Chair of LU History Department on Jemar Tisby and Why Christian Historians are Veering Left

The Pressure on Christian Historians to Win the Academy

You had written in a blog post on your website, Cautious Enthusiasm, the title of the blog post is History and Social Justice Activism, and there's a quote from you. You say that you've noticed a leftist trajectory, and specifically at a conference on faith and history that you've attended over the past 15 years.

What do you attribute leftist historiography infiltrating.

Christian circles to? If you really do a study of evangelicalism itself, especially when you study the modernist fundamentalist controversy, and then the emergence of what was called neo-evangelicalism or new evangelicalism with things like the founding of Fuller Theological Seminary, there has been for many years among Christian academics an insatiable desire to be accepted, to be accepted in the academy.

And it is kind of the nature of the academy. You've got to make certain impressions, you want to get things published, and so forth. And so there's been this almost, I would say, unhealthy desire to be approved by the larger academy.

Now, I understand that. Being an academic, I understand the contours of that. But I think it has gone way too far among a lot of, I think, evangelical, and some of them are friends of mine, evangelical historians who are so oriented toward being recognized within the larger academy that they know, they know that they cannot be conservative or vocally conservative and still get the recognition, or rarely so.

There's some rare exceptions out there. So there's a sense of hesitancy that I see as I've noticed going to Conference on Faith and History that I really like. I still go, I still take undergraduate students there.

I think it's profitable. I like the people there. Although I have seen, you know, over the past 15 years that I've been attending, a sense of going in a more, more and more progressive direction. I really saw that in this last meeting.

Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise, and Social Justice History

Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Because I know the keynote speech, I think,.

Was the thing that you wrote about. Yeah, we took 10 undergraduate students to give papers at this conference. I think we had more undergraduates there than any other school, except maybe one. And it was a very good conference, a lot of good feedback.

But they had a keynote speaker for the undergraduate portion of the conference, Jamar Tisby, who, as you know, has come out with a book, The Color of Compromise, which I have not read. But I did hear him speak, and his keynote address was to, specifically for these undergraduate budding historians.

And this is, and his whole point was, you know, here's how, here's how you can do history, right? Right. And it was laced with this, you know, heavy emphasis on, you know, do history as a project for social justice, to, you know, to make people aware.

It was a whole, you know, the whole woke idea of, you know, waking up to the problems in society and using history to sort of engineer a greater social justice projects. And now, again, social justice efforts, I'm fine with that.

But conflating it with the historical discipline, I'm not fine with that. I don't think it's healthy. I don't think it's good for the discipline. And I would say the same thing if I had gone to a really conservative conference, and the guy had gotten up there and talked about how we need to use the historical discipline to fight whatever, you know, conservative social justice perspective you might be presenting.

I may agree with those perspectives, but to take history and make it this instrument for an agenda driven project, I think really neuters history for what it is. And here's why I want to emphasize this.

Letting History Speak for Itself

History, when done well, okay, and we all want to do it well, we struggle, you know, to do it right, right? When done well speaks for itself. It doesn't need what I would call whiggish help to move it into a realm to do this or that for whatever our social needs are.

John Lukash, a great historian that I really like, he said, history is all we know. And when you think about it, it really is. It's all we know. Even as Christians, we know what's going to happen in the future, but we know that because of our study of the scripture, which was written in the past.

And so this idea that I have to do something for history, I need to use history for something other than letting history speak for itself, I think really weakens history. Now, I don't mean by that that we don't interpret history.

History is about interpretation. You have to interpret it, or otherwise we would just sit around and read primary source documents all the time. So we have to interpret it, but we need to interpret it faithfully by what I would think of as the rules of the discipline.

Don't let documents say more than what they actually say.