Why Church History Matters to the Secular Setting
Posted on February 28, 2008
Filed Under Intellectual History, class, gender, historians, historiography, race, religion |
One of the most fascinating aspects of the professional history field, to me, is the wall of separation that is often created between religious and secular history. Especially when you talk about intellectual history and the history of ideas, you can’t just write off religious belief or theological principles outright, yet many historians (even intellectual historians) do. Why is this? Is it a great conspiracy? Is it a skirmish in the culture war? I don’t think it’s either.
There are several reasons I see for this separation between religious and secular history:
- On the religious side, Church Historians are often likely to jealously guard their interpretations of doctrinal history. This is no different than Marxist Social Historians jealously guarding economic determinism, but it does make for a difficult dialog.
- On the secular side, so much has been made in the last half century about the separation between Church and State that many history teachers, even college history teachers, are afraid to cross that invisible topical line.
- The prevailing worldview among historians is that race, class, and gender are determinative factors in history. The study of the history of ideas, then, is really the study of the history of how race, class and gender have created ideas. Thus, religious ideas in history become irrelevant, except as to how they inform ideas about race, class and gender.
Why, then, is this a big deal? Why should it matter, even to secularists, what happened in Church History? Because Western Culture has developed out of a Christian and religious worldview. This doesn’t mean that the West are all Christians, or that Western Culture is equivalent with Christian Identity; rather that the history of the Church in the West is, in many ways, the history of the West itself.
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I am new to studying history, and just completed the basic Western Civilization series. I agree - I think it’s important to understand the history of Christianity and specifically the history of the Roman Church as it so deeply influenced modern Western cultures.
I am not certain I understand the race-gender-class issue. What does it mean that some historians consider these The Big Three in historical scholarship? I confess I am quite ignorant on this score.
Hiya, ilegirl, and thanks for stopping in!
Among professional historians, the issues of race, class and gender tend to be focal points of study. In some cases, these topics dominate their writing; in most cases, professional historians assume race, class and gender to be the causal agents in history. In other words, ideas or providence or human will have little to do with what happens; everything that goes on does so because of one of these factors.
It’s quite sad, really.
Hope this helps. I’ll have to write a post soon going into more detail on the subject.