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Recent Historiography of the Protestant Churches in America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
Thirty-five years ago Lewis Vander Velde criticized his fellow historians for not having written more on the American churches. He charged that lay historians, “whose point of view is detached and objective,” had left the study of organized religion in the United States to “clergymen whose primary interest is religious” American historians recognized “the importance of the Church in colonial times,” but they had “too frequently assumed that its influence as a force in public affairs disappeared with the American Revolution”—even though the nation's recent experience with Prohibition ought to have taught them otherwise:
Writers in an age when the Church is on the defensive fail to realize that the transformation which has put it in this position is much more a product of the last seventy years [i.e., 1862–1932] than of the previous seventy [i.e, presumably, 1792–1862]. In the time of our grandfathers, the Church was still a strong factor in the life of the nation; an institution led by intellectual giants, attended regularly by a large portion of the people, it exerted an important influence upon American life. … In 1860 politics and the Church still offered the greatest professional opportunities, and … in consequence the best minds were to be found there.
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References
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28. Link's confessio fidei raises some absorbing historiographic questions of its own. For example, “the compilers of the historical books” of the Bible—rather than, say, Thucydides! —“laid the foundations of historiography” and “set standards to which all historians might well aspire.” (Ibid., 85). It would be interesting to try out this proposition on a roomful of graduate students who had done no work at all in church history.
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47. Such a commitment has far-reaching historiographic implications, which can not be evaded by pragmatically continuing to study “churches” in the plural while theologically considering “the Church” in the singular, only as the Church Invisible; for the most rarefied of historical study must still base itself somewhere on historically “visible” phenomena. Professor Mead goes into this same question in his essay “Church History Explained” n. 31, supra.
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51. By a splendid irony, secular scholarship seems to have re-discovered the vitality of Protestant separateness just at the moment when church scholarship has launched into a unitive re-thinking of the Protestant past. See Glock and Stark, op. cit., Chap.V.
52. Elwyn A. Smith, op. cit., p. 97.
53. Hudson, Winthrop S., “Denominationalism as a Basis for Ecumenicity: a Seventeenth- Century Conception” Church History, XXIV (03 1955), 45Google Scholar. Or as one heir to an eighteenth-century separation put it: “The trend toward ecumenicity has brought the genesis of many Protestant denominations under suspicion. It is not uncommon to conclude that the multiplication of sects since the Reformation has been the result of rashness or, worse yet, of envy and vindictiveness. Nevertheless, a sober view of the historical process since the 16th century does not give much support to this thesis. Few centrally Christian denominations seem to have sprung from motives either shallow or base. In most instances the process of separation was slow, painful, and marked by high moral seriousness. And once the major presuppositions had been formulated, the division was more or less inevitable”—a judgment the outsider-historian may accept even when he has the unpleasant duty to record the rash and vindictive acts which so often have accompanied such separations, in America as elsewhere. Karl A. Olsson, “The Evangelical Mission Covenant Church and the Free Churches of Swedish Background,” Chap. XIII in Ferm, Vergilius, ed., The American Church of the Protestant Heritage (New York, 1953), 249.Google Scholar
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