By Steven J. Keillor
Book Excerpt
PREFACE
THIS BOOK'S NOVEL PERSPECTIVE AND APPROACH MAY DESERVE--SOME WOULD SAY, DEMAND AN EXPLANATION; and I will give one, but it will be brief. The interpretations of American history found in the following chapters must be judged on their own merits or demerits. I cannot, by some philosophical or theological argument, prove them to be worthy of consideration, nor can they be proved false and ruled out of bounds by some opposite a priori argument. They will have to be judged mainly by whether they satisfactorily explain the American past and present.
In this Christian reinterpretation, I have simply tried to stand on basic evangelical, Christian assumptions and the best contemporary historical scholarship in order to see what American history would look like from that vantage point. I make no claim that this is the only possible Christian interpretation of the American past, nor that it is based on some special revelation given to me. It rests on religious views that are common among American evangelicals: scriptural inerrancy; a trinitarian belief in Father, Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ the Son of God, who died for our sins, was raised and will return bodily and visibly; a premillennial view of his return, absent any doctrinaire stand on prophecy. What would American history look like if we stood on these beliefs, got down off less essential or incorrect ones and used the best available research and writing on the subject? That is the question this book seeks to answer. But why do we need to ask that question? It seems to me a matter of great urgency that we do so. In the college classroom of the 1990s, professors and students assume that current historical scholarship on U.S. history disproves the exclusive truth claims of Christianity. Evangelical faith is assumed to be a provincial, local viewpoint--dominant in some regions and in certain eras of U.S. history and thus worthy of study--but not a universal, divine revelation and probably fated to wither away as a cosmopolitan, global outlook becomes everywhere dominant. Instead of attacking the seven supposed proofs of God's existence, professors are now more likely to point to American history--to white American males' behavior toward everyone else--as proof that what these males believed cannot be true for anyone else. None of these assumptions is correct. The white males were often rebelling against Christianity, not advancing it, and it's not a local belief system but a rival cosmopolitanism at war with a secular one. Christianity has long ceased to be a Eurocentric faith. This book looks at U.S. history from the perspective of, say, a Chinese believer, in order to avoid the ethnocentrism and nationalism for too long associated with evangelical views of American history. Its purpose is not to secularize or to be "politically correct." Quite the opposite! A more consistently Christian view allows us to state more emphatically that the claim "Jesus Christ is Lord" is not a private value but a public fact. Several authors have noted evangelicals' retreat from the public world of "facts" to a private world of "values." I first encountered that idea in Lesslie Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks. History is a good academic discipline in which to reverse that retreat: history describes public facts, the Christian faith is a historical one, and the doctrine of the Lord's return makes claims about the public world and its future. That is why this book is not so much a Christian view of U.S. history--a historical story we evangelicals can tell ourselves to prop up our faith--as it is a truer view of U.S. history, one that uses revisionist scholarship but offers a metanarrative that is truer to the facts than are revisionists' metanarratives. I do not accept the postmodern critique of metanarratives and "truer" views, so I offer this one without apology. That current scholarship--revisionist, multicultural, feminist, neo-Marxist, whatever--has itself uncovered truer facts and interpretations, but its metanarrative directly or implicitly seeks (yet fails) to disprove the exclusive truth claims of Christianity. In these chapters I occasionally point out these scholars' unwarranted conclusions. Some go beyond their evidence, but most do excellent work that disproves only an ethnocentric, nationalistic view of U.S. history, not a Christian one, properly understood. So I have relied heavily on their work and am grateful for it. Of course these authors would not necessarily approve and should not be held responsible for my use of them. I have cited their books and articles with the understanding that they support my factual and general historical points, but of course they are not cited as support for the specifically Christian interpretations I draw from those points. I remain responsible for all points made, whether Christian or secular. If I have failed to cite work, especially interpretive work, done by evangelical historians, it is because this book's apologetic purpose is best accomplished by using secular historians' work. And it is best done by taking a Christian view of all of American history rather than focusing on the history of evangelicalism in America or of particular denominations. Chapter four, especially, departs from the popular evangelical view that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. I do not belabor the point. I simply try to show that we make a stronger public claim that "Jesus Christ is Lord" if we acknowledge that many of the Founders did not believe that he was. The title This Rebellious House is taken from Ezekiel 2 and 3, where Yahweh repeatedly calls the nation of Israel a "rebellious house." The specific phrase "this rebellious house" is used in Ezekiel 24:3. By using it I do not at all intend to suggest that the United States is somehow Israel's successor as God's chosen people. Nor do I suggest that Americans have rebelled against God in some manner peculiar to themselves. The rebellion that is the major theme of this book is the same rebellion against God commonly displayed by all humans. More specifically, Americans of European descent share in the general Western rebellion against the Christianity that Western civilization claims to defend and promote. Yahweh's words to Ezekiel could be applied to most any nation, certainly to most any European nation and its colonial offspring, including the United States: "A rebellious nation . . . has rebelled against me; they and their fathers have been in revolt against me to this very day" (Ezekiel 2:3). There have been redemptive moments as well as rebellious ones in American history, as in all national histories. This book examines some of them. Yet the Lord's success in foiling his enemies' plans and making his own plans stand firm does not at all depend on having the redemptive moments outnumber or outweigh the rebellious ones. Human rebellion is a much stronger causative engine driving American history than is human repentance. God can use human rebellion to accomplish "the purposes of his heart," so revisionists' emphasis on the negative aspects of U.S. history does not at all negate the truth of Christianity--it tends to confirm it.The study of history is inevitably caught up in larger debates. Anti-Christian spokespersons use a revisionist view of American history as an argument, a secular "apologetic," against Christianity every day. Christians have little choice but to engage in this debate and to use history in the process.
That does not mean that I have rummaged through current historical writing to grab whatever fits Christian apologetic--and then discarded the rest. One of the sad features of our current cultural debates is that we pick out the weakest arguments of our opponents and then focus exclusively on those. We are like snipers who shoot when the enemy takes one or two steps into the open. I have tried to take secular, revisionist, feminist or neo-Marxist historians at their strongest points. I have tried not to be taken captive by any particular political or ideological viewpoint. The reader must judge the degree to which I have succeeded. Other Christian interpretations of the same evidence are possible. The book comes in four parts. The first three chapters look at America under European colonial rule. The next three examine an American republic of rebellious male individualism. Chapters seven to nine deal with social, economic and international developments largely outside the control of the republic's government. The last three chapters are chronological in order and describe how U.S. society adjusted to "realism," then rebelled against it and, in the process, splintered into the fragmented consumer society of the 1990s. The book closes with an argument that the Lord's return is essential to a Christian interpretation of U.S. history--and that it is certain. As a historian, I realize that in today's fragmented consumer society, books are like wall plaques--only longer. They are marketable goods, sold in a market niche, to a select audience that is warmed or inspired or reassured by their words. Yet, as I tell my American history classes, the workings of history cannot be ended, like some mistaken marketing idea, by consumers' dislike for the results. Like the Energizer bunny, history just keeps going with its causes and effects, despite consumer disinterest. The Lord of history keeps working too, to foil plans and to thwart purposes and, we should add in this consumer age, to ignore purchases: "The plans of the LORD stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations" (Psalm 33:11).Sample Chapter
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