Hello readers, and welcome back to the Spotlight/Insight series. We spent most of last week publishing interviews from Eran Zelnik, Eli Cook, Keith Woodhouse, and Nick Witham. Today’s interview is with Michael G. Thompson, a historian of Christianity at Australian Catholic University. His focus is on Christianity’s intersections with American intellectual life and US foreign relations. His research on American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and on missionary internationalist Sherwood Eddy, has appeared in journals such as American Quarterly and Modern Intellectual History. The article on Sherwood Eddy was awarded the Society for US Intellectual History’s 2016 Dorothy Ross Award, given for the best article published in an academic journal by an emerging scholar. Michael’s first book, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War was published by Cornell University Press in late 2015, and was made the subject of a special review forum in the journal, Politics, Religion, and Ideology.
What are you working on now?
Michael G. Thompson: First, thanks so much for asking. It’s a delight to be touching base again with USIH folks, whose work and collaborative endeavours I admire and am grateful for.
I am working on two projects. The first is on the religious aspects of New Deal environmental thought as they operated internationally and transnationally. The project takes up the “long New Deal (a period of roughly 1933-48, a scope I feel one has to have for this) and explores how its innovations in soil conservation, land management, watershed renovation and planning, dam-building and hydrological modernization related to what you might call an environmental political theology. This of course assumes religion did matter to New Deal environmental thought—which I was surprised to find was true—and that such a connection had an international and transnational dimension, which much recent work on the New Deal (and on development in history) has shown was the case. On one level this has felt like a shift of focus from my earlier work; and indeed the environmental-historical aspects are new. But I’ve actually been surprised by the crossovers. One strong one point of crossover has been the ecumenical missionaries who I worked on in my first book. One strand of that enterprise was dubbed “agricultural missions”. I had not looked at them in my work on their international thought and anti-nationalism and anti-racism. It turns out I perhaps should have! Agricultural missionaries—as with other missionaries in the period—comprised a significant part of US presence in East Asia in the 30s-40s. And, while I am still working on them, the connections between these missionaries’ agricultural extension and conservation work in places such as China and India (and as others are working on, in Latin America and the Middle East) and the post World War II US state’s development and aid policies in the same regions is of particular interest to me in this project.
The second project has a different point of origin and is different in theme again. I’m really looking forward to finding the time to get some momentum on it. The project historically surveys US evangelical cultures and practices of leadership and authority from the 1960s-2010s. This has—for methodological and axiomatic reasons—both an intra-church dimension, charting actual changes, developments and discourses in church ‘polity’ and governance, and an extra-church dimension—looking at the way that churches (and evangelical para-churches) have mutually interacted with strands of wider leadership discourse, whether in management theory, politics or consumer capitalism. How have norms of leadership and authority evolved, been contested and forged? To take one strand: how did some Jesus people of an anti-establishment ethos in the 60s become purveyors of a relatively authoritarian leadership culture in later decades? Or to take another, how has intellectual authority itself been generated in evangelical cultures? What sort of intellectual infrastructures have evolved to license a teacher or purveyor of ideas as authoritative (whether market-based, seminary or university-based etc)? Both for methodological reasons, and other reasons of interest, it’s likely again the project will have international “in the world” dimensions. Some of the currents flowing between Australasia and the US in both directions need to be examined.
Within our field of intellectual history, what topics or approaches are you excited about?
Michael G. Thompson: This answer is more a reflection of my personal interests, than a careful, disinterested evaluation of where the field is at (for the latter I’d need to think some more, and maybe others would be better placed to offer that). So I’m not ascribing any hierarchy of what’s important here. But some things that are energizing me in intellectual history are points where intellectual history intersects with political life, religion, environmental thought… or all the above!
To give some examples, the direction that an emerging generation of scholars are taking in work on the ecumenical movement in global and international history is really exciting to me. Work on ecumenism and “global governance” by scholars such as Justin Reynolds, Elizabeth Engel and others are finding not just fresh answers but fresh questions at the intersection of religious, intellectual and global twentieth century history. Relatedly, I am still excited by work that configures the US in the world in interesting ways, usually bringing intellectual historical approaches to intersect with other ones. To name a few of recent interest: Torre Olsson’s extraordinary work on US and Mexican agriculture in the early-mid twentieth century, Agrarian Crossings, is at once intellectual, economic, agricultural history and an historicization of
the South west border itself. Melani McAlister’s The Kingdom of God Has No Borders has among its many strengths, a nuanced deployment of intellectual-historical approaches that encompass themes such as representations of the human body and the history of emotion, the reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Stott, and the comparative production of political theologies of race in South Africa and the US (to name just a few!), and all across borders. I always learn much from Paul Kramer’s work in terms of how “outside” factors—the perceived externalities of US history—have in fact been “inside” all along.
On other fronts, I’m late to the party on this book, but Ira Katznelson’s intellectual-historical treatment of the global crisis in liberalism in transatlantic political thought in the 1920s-30s has been a recent joy for me to read. I find to be stunning both for its quality and insight, but also its eerie prescience for understanding the present. I would love to know what it felt like to write the book and in two years hence watch Trumpism unfold. Fear Itself has so much else that is striking in the book, such as its political-scientific excavation of the Southern veto block in the New Deal that the intellectual historical work on liberalism’s crisis itself might be missed—but that would be to our loss.
Work on the production of expertise is also of great interest to me. My own approach to historicizing the alternative infrastructures of intellectual authority in evangelicalism (in my forthcoming project) owes a debt to Molly Worthen’s excellent intellectual historical work—particularly on Francis Schaeffer and others—in her many writings, especially, Apostles of Reason. My sense is that scholars working on European empires, and in Australian history, have a more developed literature on knowledge production and expertise in its colonial and imperial settings than perhaps in US intellectual history. I’d be excited to see more work joining US history to US (and Anglophone) settler colonialism more broadly.
So that’s a smattering of things that are exciting me in the field.
This year, our annual meeting theme is “Revolution and Reform.” Can you reflect on how those ideas connect to your scholarship?
Michael G. Thompson: It has been striking to reflect on this question in light of the devastating pandemic that has spread globally, and in the US, the last couple of months. The ambient connotations of the terms, “reform” and “revolution,” really seemed to change and shift for me. Prior to the outbreak in America, the terms were being deployed a lot to frame the choice between Democratic Party Presidential candidates—do we want a candidate who represents mere incremental reform, or one who has further reaching visions of fundamental change. The pandemic did not do away with those political questions—perhaps dampened them (at the same time as the nomination seemed settled until they have to be revisited on an even deeper level. But the pandemic did serve, for me at least, to highlight the voluntarist assumptions built into the way the terms were previously used—namely that we get to choose how history goes. It has reminded me of the way that even our perceived parameters of political choice can be uprooted or reframed suddenly, and not by electoral choice. I don’t mean at all to diminish responsibility for responses to such crises, of course.
Writing in their own period of seismic crises in the 1930s-40s, many subjects in my own work reflected on the themes of revolution and reform—most notably the Christian Socialists who emerged in the Great Depression around Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was, quite famously, a “revolutionary” opponent of the New Deal in the early Depression, in that he initially despised Roosevelt’s reformism and pragmatist’s incoherence. Yet that very incoherence he went to on to praise not only as political genius but as reflective of a theological virtue, namely that as humans—especially moderns—to claim too much coherence in our grasp of history’s meaning and direction is to usurp divine prerogative and assert a God-like position in relation to history. His critique of both American liberal-reformist and Soviet revolutionary pretensions to ‘manage’ history has stayed with me.
In my present work, another Niebuhrian theme has emerged (but without Niebuhr being present as a subject). That is the theme of the unintended ironic and tragic consequences of both reform and revolution. New Deal environmental ‘reform’ took on revolutionary characteristics without realizing it. I don’t mean things like the federal government’s relationship with farmers, or its relation with the private sector. I mean its material, environmental footprint where some of the highest intentions to promote integrated conservation of water and soil to combat the excesses of individualist, capitalist land use with careful technocratic planning, resulted in a damage to waterways and ecosystems that was revolutionary, and compounded not by environmental malevolence, nor even blind spots, but mostly by noble intentions at reform.
I’ll finish with another Niebuhrian theme: that of permanent protest. Across my work I have become very interested in the theme of prophetic protest (and not all protest is prophetic, of course) and its presence or absence in US religious and intellectual history. All programs of betterment—whether by means of either reform or revolution—seem to have a capacity and propensity for self-congratulation, and a corresponding inability to hear or see injustice that interrupts that self-image. An insight not just in Niebuhr’s work but in Biblical theology itself that I keep returning to is that a prophetic posture will not be reducible either to reform or revolutionary programs, but will have some tension of permanent protest with all the above, even while pushing for change.
Thanks so much for having me.
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