“The Almighty has His own purposes.” Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, quoted approvingly by Steven Keillor in this challenging and wide-ranging book, provides salutary food for thought for Christian historians as well as for statesmen. At a period of extensive Christian influence in public life, the opposing armies in the Civil War had read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, but there had been no easy victories, and the nation had inflicted upon itself a terrible and fratricidal slaughter.
It is the great merit of Keillor’s overview of American history that he neither ducks hard questions nor reiterates comforting myths, while at the same time he argues tenaciously for the validity of a Christian vision of the past, in which God is neither absent nor capricious. His analysis extends over five centuries, from the 1490s to the 1990s, from Columbus to Clinton, and is informed by the prospect of Christ’s return as the “one sure, final, unchangeable event.” His account is undergirded by familiarity with the historical scholarly literature and a clear and consistently expressed theological position. He provides a robust defense of Christianity against the argument that it is invalidated by its negative historical record; he argues that oppression, patriarchalism, slavery, civil war, and rampant capitalism occurred in America in spite of Christianity rather than because of it.
According to Keillor, the early settlement of the Americas occurred at a time when European Christianity had become dangerously corrupted and attenuated. Even though the Reformation was to address these problems, it could not remove them. Colonizers and traders might bring the Christian gospel, but the majority of them were themselves in rebellion against God. The failure to adhere to divine standards of justice was apparent initially in the dispossession of native peoples, and was subsequently compounded by the acquisitive capitalist dynamic inherent in the slave trade and the development of the plantation system. Nevetheless, despite human sin, Christ was made known to the exploited New World and to the oppressed slaves.
Meanwhile, Keillor points out, the Puritan founders of New England crossed the Atlantic as “poor exiles of Christ,” with no aspirations to found utopia. (In his view, John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” is “the most misused quote in American history.”) Stable, religiously integrated Christian societies developed over time. By the eighteenth century, however, things began to go wrong: links between church and state corrupted the purity of the gospel and forced an accommodation to the ambivalent faith of children who lacked the clear-cut conversion experience of their parents.
Keillor sees the Great Awakening as an outpouring of divine grace that inspired Christians but also increased religious pluralism, and it thereby indirectly contributed to the growing secularization of politics. The American Revolution and the Constitution were products not primarily of Christian influence but of “Enlightened” secular republicanism, and the subsequent drive westward was fueled by patriarchal, acquisitive, male individualism. Subsequent revivals stemmed from the further autonomous action of God’s Spirit in redeeming an undeserving and unprepared people.
Despite the aspirations of antebellum evangelicals to reform the nation, simmering conflict finally led to the horrific bloodshed of the Civil War. Keillor points to an underlying rejection of Christian principles by politicians on both sides. God used the conflict, Keillor suggests, to spark revivals and to end slavery, but—like the children of Israel—Americans quickly forgot their hard-earned lessons, indulging in an orgy of unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Even so, God continued to bring good out of evil. The extension of American influence across the Pacific not only satisfied imperialistic appetites but also enabled missionary enterprises that advanced the fulfillment of God’s ultimate purposes for the world.
The eschatological tone of Keillor’s work becomes even more apparent as he surveys the twentieth century. In the face of world wars, totalitarianism, economic instability, and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, successive administrations had nothing to offer but a kind of pragmatic realism that staved off immediate disaster while failing to address the deep spiritual confusions of American life.
In the 1960s the tares sown in earlier decades bore fruit in excesses of amoral experimentation, social chaos, and secular apocalypticism. Subsequent years have seen a further heightening of cultural fragmentation and capitalistic individualism, and the growth of the “new Babel” brought by information technology. “Global computerized capitalism” is now in conflict with “the global preaching of the gospel,” foreshadowing the cataclysmic confrontation of Christ with Antichrist that will end history as we know it.
As Keillor certainly recognizes, there are other possible Christian interpretations of American history. His theological presuppositions are open to debate, especially in respect of his emphasis on the transcendence rather than on the providence of God, and his adoption of a premillennial eschatology of chaos and conflict redeemed only by the return of Christ. There are also historiographical difficulties. It is of course hard to defend the implicit postmillennialism of the seductive quasi-Christian myths of American history, founded on visions of the Pilgrim Fathers, manifest destiny, and resolute confrontation with evil at home and abroad. On the other hand, as the validation and confirmation of Keillor’s own interpretation still lies in the future, it places itself above empirical argument.
Similarly, his confident attribution of the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the direct agency of God is no more verifiable in objective historical terms than is his presumption that the momentous political events of the 1770s and 1780s were the product purely of human agency. His criticism of recent national leaders for lacking an eschatological perspective also seems misplaced; indeed, we should be profoundly thankful that Cold War presidents espoused the pragmatic realism Keillor dislikes rather than supposing that their fingers on the nuclear button were outgrowths from the hand of God.
This Rebellious House: American History and the Truth of Christianity
by Steven J. Keillor
InterVarsity
368 pp.; $24.99, paper
Keillor’s attempt to exonerate Christianity from all responsibility for the more unacceptable aspects of the American past also assumes ground that is sometimes hard to defend. Rather than attributing the practice of slavery and other forms of oppression to straightforward rejection of the Christian message, it would have been more credible to acknowledge that professing and even genuinely converted Christians were also sinful and fallible human beings, who could twist their Christian beliefs to serve their material ends. The dynamics of compromise, and subsequent repentance and renewal in the churches themselves, are surely more central to Keillor’s narrative than he acknowledges. In general, while the concentration on secular themes and historians is in many respects admirable, the overall argument of the book would have gained much from a more detailed and subtle analysis of the role and influence in the public sphere of organized religion and personal spirituality.
But such criticism of Keillor is apt to seem churlish. He has written a courageous and original book and given important new life to discussion of what a distinctively Christian history might look like. In pursuing this discussion further it would be helpful to ponder fully the wisdom of Lincoln’s insight that the purposes of God in history are seldom easily understood. Seven centuries before Christ, the prophet Isaiah had attributed to the pagan king Cyrus a role in the divine purposes of the God who hides himself (Isa. 45). For those without such special revelation, it is quite as unwise to presuppose that God was not active in a situation as that he was. A fully rounded Christian understanding of history will show a humble caution about its own claims, leaving open the question of precisely how and when God was and is silently working out his purposes through the full range of human experience and activity.
John Wolffe is senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University.
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
