Lately I have been reading in my favorite genre of intellectual history: monographs that pair sharp conceptual focus with ample chronological – and sometimes spatial – sweep. Think James Kloppenberg’s Toward Democracy, or Sara Georgini’s American Gods, Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism and Barbara Packer’s The Transcendentalists, Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny, James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed, Henry May’s Enlightenment in America.
These are the kinds of books I like to read when I am in the weeds writing about some painfully particular and wearingly narrow piece of the past – say, January 1987, for example, a slice of time so thin that I find myself hunching over the keyboard, mentally squinting through a historic lens no wider than a jeweler’s loupe as I type. Sometimes thin slices of time can look marvelous under magnification, but getting that texture down on paper makes for wearying work. So when that’s my task in the writing, reading sweeping narratives that trace ideas over oceans or generations or centuries serves as a much-needed counterbalance to the tedious tick-tock to tell the meaning of a single day.
Perhaps what is most refreshing about these intellectual histories is how they manage the oscillation between smallness and sweep, between the particular and the paradigmatic.
On a recent re-read of James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, I noticed a marked shift in the tone and tempo of his narrative at the start of Chapter Four. Here is the first paragraph of the chapter:
Not even theologians execute their mental pirouettes in pristine freedom from earth’s gravity; the business of making a living, slaking appetites, hating enemies, and loving friends entangles every mind. Life is a pas de deux. Grubby realities make the partners for our most high-flown ideas. And the twinned movements must glide to the same rhythm, or we stumble painfully over our own feet; ideas will not guide us satisfactorily through life unless in tune with it. Changing patterns of religious belief reflected this ineluctable limitation. Nor did the social influences on religion escape contemporaries. Opponents of early Evangelical reformers, for example, accused the saints of trying to impose their strait-laced morality on the lower classes only in order to make more docile hands for the new mills.
I can almost see him set aside his mental magnifying glass, lean back in his chair, and – well – philosophize. For the first half of the paragraph the verbs are present-tense verbs, and they advance assertions unburdened and unbothered by footnotes, making claims for human life as it is without reference to any particular time. There muses the historian, and his voice sounds for all the world like George Eliot’s narrative voice in Middlemarch, drawing reader and writer together into a “we” of shared problems and shared perspectives.
The whole chapter, “Belief and Social Change,” rings forth in the keynote sounded in that first paragraph. The historian has done three chapters’ worth of fairly close reading of sources, and now in this chapter he steps back and sketches in very broad strokes the connections he sees – not necessarily causal but certainly contemporaneous – between changes to religious thought, to social norms, to cultural values, and to economic life. But it’s all very broad and meditative and grand. There are fewer citations in this chapter than any of the preceding chapters – indeed, with 28 endnotes over 26 printed pages, it is the most sparsely annotated chapter in the whole book.
Yet “Belief and Social Change” is perhaps the most pivotal chapter in the whole book, exploring the moment – over a few decades – when the idea that there might not be a God after all becomes not just theoretically possible but intellectually and emotionally palatable. After this chapter Turner indeed returns to a close reading of sources, tracing the consequences of this epochal shift: unbelief eventually becomes preferable to faith for a significant swathe of white middle-class Americans. (Turner’s freethinkers are very white – DuBois appears in the index once, and Douglass not at all. Christopher Cameron’s Black Freethinkers: A History of African-American Secularism is an essential intervention here – and the next book in my queue.) But at the heart of the book – at its physical center as well as its moral center of gravity – there sits a historian meditating on the human need for harmony between the practical and the theoretical.
Is he right? Is this true? It’s the moral and psychological understanding that he brings to the whole work, the organizing principle that helps him place the rise of unbelief within a narrative that tracks with other broadly theorized developments – urbanization, industrialization, rationalization. Is James Turner begging his own question here in chapter four, or is he rather drawing from the insight gained through a sustained and focused reading of voluminous and varied sources and distilling that into a single salient observation that cannot really be footnoted or tagged with a single archival source because it partakes of them all?
I don’t know.
I do know this: throughout his book, but especially in chapter four, Turner’s voice conveys a sense of blessed assurance, a serene and quiet and unperturbed centeredness that makes the concepts of both “belief” and “unbelief” seem both gravely important and easily managed, small matters encompassed within the historian’s sweeping gaze.
But as it is with the hymn, so it is with the history: whatever we write must be only our story, only our song. That’s all our writing ever can be. I cannot borrow the assurance of James Turner in articulating his own version of history as moral inquiry. I must find and follow my own.
Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!
2 Thoughts on this Post
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I enjoyed your discussion of James Turner’s Without God, Without Creed, a book I’ve liked very very much for its writing and its arguments, though like you I cannot say whether the perspective is “true.” It is certainly not the only way to look at the topic of disbelief, as your reference to Christopher Cameron’s book underscores. Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers tells another dramatically different version of the story of disbelief in the United States. I have learned from both Turner and Jacoby and decided not worry about the disjunctions between what they see. The paragraph in Turner’s book that you discuss I think is less philosophical than poetic, in the sense of the Greek word poeisis, poetry is a bringing into being of an object or an idea that did not previously exist. In a historian’s case starting from a feeling for the past that feels right but needs evidence before it can be more than an assertion. Even with the evidence, it remains an assertion, by which I mean an idea that is always emerging from engagement with the past and never arriving at any final resting place. I think of this as a starting point necessary to write a book or an essay, a conviction that organizes sources and makes them speak. Assurance may be found in the poetic coherence of the material, but not certitude. I’ve found William James’s argument that ideas are propositions about reality particular relevant for thinking about historical work. Since our sources are always fragmentary, biased in every imaginable way, and incomplete, our ideas about the past can only be provisional ways of seeing. Evidence presented can be verified, but new evidence in sources we did not know or existing evidence we downplayed because it did not fit well with a starting conviction will sooner or later demand new propositions describing any and every historical topic. The best we can say for “assurance” is that propositions are credible, even if unprovable and with certainty awaiting challenging revisions by others whose convictions and standpoints will be distinct, usually dramatically so. Historical arguments are never “true” in the sense of being the final word, which is not to say that we cannot identify with certainty interpretations that are clearly false. The provisional nature of historical argument is clearest to see in the classics with wide temporal and spatial boundaries, where so much potential material must be excluded to arrive at a legible narrative arc. Conviction and assurance helps determine selection of details from the archives and secondary literature that instance a broader meaning even as the accounts are detached from their immediate circumstances and reconstructed to be consistent with the book’s moral compass. As valuable and enjoyable as the conjunctural histories that you’ve cited are, the stories told would be impossible without a deep bibliography in the secondary literature, without hundreds of historians having already examined events in single communities during much shorter periods of time. And even that work on topics with small temporal and spatial boundaries demands to an equal degree a poetic feeling for how the sources might become meaningful.
Thanks, Lora, for this thoughtful piece. I appreciate your appreciation of Turner’s Without God, Without Creed. You are noticing a quality that David Hall identified in an initial review: “Turner offers us intellectual history in something like the grand manner.” Your thoughts about these “distilling” parts of Turner’s writing remind me of a suggestion I offer students: in addition to thoroughness of research and argumentation, consider what is the upshot of your account and your theme. And indeed, I drew upon Turner’s “broad canvas” in my own Science and Religion in the Era of William James, especially to highlight the cultural shift toward an “eclipse of certainty” (15).
And thank you Richard for your astute comments, also drawing upon James, about narratives, even with substantial evidence, never arriving at a final resting place. James summarized this in a favorite phrase, “ever not quite.” Such comments are sometimes greeted, especially in public, as a reason to doubt even thorough commentaries. Between this skepticism and Richard’s insight is a place for historians, with the path of constant inquiry: seek truth, and distrust it. AKA, trust substantial narratives but also keep at the work of more discovery, and for both, keep in mind the power of stories to convey both the narratives and the new discoveries.