Teaching "Toward a Secular Culture"

I have a tender spot for evangelical students (it is tender in both a soft and a painful way) because I grew up as an evangelical and my parents and many friends are still in that world. One of the reasons I moved out of that world was because learning about interpreting primary sources and higher criticism of the Bible led me to think about the Bible as just one of many historical sources. This is anathema to the way I was raised. The preacher at my parent's church has the parishioners hold their Bible aloft every week and pledge their devotion to it as the one true word of God. It seemed to me to be impossible to hold the Bible as inerant and as a contingent historical source. I am fully aware that many people, friends included, have found compromise positions within this debate, but in my mind I could not let the Bible-as-historical source dictate my life to me.

I'm thinking about this as I read over the beginning of the American Intellectual Tradition, which focuses on the movement "Toward a Secular Culture." When I first saw that heading in the table of contents LD kindly supplied, I wondered if that was really the most important intellectual theme of the second half of the nineteenth century and I wondered whether twentieth century America could really be called a "secular culture." After reading the intro to the section (thanks Oxford for my desk copy!), I realized that what is meant by a "secular culture" is one in which the Bible is analyzed as a historical source, and not quoted as proof-positive of the way the world works. In other words, reason is used as the primary basis of learning and the material world is the primary source for that learning--materialism, rather than the Puritan era when the material world was interpreted through the lens of scripture--i.e. the massive storm that was God's wrath on mankind.

So what does this have to do with evangelical students and my tender spot?

Book Review: Knight on Stansell’s *The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present*

Review of Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: The Modern Library, 2010). ISBN: 978-0-679-64314-2. 503 pages. Extensive notes; no bibliography.

Louise Knight, Visiting Scholar,
Gender Studies Program, Northwestern University


This is a bold book. Just the idea of writing a history of American feminism is bold. Yes, Mary Beard wrote Woman as Force in History in 1946, which was the first book on the history of women’s activism in the United States. Yes, Eleanor Flexner wrote Century of Struggle in 1959, which was the first book on the history of women’s suffrage (revised and expanded by Ellen Fitzpatrick in 1996). There has also been Nancy Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987), which is a history of women’s movements in the United States between 1910 and 1930, and innumerable histories of the 1960s resurgence of the women’s movement, popularly known as the “Second Wave,” and some about the third wave too. The most comprehensive, thoroughly footnoted book I know of is Estelle B. Freedman’s excellent No Turning Back: The History of Feminism (Random House, 2002), but it is thematically organized and dense with facts. Christine Stansell, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, has had the vision, stamina, and sheer chutzpah to tackle the big subject chronologically, with an emphasis on its contentious intellectual complexity. The Feminist Promise is an important first.

What exactly is it about? At its core the book is a history of a set of ideas that revolutionized American society by restructuring not just gender relations and women’s place in the world but, first and foremost, women’s expectations for themselves. It is about the conceivers of those ideas but also about the people and organizations who pushed for and resisted them, as well as the on-the-ground social change that resulted, or did not. And it is about the arguments within feminism, of which there have been many. As Stansell writes in the Introduction, “Feminism is an argument, not received truth” (xix). The observation is one of the first clues that this is a book that keeps ideas in focus, and does not consider them as a sidelight to social action.

Hollinger on the Protestant Dialectic

The July 2011 edition of the Journal of American History includes David Hollinger’s article, based on his Presidential Address, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity.” In it, Hollinger describes the social thought of those mid-century Protestants, whom he calls “ecumenical Protestants,” who quit thinking in particularistic Christian and American terms and instead began to recognize that “the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.” Seeking justice between peoples became a more important calling than seeking to convert non-Christians.

Hollinger’s essay claims to make two important contributions. First, he argues that a better understanding of mid-century ecumenical Protestant thought helps us come to terms with “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs.” More: “Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world”—such that the United States was an exceptional nation because it was founded as a Christian nation—ideas “that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists.” Ecumenical leaders did not speak for their congregants. In this, Hollinger adds complexity to accounts of secularization that focus on non-religious free thinkers, such as David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Not enough intellectual historians focus on what my friend Bo Peery calls the Christian Left, except perhaps to take note of Niebuhrian realism. So I find this claim uncontroversial.

Fun With Primary Sources: The Free Congress Foundation's "History of Political Correctness"

William S. Lind

Last week I put up a post about the Frankfurt School in right-wing conspiracy theories.  As discussed in the comment thread of that post, a few things have become clear about this meme, largely through the work of Chip Berlet:

First, the notion that the Frankfurt School was responsible for creating "Political Correctness," "Cultural Marxism," and a related plot against Western civilization itself emerged from the circle around Lyndon LaRouche from the 1970s (when LaRouche's attacks on the Frankfurt Institute apparently began) through the early 1990s, after "Political Correctness" had entered American discourse through President George H.W. Bush's 1991 University of Michigan Commencement Address. Michael Minnicino's 1992 article on the Frankfurt School and Political Correctness, published in Fidelio, the journal of LaRouche's Schiller Institute, was particularly important. Minnicino has since renounced this article and other work he produced for LaRouche.

Second, the supposed connections between the Frankfurt School, "Political Correctness," "Cultural Marxism," and a plot against Western civilization were popularized by William S. Lind through his work at Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation.  Lind has been something of a journeyman, working on the Senate Armed Services Committee for Sen. Robert Taft, Jr (R-OH) in the 1970s and Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO) in the 1980s.  Later he wrote for paleoconservative publications like The American Conservative and for Alexander Cockburn's leftwing Counterpunch.

Below the fold, you'll find Lind's Free Congress Foundation-produced video, "The History of Political Correctness," which I believe was made sometime in the 1990s (I haven't been able to find an exact production date.  If anybody knows when this video was made, please provide the date in the comments).