(Ir)religiosity

I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed with the book.  That’s not to say it is not without merit, it does several things very well and I’ll get to those in a minute.  But as an avowed Howard Zinn fan I thought the book failed to deliver.  That’s probably the fault of my own expectation combined with the way the book was marketed; however,  Diana Butler Bass points out in the introduction that she hopes to do with Christian history what Zinn did with American history.  Given the size of the book she all but sets herself up for failure.  Again, that is not to say the book itself is not noteworthy.  I just think it might be better served with the Zinn comparisons and with a different title.

But what it is about anyway?

For DBB there are basically two kinds of Christianity:  there is “Big-C Christianity,” which is the story we are all familiar with.  It’s trajectory runs thus: Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, Christian America.  If you’ve ever taken a church history class, odds are that is the way the story has run.  It’s a story of power, militant coercion and victory.  Counter to that is another type of Christianity, what DBB calls “generative Christianity” or “Great Command Christianity.”  This version of the story is one that is always guided by Jesus’s axiom of loving God and neighbor — contrary to the other story, this is the true essence of Christianity.   While the Big-C story may be dominant and pervasive in church history textbooks, DBB makes the convincing case that the story of generative Christianity has always been around carrying forward the true Christian legacy.  Her intention in the book is to tell that version of the story and eschew the Big-C story.

Telling this different story is without a doubt the book’s greatest strength (and also it’s greatest weakness, which I’ll get to in a moment).  DBB tells an alternate version of Christian history and highlights important figures that most Christians have probably never heard of.  As a seminary student and a religion major in undergrad I’ve taken probably a dozen or so hours of church history and, unfortunately, I had never heard of some of the people profiled in this book.  These were the people who resisted the temptation of power and instead followed the great commandment.  The book is well worth the reading for this reason alone.  And it is written in such a way that academic and lay people alike will benefit.

But, because the book is short and because it is sets out to tell the story in a certain way, I think it fails to live up to it’s title and it’s comparisons to Zinn’s work.  Here I resonate with many of the criticisms brought up in the Catholic Anarchy review.  First, the book is extremely one-sided in that it only really recounts the Western history of Christianity.  This is unfortunate because 1) the title itself taken at face value infers otherwise and 2) the Big-C story is, by and large, the Western story, and, by the same token, the Eastern and Southern versions of the story are generative Christianity!  To be sure, there were always generative practitioners in the Western story, but to suggest, as the book tends to do, that both the generative story and Big-C story took place within Western Christianity alone is a bit myopic, I think, and perhaps a bit too generous to the Western story.

Which leads me to another concern.  While I applaud the effort to tell a version of the story that is not beholden to power and conquest, I think glossing over those details is a mistake — especially in a book that models itself after the work of Howard Zinn.  To quote from the CA review:

Zinn’s book was important not because he recovered stories of “great Americans” who happened to “get it right,” embodying whatever it is that is good in the narratives, myths and ideals of the united states of america. No, Zinn’s book was a “people’s history” because he told the story of the u.s. from the perspective of those marginalized citizens of the united states as well as those who were america’s victims. When Zinn did related stories of those americans who “got it right,” those stories were never divorced from the stories of the victims whose voices were heard throughout the narrative.

This is my biggest problem with the book.  Like I said its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness.  A book that claims to tell “the other side of the story” should, I think, not only recall those who got it right and effectively lived generative Christianity, but also those who were victimized and oppressed by Big-C Christianity.  Those voices are noticeably silent in this book.  Sure, we know the Big-C story, but we do not know it from the underside.  In that respect, DBB’s book fails to live up to its title and its comparisons.

That being said, I would still recommend this book.  Especially for those non-academics.  It is written for a popular audience, it highlights figures and practices that are rarely mentioned elsewhere and, most importantly, it tells a story of Christianity in which the “Christians” actually looked and acted Christian.

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