(Ir)religiosity

I learned yesterday that Howard Zinn, long-time BU professor of history, radical activist, and one of my intellectual heroes, died of a heart attack while visiting family in California at the age of 87.  Oddly enough, I didn’t initially learn of this from Twitter, Facebook or even my Google Reader.  A lone comment on this video I posted a few years ago on Zinn’s political philosophy first alerted me.

It was a wide-eyed reading of  Zinn’s seminal A People’s History of the United States (among some others) that I was first awakened from my own dogmatic slumber and challenged to view history from the perspective of the those on the underside — indeed, the only proper way of reading history is by doing so, by listening to the voice of the other.  Since then I have found Zinn to be an inspiring, dynamic and prophetic figure.  I am proud to be attending the same institution where he spent most of his career and I hope that his legacy will live on through his writings and most of all in his exhortations to organize and renounce the status quo.

Interestingly, I ran across this passage the other night in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution“:

During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.

Indeed.  Many figures come to mind.  Martin King…Gandhi…Oscar Romero…Dorothy Day…Malcom X…César Chavéz…Che Guevara…Jesus.  And, today especially, Howard Zinn.  May we honor his work not by domesticating it but by taking it seriously.

In light of the SOTU yesterday his last short piece of public writing is worth reading.  It is a retrospective on Obama’s first year.

Finally, below is a video from one of Zinn’s most recent projects.

RIP, Howard. Thank you for your life and witness.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

While I was away last week I received a copy of Diana Butler Bass’s new book, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. I about a third of the way of the way through it now and I’m enjoying it so far. This is my first Butler Bass book and without going into a lot of detail (I’m hoping to write several posts pertaining to the content) I’ll just say that I really like that fact that this book is written for a popular audience. Unfortunately, many church history books just aren’t written at that level and probably aren’t enticing to anyone outside the academy. So I applaud that. I’m also really interested in the idea of writing a church history in the style of Howard Zinn (one of my favorite historians and activists), which is what she aims to do given the title.

About her Zinnian method Butler Bass writes:

Eschewing historical orthodoxy, [Zinn] confessed, “I had no illusions about ‘objectivity,’ if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit.” This book has much the same purpose from a Christian point of view. [...] Like Zinn, I sidestep issues of orthodoxy and instead focus on moments when Christian people really acted like Christians, when they took seriously the call of Jesus to love God and love their neighbors as themselves. (page 14)

I like it. Because all history, like all reading, is always an interpretation. There is no objective, neutral, unbiased or untainted account of “the way things really were.” There just isn’t. Too many histories are written in such a way. I’m glad that Butler Bass admits that up front and I’m excited that she is attempting to tell a side of the story that jettisons the hegemony of historical “orthodoxy” and opts for the story of those on the underbelly of power.

Over the next week or so I will post more of my thoughts on the book. In the meantime, below is a video interview with Diana and Spencer Burke from TheOoze.tv.

I like Howard Zinn.  I like him a lot.  And if you haven’t read his A People’s History of the United States you need to — right now.  It’s a great book.

Al Jazeera interviewed Zinn the other day.  Here are a few selected quotes.

“[The US] is an empire which is on the one hand the most powerful empire that ever existed; on the other hand an empire that is crumbling - an empire that has no future … because the rest of the world is alienated and simply because this empire is top-heavy with military commitments, with bases around the world, with the exhaustion of its own resources at home. [This is] leading to more and more discontent and home, so I think the American empire will go the way of other empires and I think it is on its way now.” Read the rest of this entry »