FULL INTERVIEW: Dr. Sam Smith on History, Social Justice, and Presentism

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

Well, welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and I am joined today with Dr.

00:07

Sam Smith, who is the Department Chair in History at Liberty University. Thank you for joining me today,

00:13

Dr. Smith. Thank you, John. I'm glad to be here. And Liberty University, if you want to just give me a little bit, like a 30 -second synopsis of what

00:21

Liberty University is, what the Department of History is, what makes it unique, and what's your role here, that would be great.

00:28

Liberty University was founded in 1971, and I came here 15 years ago as a history professor.

00:38

I've been the chair of the department for the last three years, and I've been the director of the graduate program for the last 10 years.

00:45

I'm still both of those today. It's very unique in that, especially on the graduate side, we're the only that I know of, master's program in history, that's from a fully accredited university that teaches history from a conservative, and I mean theologically conservative, evangelical perspective.

01:10

And we think that's unique, we think it's special, and a lot of students come to this program because of that.

01:19

What motivated you, when you were choosing programs in undergrad, to be a historian?

01:26

I started out as a biblical studies major, and that's actually what my undergraduate degree is in, in Bible.

01:32

I went to Bob Jones University, and I did a history minor. And I started really falling in love with history because of a couple of historians that were there.

01:44

Dr. Edward Pinozian was our teacher for Western Civilization. Still to this day, the best history teacher

01:52

I've ever seen. He absolutely captivated his audience, the students.

02:00

This is in a big lecture hall. But I remember, here I am a freshman in college, and I had gone to a big public school, didn't really like academics that much.

02:10

I kind of went to Bob Jones, that's what was expected in our family. All of my siblings went there as well.

02:18

I wasn't really interested in history until I got to college. And he made it come alive to me.

02:26

And I remember sitting there, they actually had bells. I remember sitting there, when the bell would ring,

02:33

I would be so disappointed. Because I was so, it was like watching a movie to me.

02:40

And that really got me started on an interest in history, and I minored in history there.

02:45

And then later I did a master's in church history at Bob Jones. And then

02:52

I taught in high school and was an administrator for some ten years, and then I went back to the

02:57

University of South Carolina to do a Ph .D. in history. So you're at a Christian university studying history.

03:03

How did you see your faith, or since then, how have you seen your faith influence your study of history?

03:11

I tell people, I really became a historian kind of through the back door of theology.

03:17

My first, you know, other than these freshman classes, I started taking courses on the history of doctrine, history of Christianity.

03:26

And so my faith, my interest in my faith, plus how it is in the context of the larger spectrum of history, really started drawing me in.

03:38

And I felt like the study of history was actually nourishing my faith. Because I was seeing how others had gone through, you know, different struggles in the church and so forth.

03:50

So when I eventually went to do a Ph .D. in history, American history, early American history at the

03:55

University of South Carolina, I knew what I wanted to write on. I knew what

04:00

I wanted to study, evangelicalism and Christianity in the colonial

04:06

South. That's really kind of what I focused on in my research. And you know, it's something that still is my greatest interest.

04:16

The role of Christianity in American history, to me, is fascinating.

04:23

There's all kinds of very interesting characters in this topic.

04:30

It really is a fun area to study in American history.

04:36

Yeah. And I want to take this opportunity to plug both your website, where you blog occasionally, and your book, or where people can find you.

04:45

So what's the website? The website is called A Cautious Enthusiasm. It's the same title of my book that I published on Southern Evangelicalism in Colonial South Carolina at the

04:56

University of South Carolina Press. And I had started it a long time ago, wrote a few things, and then quit.

05:05

And then my son kind of encouraged me to start writing some things. And so it's kind of a mixture of politics, religion, history.

05:15

Sometimes I write blogs when I'm a little upset about something that has happened.

05:23

I think that motivates most of our blog posts. Yeah. So I wanted to ask you, because some of the things that we're going to be talking about are related to things you've already written about on your blog, and I wanted to specifically talk about social justice and how that should or should not influence your study of history.

05:46

So as a Christian historian, should social justice in its modern form influence the way that we look at the past?

05:55

Well, I think a lot of things influence the way we look at the past. I mean, there's no way to completely free ourselves of the biases and the intentions and the agendas that we have.

06:07

We're human beings, and that's the way it is. We have certain biases that we'll probably never get rid of.

06:14

On the other hand, I think the most important thing in writing history and researching history is to recognize that and to recognize it as a potential danger when you are trying to find out what happened in the past and why.

06:31

I have no problem with a person wanting to participate in social justice activities, even if I don't agree with their perspective on it.

06:40

What I do have a problem with, especially as a Christian historian, and something I see happening with Christian historians, is conflating social justice principles with the gospel itself.

06:55

To me, that's exceedingly dangerous. The gospel is too precious to mix even good things into it, right?

07:03

Secondly, as a historian, I have a problem with conflating any kind of agenda -driven motivation into the study of history, that is, making it a part of what

07:18

I'm doing as the front and center of what I'm trying to accomplish. And the reason for that is, and that's for people on the right and the left, if you have an agenda, and you're trying to push that agenda, it will inevitably cause you to take your eye off the ball, because you start looking for evidence that supports your thesis before you've done enough research to see if it's a legitimate thesis.

07:49

And that's one of the major dangers of conflating historical investigation with something like social justice.

07:58

Now, it sounds like, from my theological training, and I'm sure you understand the difference between exegesis and eisegesis, it almost sounds like what you're saying is the tendency is when you want something like social justice to motivate the discipline that you're engaged in, like history, it becomes eisegetical, so you start quote mining the past for a preconceived idea.

08:20

Am I tracking with you? It's the same. I think it's almost exactly the same principle. Okay. So an exegete takes the passage and tries to take out what is actually meant there, not presupposing a certain theological position and then imposing it on that, and trying to find your theological position on it.

08:45

Any good systematic theology should start with exegesis, in other words, it has to be exegeted out of the passage for it to then be systematized as doctrine.

08:58

If you get that mixed up, if you start with systematic theology and not with exegesis of the

09:03

Bible, I think you're doing the same thing that a historian is doing if he goes to history with,

09:11

I gotta find something that's really going to bolster up my view on what should be done today about whatever's going on in society.

09:21

Then you start cherry picking history, looking at things that support what you believe in.

09:29

And again, there's nothing wrong with a person believing in certain things, there's certain things in society that do need to be fixed, but when you start using your discipline, like history, to inform the, what

09:43

I call the oughts, what ought to be, instead of what happened, why did it happen, those basic questions that you have to ask of a historical document, or when you're reading a secondary source, instead of what should have happened, or how can

10:07

I manipulate history to have this result for today. Historians used to call that presentism.

10:14

You're focusing on the present, and then using the lens of the present to interpret the past, and it always gets it mixed up.

10:23

I want to get more into presentism, but just to finalize what we're talking about now, it sounds like with the social justice movement, in its modern form at least, there's a theological problem, so they create a paradigm, and this paradigm created for the historical discipline ends up forcing them, or motivating them to go into the past, and to quote mine, or to just find things that are going to support a preconceived notion of what the ought, what the world ought to be like.

10:56

And so you have, it sounds like a theological problem and a historical problem with trying to insert social justice into history.

11:04

And I want to explore, I guess, both of those. You had written in a blog post on your website,

11:12

A 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.

11:28

What do you attribute leftist historiography infiltrating Christian circles to?

11:35

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.

12:07

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.

12:16

And so there's been this almost, I would say, unhealthy desire to be approved by the larger academy.

12:27

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,

12:39

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.

13:05

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.

13:17

I still go, I still take undergraduate students there. I think it's profitable. I like the people there.

13:24

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.

13:34

I really saw that in this last meeting. Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

13:40

Because I know the keynote speech, I think, was the thing that you wrote about.

13:45

We took 10 undergraduate students to give papers at this conference.

13:52

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,

14:04

Jamar Tisby, who, as you know, has come out with a book, The Color of Compromise, which

14:10

I have not read, but I did hear him speak. And his keynote address was to, specifically for these undergraduate budding historians.

14:21

And this is, and his whole point was, you know, here's how, here's how you can do history, right?

14:27

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.

14:38

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 greater social justice projects.

14:52

And now, again, social justice efforts, I'm fine with that.

14:57

But conflating it with the historical discipline, I'm not fine with that. I don't think it's healthy.

15:03

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.

15:21

I may agree with those perspectives, but to take history and make it this instrument for an agenda -driven project,

15:31

I think really neuters history for what it is. And here's why I want to emphasize this.

15:39

History, when done well, OK, and we all want to do it well, we struggle, you know, to do it right.

15:48

When done well speaks for itself. It doesn't need our what

15:54

I would call whiggish help to move it into a realm to do this or that for whatever our social needs are.

16:06

John Lukash, a great historian that I really like, he said, history is all we know.

16:14

And 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.

16:25

Right. And so this idea that I have to do something for history,

16:31

I need to use history for something other than letting history speak for itself,

16:38

I think really weakens history. Now, I don't mean by that that we don't interpret history.

16:44

History is about interpretation. You have to interpret it or otherwise we would just sit around and read primary source documents all the time.

16:52

Right. So we have to interpret it, but we need to interpret it faithfully, you know, by the, you know, what

16:59

I would think of as the rules of the discipline. Yeah. Don't let documents say more than what they actually say.

17:06

Now, I want to push back a little bit on that just to play devil's advocate for a moment, if I can.

17:12

Now, shouldn't I mean, you said it initially, you gained some inspiration from the study of history. These characters of the past, they fascinate you.

17:19

Yeah. And when we look at the past, we're going to see villains and we're going to see heroes and all the range that comes in between that.

17:26

Should not those things, the bad things that happened in the past, the things that we say that should not have happened, like let's say the

17:32

Holocaust, shouldn't we learn from that? Shouldn't we look back and say, well, that ought not to have happened? I don't know that that's what the social justice advocates are necessarily saying, but it sounds like that to most people.

17:44

They're just saying that we shouldn't have had slavery. We shouldn't have. Racism was a bad thing. You know, the long list.

17:50

Right. So what's wrong with that? History is one of the best teachers there is.

17:56

And in no way am I saying that it does not inform on how we should do things.

18:01

It informs. It gives context to everything. Right. It gives context to it. What I'm talking about is the actual process of research and writing as as an agenda to accomplish something in the present,

18:18

I don't think is the role of the historian. Right. Because you're you're missing the point of history.

18:23

History is about what happened and why. Now, once it's written, once it's done and we see what happened, the

18:30

Holocaust, we see what happened, you know, in slavery and so forth. We can be informed of that and it and it can help us to say,

18:39

I don't want that to happen. Right. We don't want to repeat that. History is wonderful at teaching that.

18:45

But I think that's different. I think that's different than using it as a tool on the front end, especially of interpretation, of going into it with that perspective.

19:00

One of the best lessons I got on this was years ago when I was in graduate school, Dr. Clyde Wilson invited me to go with him and a historian who was researching at the

19:13

University of South Carolina in the papers of Henry Lawrence. I worked in the papers of Henry Lawrence.

19:19

It's a paper project of Henry Lawrence, a great South Carolina founder, one of the early presidents of the

19:26

Continental Congress. And he was a slave owner. Right. Well, this professor was there and he was researching

19:35

Henry Lawrence. And Dr. Clyde Wilson took him out for lunch and wanted to know if I wanted to go with him.

19:41

So I said, sure. So we're sitting there. And so I asked this professor, I said, so what do you want to argue about Henry Lawrence?

19:51

Because I had seen him in there going through Lawrence papers and everything. And he said,

19:57

I don't know. That's why I'm here reading the letters. Of course,

20:03

Dr. Wilson reminded this graduate student, you don't get your thesis before you do your research, son, you know, that kind of thing.

20:12

And that was a tremendous lesson that, you know, he's there reading through the papers to find what did

20:18

Lawrence say, what was his perspective, etc. And that just that little conversation was something that really hit me that you don't get the cart before the horse.

20:30

That's a good story. Yeah. When you're doing history. Now, I love, as you know, Herbert Butterfield and his little book,

20:38

The Whig Interpretation of History. I actually read it for a class on the philosophy of history.

20:45

I was first introduced to it, I believe, by Dr. Wilson. And I use this book in my capstone history class to remind students about what are some of the do's and don'ts about the historical discipline.

21:01

And one of the chapters in that book is on moral judgments. Now, in no way does

21:07

Butterfield say you never make moral judgments. That's impossible. Right. Right.

21:12

You look at things, you know, Hitler was not good. You know, a lot of things.

21:19

But he said, you don't in so many words, you don't use history as a bludgeon to beat people up in the past, to use it as this tool of moral judgment.

21:32

In other words, you let history speak for itself. You tell the truth and then it will do the work that it needs to do.

21:39

So the whole idea of using history for moral judgment is taking what

21:46

Butterfield said, a shortcut through history. Interesting. You're you're you're you're kind of getting past all you're trying to treat history as this simple line that I'm sitting here in twenty nineteen and I can judge somebody in eighteen, nineteen, you know, by my, you know, the standards that I have, you know, that I've lived under, you know, my circumstances.

22:10

And he just points out that that's dangerous. And one of the things Butterfield says is that he doesn't say history is not a, you know, a linear event.

22:20

It is. But it's not a simple linear event. It's a complex.

22:26

He called it a labyrinthine network of millions and billions of connections. And the role of the historian is to try to figure out that web, try to figure out the whole perspective, you know, and make sense of the complexity.

22:45

Got it. Yeah. Well, if you if you take these shortcuts in the study of history, you're missing the complexity.

22:53

Now, I haven't told you this. But I have I think we're heading towards or we might even be in, of course, history when we we come downstream from that.

23:03

We'll find out which one it is. But I think we're possibly in somewhat of a postmodernist crisis.

23:09

And I'm using that term because I'm comparing it to the modernist crisis in which disciplines from the sciences, scientific

23:16

Darwinism, higher criticism. So applying the scientific method to texts kind of came into the church and you had the fundamentalists kind of break away and form their own organizations and institutions.

23:31

And then you had the those who were pushing for more progressive interpretations and trying to marry that with scripture, kind of holding on to the institutions that were there.

23:41

And I think at the time they didn't really think that they were challenging the Bible. They probably thought they were protecting it.

23:46

We're going to take science and we're going to make sure that it can be integrated with the Bible and that there's really no contradiction.

23:52

Evolution and the Bible go together. And so now we're going into another crisis,

24:00

I think, is my own. I haven't heard anyone say this, but it's the disciplines of history and sociology and these other things that are coming in and they're providing a new final authority.

24:11

And it's not the scientific method. But as you, I think, pointed out earlier in the discipline of history, it's almost using history as this way to to tell to tell the story from the side of the perspective that you want it told.

24:27

So from the side of the oppressed, perhaps, or the aggrieved people. And so truth doesn't matter as much, in my opinion.

24:32

It's it's trying to take down these institutions of power. And, you know, we're on this trajectory of ever more becoming better and better and more egalitarian.

24:45

And now that's creeping into the church. And that's that's kind of the way that I've seen this. So it's very serious in my mind.

24:51

Do you think I'm off on that? Do you agree with that? No, I do think that that's happening. And I think postmodernism is part of the story.

24:59

I mean, 20 years ago, I sat in a in a kind of a mock interview. We were doing several graduate students on how to do interviews for jobs.

25:09

And we were counseled by one professor. Never use the word truth.

25:15

Wow. Don't say truth because it makes you sound like you're really, you know, you're arrogant or or some of that.

25:23

And this is a historian talking about this. So, you know, because he was afraid that if you use that word, people would label you as some sort of absolutist or something like that.

25:37

So I actually sat and heard that, you know. The whole idea of truth as a social construct is is is alive and well in the historical discipline.

25:50

I think we're seeing it more and more in politics. I think we're seeing it in a lot of areas.

25:56

I say to people, I dread the day when surgeons become postmodernists because, you know, this whole idea that truth is kind of, you know, is what you make it, et cetera.

26:10

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like there's a pre thought or a pre an idea that they already have, like a social justice warrior about what you said before, what it ought to look like.

26:24

And then the historical discipline just becomes the tool to kind of like a hammer to to try to take.

26:31

Hey, you're you're one of these privileged classes. And in the past you did this. So I'm going to use this hammer of history to label all the guilt of the past on to you.

26:40

That's what I'm seeing, at least in the historical discipline. And and so that and that does change the narrative.

26:47

So it changes tremendously and really turns it on its head in many ways.

26:55

And the truth gets, I think, lost somewhere in that project. And that's where we get color of compromise, the idea that there's this this compromise can be reduced down to this color, your color of your skin or the church or some institution that it's always compromising.

27:12

So I wanted to ask you, this is, I think, a question that a lot of Christians have who start studying the past.

27:21

We look at men like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, perhaps even Robert Louis Dabney.

27:27

And we find out that these men were men of their time. They owned slaves. They were not egalitarian.

27:34

In the case of Dabney, he supported the Confederacy and maybe we respected these guys.

27:41

But now there's a lot of second guessing going on. Should we respect these guys? Were they even really

27:47

Christians? That's been brought up now by prominent evangelical leaders to say, well, I don't think Edwards could have been a

27:52

Christian or it's in doubt. In fact, I've heard some prominent evangelicals say that it's it's more they're more confident

28:00

Martin Luther King Jr. is a Christian than Jonathan Edwards because he owned slaves. Well, I hadn't heard that.

28:07

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can definitely give you some citations afterward, but I don't want to name names in this particular interview necessarily as far as that goes.

28:16

But but there it's more than one person that's saying this. And even if you just go to social media and type in Jonathan Edwards slavery, you're going to find a list of people that are denouncing

28:25

Edwards. So what do we as historians, how do we view that?

28:31

How do we tell that story? How should we think of these men from the past? Should we still respect them or should we throw them overboard?

28:37

Well, let me start by saying this. I think that what you just described is, again, both a theological and a historical problem to say that someone is not a

28:51

Christian because they own slaves or something like that is is just ludicrous.

28:58

I mean, the whole idea that that we're going to be, you know, perfect individuals because we're we're

29:05

Christians is is not biblical. I mean, there's all kind. I mean, you have slave ownership is has has existed time immemorial.

29:15

That doesn't make it right. We live in I'm thankful we live in an age where it's not normalized in our society.

29:24

These people did not live in an age where slavery was not normalized. It was normalized.

29:30

And it had existed not just their lifetime, but their parents' lifetimes, their grandparents, and they, you know, stepped into this world with this.

29:41

Now, does that in any way take away from the fact that I think that slavery is a good or bad thing?

29:48

It's obviously a bad thing. I think it violates biblical principles. I think it violates doing to others as you would have them do unto you.

29:58

But I live in an age where it's not normalized. Right. And I and I feel like that I'm fortunate to live in an age where that's not normalized.

30:10

However. To prejudge people like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Dabney, you know,

30:19

James Henley, Thornwood, whoever you want to say some of these great and godly men who love the

30:25

Lord and were clearly passionate for the gospel. Yet this was this was the world that they lived in,

30:32

I think, is to, again, misunderstand theology and to misunderstand the contours of history.

30:40

Because you can do this. I mean, slavery is not the only sin. There's all kinds of things.

30:46

Yeah. That that people, you know, are caught up in that they may have done or that we look at today and go, wow, how could you do that?

30:56

Yeah. And so I think it's I think we need to to have a history teaches us to appreciate the differences between now and then, maybe, and not to use it to prejudge them on our own standards today.

31:15

As a Christian, I would certainly be against slavery. I think I think it would. And I'm thankful that it doesn't exist in our society, except for we know slavery is in certain societies still in other places.

31:28

But, you know, to think that, you know, they're not Christians and so forth,

31:33

I just think is I've often thought if Edwards or any of these guys came to our time, they would be just horrified at the level of pornography, the easy access to abortion, perhaps, or just even just the general depravity in culture that we don't we're tuned out because we're so used to it.

31:52

Commercials, even sexualization of women and so forth. And if they were to judge us by the standards of their day, we would not meet the test, probably in a worse way than they didn't meet, you know.

32:03

Yeah. And that's where I heard Dr. Tom Kidd give a talk at a conference on faith and history at Regent University.

32:13

And it was on his study of George Whitfield. He came out with a book on biography of George Whitfield.

32:19

And he talked about Whitfield and slavery. And he said something very interesting in this talk.

32:26

You know, he pointed out the bad parts. Right. Right. But he made a comment. He said, you know, let's admit something here.

32:34

If we had been living in George Whitfield's age, chances are really good we would have had the same perspective as he had.

32:45

And and that's a good historical observation. That's a that's an observation that says, yeah,

32:52

I understand. Because history is about trying to understand these people, not judge them.

32:59

Right. History will judge them. You know, it doesn't need your help. Right. But to understand them.

33:05

Why? How did they get to that point? And that's when you can actually, I think, learn from history.

33:11

You start understanding it and then you say, I don't want it to be that way in the present.

33:17

That's fine. That's a good segue to my next question, which is if someone listening wants to know more about history, specifically

33:25

American history, their Christian heritage, church history, I would include in this.

33:31

They're a layman. What books would you recommend them looking into? First, let me start with I think it would be very helpful if they would read some primary source documents like.

33:44

Good point. Founding documents, even in the colonial era, the 1606

33:50

Charter of Virginia, for example, and the

33:56

Massachusetts Bay Charter, Connecticut's charter under Thomas Hooker.

34:03

And especially when you're talking about American Christian heritage, understanding where a lot of these colonies and how their perspective of how and why they started,

34:13

I think is very instructive, but also into the late colonial period and into the revolutionary period reading, you know, a lot of the founders, even some of the lesser known founders have papers at different universities.

34:30

I mentioned the papers of Henry Lawrence. You can go to, you know, the

34:36

University of Virginia and there's the papers of James Madison. I'm sorry,

34:42

Princeton has James Madison's papers and Jefferson's papers are in a couple of different places, including

34:48

UVA. Go in and read these, you know, the writings of the founders.

34:56

And that's not to say that there are Christians or not. It's to say you really get the sense they lived in a society that understood itself as being, you know, a

35:08

Judeo -Christian culture. So let me sort of fine tune the question.

35:14

So I'm a Christian layman and, you know, I'm a farmer or whatever, and I just don't have time to go into archives.

35:20

Three primary sources and let's say two secondary sources for understanding American Christian heritage.

35:26

So you already mentioned two primary sources. So give me a third one and then two secondary sources.

35:33

Well, I would say the papers of Henry Lawrence is a good place.

35:39

My first published article was on his Christian life. I knew nothing about Henry Lawrence when

35:44

I started reading in his papers at the University of South Carolina. It's really what kind of blossomed into my dissertation, studying his

35:53

Christian perspective, which I didn't really know until I started reading him. As far as secondary sources,

36:01

I'm reading a book right now and, you know, you're reading the book too, Daniel Dreisbach's book,

36:06

Reading the Bible with the Founders. I've read it. I think it really gives you a good, solid foundation on the use of the

36:13

Bible among the founders and how it was pervasive and how that perspective has been ignored.

36:23

Mark David Hall has written a biography on Roger Sherman. Jeffrey Morrison has written on John Witherspoon.

36:34

And these are Christian historians who I think have, you know, I mentioned how a lot of Christian historians are a little hesitant about, you know, their conclusions.

36:44

But, you know, Daniel Dreisbach, Mark David Hall, especially those two, maybe it's because they have tenure,

36:51

I don't know, but they're pretty bold in their proclamation that, hey, what's happened to the historical discipline?

36:59

They're not paying attention to the pervasive nature of Christianity and the

37:06

Bible in American history. Yeah. And to me, that's much more effective than trying to, you know, say all the founders were

37:14

Christians because we know they weren't. But to say, how did they use the

37:19

Bible? What was their perspective on the Bible? Not necessarily how many of them were evangelicals or not.

37:26

Some were, some were not. But what was their overall posture toward the

37:32

Christian faith as it was presented to them? And so I think that's a good way, a good place to start.

37:39

Biography, to me, I love to read biography. I love to read, to take a person and sort of see how history unfolds around them.

37:51

Yeah. And to take a Christian like a John Witherspoon or Roger Sherman and kind of see how history, you know, how it contextualizes their life is a fun way to do history.

38:04

Is that the same advice you give to, say, a high school student who wants to get into the historical field and study?

38:10

Would you give those same resources or you have additional advice? I would say one thing with, you know, high school historians is that they should really try to study world history.

38:23

Really? As a basic, yeah, because especially if they want, let's say they want to be an American historian.

38:29

Right. I tell people start with world history because it provides this larger context.

38:35

I think of history as when you're first getting started, you want to lay foundations and then you want to build up and you get a little more focused as you go.

38:51

Right. But if you try to start with colonial America and you don't have a foundation in European history and world history, colonial

38:59

America is not going to make a whole lot of sense because you're just not, history is all about context.

39:07

It's all about context. Yeah. What happened before what you're studying now will help you understand what you're studying.

39:16

It sounds an awful lot like a preacher telling someone, an aspiring preacher, get to know the

39:21

Bible before you go to seminary and learn Greek, just get to know the general context. Get the general contours of world history,

39:28

Western civilization, and then start working your way into. Now, sometimes you can do it backwards.

39:36

You can do it and go, wow, let's find out what's happening in England at the same time as the revolution.

39:41

Right. One of the most instructive things that I experienced in graduate school is

39:47

I took a graduate reading seminar on colonial

39:52

America. So I'm fully expecting to go in there. We're going to study all the colonial documents and so forth.

39:59

And the teacher stood up and said, we're not going to study colonial America from the from these shores.

40:06

We're going to study it from England. But that was interesting. It was fascinating. And I thought, wow, that's a different take.

40:13

And so most of the things we read were from the other side. Wow. And it gave me a context, right, for colonial

40:23

American history that I just would not have had, I think, if I had not, the teacher had not had that kind of creative approach to the study.

40:32

Now, what is your favorite historical figure, other than a Bible character, if you had one to choose from to say, that's my guy or girl?

40:41

Well, that's a hard one. I actually have two. OK, I knew you'd say more than one somehow.

40:46

And they're very different. OK, OK. One is Thomas Jefferson. I'm fascinated with Thomas Jefferson on many levels.

40:57

He honestly is one of the most brilliant people I've ever encountered in studying history.

41:03

Brilliant in languages, brilliant in law, brilliant in political science, brilliant in history, music, architecture.

41:14

I mean, he is he really lived in an age that had this idea to bring all of learning in your orb.

41:24

And so to study him is a fascinating experience. But when you study him, you realize that he really wanted to be the common man's president.

41:36

Right now, I think Jackson was more of a common man's president than Jefferson. But Jackson thought of himself as Jeffersonian, and that's part of where he gets some of his common man mystique.

41:49

But Jefferson really, I mean, you look at even at his gravestone that he designed and put on there.

41:57

There's nothing on there about him being president of the United States. Yeah. You know, he didn't want to.

42:02

That's really not what he wanted to be known for. Now, we would think, wow, that's the most important thing. I don't think he thought that was the most important thing he did.

42:11

Now, his last couple of years were kind of, you know, on the downside as president.

42:16

But still, you know, he wanted to be known as the founder of the University of Virginia and the author of the religious statute or the

42:24

Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty, Declaration of Independence, et cetera. But so I see a sort of a humility in the man.

42:33

Yeah. That really strikes me. Before you get to your second character, I just I have to sort of interject this.

42:42

Historians can be arrogant. Those who are who've made it. But that's anyone who's made a

42:48

Ph .D., not just historians. But but what you said about Jefferson, that he he was so accomplished and yet didn't want to be known as president of the

42:58

United States. I mean, that's I'm tracking with that. I want to be someone who no matter how much

43:03

I accomplish, I look at my life and I say, well, first, I'm a sinner in need of grace. I'm a child of God. And then

43:08

I'm a father. I'm a husband. I'm you know, these these are my roles, my primary roles and historian or any discipline, anything

43:17

I accomplish that's kind of secondary to these roles that God has ordained. And I think you feel that way as well.

43:23

That's probably what attracts you to Jefferson, I would think. Yeah. My understanding after he finished, you know, writing the

43:30

Declaration of Independence, he wanted to get back to Virginia to do the most important work in helping them to form a constitution because he knew if you declare independence, you've got your states have to have their own, you know.

43:46

That was bigger to him than the declaration. I think it was in some ways possibly bigger to him to do that.

43:53

And so and I'll tell you something else about Jefferson that I really appreciate. He he

43:59

I don't think he was an evangelical Christian. I hope he made things right with the

44:04

Lord before he died. But I don't know that. But, you know, he understood something about religion that a lot of people didn't understand, including

44:12

Christians. And thus he is the author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Liberty.

44:20

He understood something basic about religion. It has to be volitional.

44:26

You can't force people. To believe something. And this was at the core of Jefferson's view of religion, that it that it's not something that can be forced.

44:36

Now, you know, whatever his perspectives were on the faith and so forth, that's one thing.

44:42

But he understood that. And a lot of people, even Christian people, don't fully understand that as well as he did.

44:50

Yeah. And so I really appreciate him for that. And a lot of other things. I do, too. Who's the second character?

44:57

More of a modern figure, J. Gresham Machen. I wasn't expecting that.

45:03

Yeah. J. Gresham Machen. When I was a student taking beginning

45:09

Greek, we used Machen's book on Greek for beginners.

45:15

That was my introduction. Wow. And then I kept hearing professors talk about this

45:22

Machen guy. I thought, well, I've been studying his Greek book. Greek book, textbook. So I started reading

45:28

Machen and I read Christianity and Liberalism, which to me is one of the greatest books ever written in American history.

45:39

OK, now I got to read it. Yeah, it's it's so clear, accessible, straightforward, but powerful.

45:48

And it's in the title is telling Christianity and liberalism.

45:54

They're different. Yeah. His whole point is they're not the same. He said, you can be liberal.

45:59

He said, you can believe whatever you want to. But historically, and this is where history comes in, you can't call it

46:05

Christianity. So maybe we should write a book today, Christianity and Social Justice. You can write it.

46:12

You can write it. Maybe so. I hadn't thought of it that way. Yeah. But Machen, you know, he was at Princeton.

46:18

He he had studied in Germany. He's one of the great scholars that America has ever produced.

46:25

He was a New Testament scholar at Princeton. He left Princeton because of the liberalism there and founded

46:31

Westminster Theological Seminary. And, you know, he's just one of those characters.

46:36

He was also very, I would say, Jeffersonian in his politics. He was kind of a libertarian in many respects.

46:46

And so, yeah, he's just one of those figures that fascinates me. And he was against he had this speech on public education, right, that he's very concerned.

46:57

That's right. He he he saw major problems. He saw Christian education as the hope of the country.

47:03

Yeah. But but then he had other views that people kind of scratched their head on, like he was very much against the teaching of the

47:11

Bible in public schools because he felt like the Bible was too precious to be taught by people that didn't believe it.

47:18

Yeah. And so that was his perspective. Now, as a citizen, I don't think you should bar the

47:24

Bible from public schools because of its historical and literary value. As a

47:29

Christian, I do see his point that, you know, you don't want people being instructed in the faith that don't believe the faith.

47:38

Yeah. So it's kind of a catch 22, I guess. Any final thoughts on any of the topics that we've covered?

47:45

Any comments that you want to make in conclusion? Well, I would just say that, you know, being at Liberty University has been one of the great privileges of my life to be able to be at a university where we get students like you who come in and study and who are who love the

48:06

Lord, who want to be good academics and who strive toward that, but also strive to glorify

48:11

God in whatever they do. To be a part of that and to be able to engage with students and other faculty members in the life of the mind, but in a place where we're trying to bring everything under the umbrella of God's authority as we're supposed to do.

48:35

And so that's a privilege that I will always be grateful for. Yeah. So if you're someone who's listening to this and you're a student or potential student, you're considering history, come to Liberty University and you won't have to deal with social justice or any of the other things.

48:52

You just study history and and from a Christian perspective with wonderful professors. What's the address once again for the blog,

49:00

Cautious Enthusiasm? Cautious Enthusiasm. I think if you just Google that, it'll come up.

49:07

Yeah. Well, my book will come up and then that will come up and it'll show it as a blog.

49:14

OK, well, Dr. Smith, thank you so much for your time. OK, thank you. God bless you. Until next time.