “great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations—to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image,” Fulbright warned that any nation setting out on “self-appointed missions to police the world” will bring “misery to their intended beneficiaries and destruction upon themselves.”

To counter the Washington rules, Bacevich urges Americans to revisit “the anti-imperial origins of the Republic.” “The proper aim of American statecraft,” he asserts, is to “permit Americans to avail themselves of the right of self-determination as they seek to create at home a ‘more perfect union.'” Echoing Eisenhower and Fulbright, he reminds us that “fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland and Detroit.” Well aware that isolationism is impossible, he sketches an alternative credo, redolent of Niebuhr and the Abraham Lincoln of the Second Inaugural Address: we cannot know God’s purposes, we cannot master history, and we should try to change only what we know best, and even then fitfully: ourselves. The military, he insists, is for defense and nothing else; American soldiers should be stationed here, which would require the withdrawal and dismantling of the base system; and force should be employed only as a last resort, in accordance with “just war” criteria.

Bacevich’s counsel is so eminently wise that my skepticism may seem churlish. But his account of the American Empire and its rules is open to several objections. As Bacevich surely knows, what Williams once called “the contours of American history” have always been violently expansive. The American drive for global dominion was not a fall from republican grace that occurred in 1947. And precisely because our imperial present is deeply rooted in our liberal republican past, I cannot agree with Bacevich that we can appeal to an anti-imperialist heritage. To be sure, King and Fulbright and Williams have an ancestry as well—most illustriously, the Anti-Imperialist League that emerged after the Spanish-American War, graced by the imperishable examples of Mark Twain, Jane Addams, and William James. Still, venerable as their dissenting tradition may be, their failure is evident; American history is not on Bacevich’s side. From Puritan divines to frontier trappers to today’s suburban shoppers, Americans have repeatedly affirmed what Williams dubbed “empire as a way of life.” In short, “Washington” rules because Americans want it to rule.

Proposing alternatives to the consensus may seem “a fanciful exercise,” Bacevich writes. But “before the movement comes the conviction—an awareness of things amiss combined with a broad vision of how to make them right.” His modest prescriptions might ensure our safety and prosperity, he suggests, perhaps even fulfilling “the mission that Americans persist in believing God or Providence has bestowed upon the United States.” Yet isn’t the notion of divine anointment precisely one of the “things amiss”? The covenant theology of American anointment is exactly what we need to renounce.

Williams posed the question squarely: “Is the idea and reality of America possible without empire?” If one says yes, Williams wrote, one is “a pioneer on the ultimate American frontier.” The creation of a post-imperial America is the most urgent—and potentially most liberating—adventure for Americans in the 21st century. What will Americans make of their country if they lose their conviction of an exalted destiny? Resistance to the waning of the white American imperium will surely be widespread and adamant—witness the descent of the Right into nativist and fundamentalist lunacy. But relinquishing empire as a way of life, giving up the delusion that the world will fall apart without the ordering of our money and armaments, presents a moment of possibility: we could embrace the decline of our global supremacy with a joyful sense of emancipation. If we are weaker and poorer, we’ll also be freer to arrange our common life by wiser and saner standards—perhaps by standards that reflect our professed belief that the poor are blessed, and that the meek, not the strong, will inherit the earth. If that unlikely but not impossible reformation transpires, Andrew Bacevich will be among those who deserve our thanks for their service.

Eugene McCarraher is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

During a semester abroad in Mainz, Germany, in the mid-1990s, I sampled lectures on the New Testament from the university’s Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät. Fifteen years later, I can only remember two things the professor said in the course of the semester. First, when discussing a gospel account of a healing, he commented that “only some people in America” believed that such miracles actually occurred. Later on, he observed that when American theologians—he at least conceded that such rarities existed—happened upon an idea, they did so unaware that German theologians had fully vetted it several decades earlier. He might have added that few American Christians wanted their ministers to stumble upon any recent theological insights, from Germany or anywhere else. Die Amerikaner: superstitious, backward, ignorant.

In God and the Atlantic, Thomas Albert Howard analyzes the venerable history of European criticism and derision of American religion. “[Woodrow] Wilson talks like Jesus Christ and acts like Lloyd George,” French President Georges Clemenceau complained at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. No one accused George W. Bush of speaking like Jesus, but European dissatisfaction with his purportedly evangelical administration produced fresh discussions of a longstanding “transatlantic religious gap” between a religious United States and a secularized Western Europe.

The many sneering dismissals of America and American religion that Howard includes in God and the Atlantic are themselves worth the price of admission. They range across the span of U.S. history, from the French diplomat Charles de Talleyrand’s assessment of the early Republic (“The states of America are a country where there are thirty-two religions, but there is only one course at dinner—and it’s bad”) to the pithy judgment of postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard (“the only remaining primitive society”), none of them surpassing the loathing expressed by the philosopher Martin Heidegger (“[the] metaphysical essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times”), who found Nazi ideology more congenial.

Howard’s foremost contribution is to historicize and categorize European animosity against American religion, dividing it first into traditionalist and secularist camps. Unapologetic for his focus on élite thinkers, Howard follows Charles Taylor in exploring a “social imaginary” largely created by intellectuals that filtered down to other strata of society. What emerges is first and foremost a sweeping and engaging intellectual history of Europe during the ages of revolution and reaction. While many European thinkers found backwoods revivalists, Shakers, Millerites, and Mormons inherently fascinating, their comments about the United States primarily interpreted events closer to home. Thus, traditionalists pining for the ancien régime regarded the American experiment in democracy with great suspicion and accordingly concluded that religious freedom undermined order and morality. More secular reformers and revolutionaries, meanwhile, saw the primitive vitality of American religion as a stumbling block to either a Comtean “religion of humanity” or the coming socialist state. Many Europeans on the Left absorbed a bitter anticlericalism through the heritage of the French Revolution.

Howard suggests that these rival tendencies of European thought occupied some common ground in their view of the United States. Both traditionalists and secularists argued that American society lacked conditions they regarded as normative but that Howard argues were merely specifically European. In short, America was anomalous or defective, lacking a feudal past and now locked into a bourgeois pursuit of material wealth. Also, many Europeans of all political stripes regarded the United States “at once as poor learner, oafish foil, and didactic counterexample.”

When encountering a book both far-ranging and brief, one cannot help but quibble on occasion. While Howard typically provides succinct introductions to the life and thought of key figures such as Frances Trollope and Karl Marx, similar material on intellectuals less familiar to non-specialists would assist such readers. More substantively, Howard comments at the outset that Great Britain presents a “special case,” given the religious “patrimony” of the United States, yet after an early section on 19th-century British traditionalists (mostly Anglicans), he only rarely returns to this special relationship.

Howard does not waste much time assessing wild European claims about American religion. After all, Europeans once asserted that New World dogs failed to bark and that Americans were degenerating into a race of sterile midgets. A 19th-century Catholic encyclopedia reported the existence of a literalistic American sect which allegedly required its adherents to pluck out their right eyes in fidelity to Matthew 5:29. Many critics of New World religion never crossed the Atlantic; many others happily misused the actions of small minorities as representative examples. Still, a good number of critics hit the mark. Anglican minister Isaac Fidler, who did visit the United States, observed that a minister’s dependence on his congregants’ good will and money created a great temptation to discard erudition and to compromise with local standards and tastes. Indeed, both traditionalists and secularists criticized American Christians—and Americans in general—for ignoring the life of the mind. While critics have always overstated this case, even sympathetic interpreters like Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the American preference for practical knowledge.

Of course, it still speaks ill of many cultured European despisers of American religion that they made so few attempts to acquire more than a superficial acquaintance with the object of their scorn. Thus, Howard spends the latter portion of his book introducing more knowledgeable and sympathetic voices into the dialogue. Because “one cannot live by Tocqueville alone,” Howard eschews the French aristocrat in favor of two somewhat less familiar interpreters of American Christianity.

At first glance, Reformed church historian Philip Schaff and Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain have little in common, separated both by time and ecclesiastical boundaries. Both men, however, spent many years in America while maintaining close connections with continental intellectuals, and they both concluded that Europe had much to learn from its New World child’s voluntaristic approach to religion. Schaff, who spent the bulk of his career at Mercersburg and Union seminaries, deplored America’s rampant sectarianism but predicted a future marked by “free unity in spirit and truth” that would transcend but not obliterate confessional differences.

For most of Maritain’s adult life, he spoke and published in the shadow of fin-de-siècle Vatican condemnations of “Americanism.” Thus, his praise of American democracy and religious pluralism took considerable courage. Howard briefly explores Maritain’s Thomistic emphasis on the imago Dei, focusing on his articulation of a humanism shorn of its anti-religious bias. In Howard’s paraphrase, Maritain’s “new Christendom” grounded the liberal state on “a common, supranational insistence on the freedom and dignity of the person qua person.” When Maritain left France in 1940 and took refuge in the United States, he found to his surprise that America realized his ideals in part. America, he suggested hopefully, displayed religious freedom without either anticlericalism or “antinomian perversion.” He admired the voluntaristic energy and dynamism of American Christianity, which still supported a benevolent empire of sorts without state control. And as Schaff had also done, Maritain praised middle-class American thrift and industry in contrast to a bourgeois thirst for aristocratic leisure.

Howard makes plain his appreciation of “mediating figures” such as Schaff and Maritain. He rejects secularization as a normative description of or prescription for the modern world, and he presumably would echo the balanced assessment of the American religious scene that his exemplars epitomize. Indeed, his book suggests that if Americans and Europeans alike were more familiar with their divergent histories, they would find the transatlantic religious divide less of a cause for mutual animus, derision, and contention. Making use of Ralph McInerny’s study of Jacques Maritain, God and the Atlantic implies that both Europeans and Americans should make a much deeper effort to discern the “lurking positive” in each other’s approach to religion and society. For believers and secularists on both sides of the Atlantic, that would be a worthy leap of faith.

John G. Turner teaches modern American history at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Bill Bright and Campus Crusade: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (Univ. of North Carolina Press). Currently he’s studying 19th-century Mormonism.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Commentaries stand on the shoulders of previous commentaries or, to shift the metaphor only slightly, they stand among other commentaries. The Gospels are just inside the century mark of being 2,000 years old and, while commentaries didn’t immediately show up in ancient bookshops, the trail of commentaries on each of the Gospels goes back 1,700 years and more. The Gospel of Luke was not the favorite of the Fathers—Matthew and John got the nods—but we have homilies from Origen (253), Titus of Bostra (378), and Ambrose of Milan (397); Augustine’s Harmony refers to Luke (430). After Augustine came Cyril of Alexandria (444), Philoxenus of Mabbug (519), and the Venerable Bede (735). The medievals, such as Bonaventure (1274), had an interest in Luke, as did the Reformers (Luther, 1546; Calvin, 1555). I will avoid a complete listing and jump, as we often do in the Protestant world, to modern scholarship: I think of T. Zahn (1913), Erich Klostermann (1919), B.S. Easton (1926), and J.M. Creed (1930). But it was in the 1970s and ’80s when Luke particularly flourished as a text for commentators, and thus one thinks of Heniz Schürmann (1969), F. W. Danker (1972), I. H. Marshall (1978), J. A. Fitzmyer (1981), L. Sabourin (1985), F. Bovon (1989), and J. Nolland (1989). In the ’90s some hefty volumes emerged, and Darrell Bock (1994) and J. B. Green (1997) remain among my favorites.

Sorting through what others have said leaves the commentator weary, wondering if the task can be done by one person and in manageable length, but the fresh commentary both sums up briefly what has gone before and takes us into new territory. Frequently enough it is a methodological approach that provides fresh light, as Howard Marshall subjected tradition criticism to withering scrutiny and Darrell Bock examined Luke through the lens of a biblical theology, while Joel Green read Luke through the lens of a literary approach alongside a judicious use of social-scientific discoveries about the ancient world.

Preachers need commentaries the most: their daily labor in the Bible and the need to say something faithful and insightful every Sunday drives them to those who can help them. The freshest commentary often provides the most nutrients. We can express our gratitude to scholars who have spent a decade or more in research in Luke and then put the results down on paper so others could reap the benefits of their labor.

But what happens when a pastor puts his hand to a commentary? Philip Graham Ryken completed this two-volume commentary on Luke shortly before he became president of Wheaton College, while still serving as pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. The strength of this commentary is that Ryken reads Luke for himself, in light both of his Reformed theology and of his pastoral task, relying very little upon the scholarship of others. (That, too, is its weakness.)

Departing from what has become for commentary writers the ever more daunting tradition of writing a comprehensive introduction, Ryken plunges right into the Gospel: Luke begins at 1:1 and so does Ryken. His commentary is lucid, intelligent, theologically informed, and fair to the text in light of the pastoral task. His eyes are always on his congregation, and so whether he calls us to respond to the Word by taking God at his word; or by reading the Beatitudes as a challenge (are we blessed by God?); or by accepting the challenge to follow Jesus; or by attending to the question “Who is the person that needs your help?” in the famous Good Samaritan parable—whatever the local emphasis, to the very end of the commentary, Ryken’s intent is to apply the whole text and apply the text wholly.

The pastor can’t afford simply to be a historian; theology comes into play, and Ryken knows when to bring it up. Many have said Mary could not have uttered the Magnificat (Luke 1:49-55), for she was too young. Ryken responds: “This objection overlooks the doctrine of inspiration, which teaches that Mary’s words came from God the Holy Spirit.” Well, I was nurtured in a school that might have said “prophecy” here and would have reserved “inspiration” for what Luke wrote, but Ryken soon makes amends: “If we wonder how she was able to write such a famous poem, the answer is simple: Mary knew her Bible!” I don’t know if this undoes his inspiration comment, but it does force the reader to think about the magnificent memories of ancient Jews who heard the Bible’s stories over and over and over in home and synagogue and so would have been able to create a pastiche-like poem of one’s favorite YHWH-promises.

His reading of the Friend at Midnight, Luke 11:5-8, is an excellent example of theological care. He avoids the special pleading of Kenneth Bailey’s appeal to the word anaideia as a one-of-a-kind meaning of “desire to avoid shame” and stands with solid scholarship in saying it means “shamelessness.” Then he weaves in and out of the potential problems and genuine insights that this parable offers about God: God does not need to be badgered; God does not respond to keep us from badgering. Ryken sees the logic: God, in fact, is not much like this man in bed at all; God is so much better!

Entitling the Pharisee and Tax Collector parable “The Sinner’s Prayer” (Luke 18:9-14) is perhaps a tip-off. Ryken sketches the Pharisee over against the Tax Collector through the lens of personal salvation and then in “be merciful” finds atonement theology, even substitutionary atonement with expiation and propitiation and justification at work: “This is what the tax collector was praying.” I doubt this was at work in the imagined Tax Collector (it is a parable, after all); Ryken is stretching here to find in the one Gospel that has comparatively little atonement theology an atonement theology that is far more crisp and clear than the text itself. But as I said, this overly theological approach is rare. I find his discussion of atonement theology in, say, Luke 23:44-49, to name but one example, insightful and solid, though probably more Reformed than many who will use this commentary.

The strength of this commentary, as I’ve said, is also its weakness: Ryken reads Luke for himself, but he has ignored too much valuable work by others. The methods of scholars and the insights of scholarship just don’t appear enough, and their absence weakens this commentary. I don’t know how one can write about the Beatitudes (Matthew’s list has several more); or the Lord’s Prayer (where Ryken says we need not be troubled by the differences, for the prayers are basically the same, and anyway Jesus taught the prayer more than one way [“clearly”], and the Lukan prayer is later in the ministry, hence Jesus gave a shorter version to remind the disciples of his earlier version, and the two versions show us we need not repeat only the one [Matthean] version); or the Centurion’s servant without some discussion of Q or at least the Lukan parallels with substantial discussion of the differences, their redactional pedigree, and the light source and redaction critics have thrown on Luke’s Gospel. I understand the pastoral task, but this is a commentary, and pastors (and students) will have questions that emerge from careful reading of the Bible itself that avoidance can’t resolve.

The “theology” of Luke has been a hotbox for nearly six decades now, and this commentary doesn’t sufficiently engage with scholarship on the salvation-historical plan (ever since H. Conzelmann’s famous study), the potency of absorbing and fulfilling Old Testament expectations—in light of how Judaism read Scripture, as well as the special attention Luke gives to the marginalized—and what that might say about kingdom theology and Christian praxis. In other words, there are central themes that have been examined in detail in Lukan scholarship, and Ryken does not give these themes a clear theological profile in light of Luke’s special emphases. For example, I. H. Marshall showed how holistic salvation is in Luke’s theology, yet Ryken too often wants to refocus to personal soteriology. A more robust view of political and economic salvation could be exploited for Christian living today. Nor is there enough attention to the literary parallels between Luke and Acts or the numerous and insightful studies on the purpose of Luke-Acts. These themes are not only central to Lukan scholarship today but also can be dynamically reshaped for preaching. Pastors and Bible students need someone who knows the text well, as Ryken clearly does, to weigh in on these topics in summary explanations and theological evaluation.

Pastors go to commentaries not only to prepare sermons but also to find help in interacting with other commentaries. They won’t find that here, for there is almost no interaction with our generation’s most significant commentators. Had he chosen to interact with these, Ryken would have done pastors even more good than this excellent exposition of Luke provides.

Scot McKnight is Karl A. Olsson Professor in Religious Studies at North Park University. His commentary on James (NICNT) was published earlier this year by Eerdmans.

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