(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. 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.

In honor of his birthday this past Saturday, here is one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

– William Butler Yeats