Hard to believe, but Heath taught his last class of the "Religious Experiences in American History" this Friday. It's been a wonderful experience and hopefully, one he can repeat next fall. Although the final class was dedicated in large part to evaluations, Heath offered this closing mediation to help bookend the year for his students:Allow me to conclude our journey together, then, with a few meditations. We have come a long way: from sixteenth century Pueblo villages to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Looking back, what can we make of this tangled story? I hope by now it is clear to you that writing history is very different than constructing a timeline. Our narratives of the past inevitably reflect our own assumptions about what matters, who matters, and how the world really works. Two historians with the same research question can – and almost certainly will – write very different books. Does this mean that history is just whatever we say it is? Of course not. Evidence places real constrains on the historical imagination. But this being said, how one sees the story still depends very much on where one stands.
From my own vantage as a believing Christian, the story of American religious history appears often deeply tragic. There are certainly celebratory moments and maybe even chapters. The Puritans’ deep concern for the common good; the fact that women like Catharine Beecher spoke truth to power, even as Andrew Jackson moved forward with his despicable plans for Indian removal; the example of those missionaries who chose to walk the trail of tears with their Cherokee brothers and sisters, rather than desert them in their moment of need. There is the reality that Catholic and Jewish immigrants to this land found deep solidarity in religious communities, and also the witness of African Americans who found in the religion of their oppressors the way to overcome. These stories give me hope that perhaps, in some mysterious way, God is in fact at work on this side of the veil.
But there is much more to lament. The violent conquest of the Pueblo by Spanish katsinas. The callous enslavement of millions of Africans, who even at the moment of their baptism were forced to recant their own freedom. That even as evangelicals mobilized for abolition, they turned a blind eye to the wage slavery that was becoming ever more prevalent in their day. That white churches served as bulwarks of Jim Crow. That within all religious denominations women have been so often subjugated to men and homosexuals have so often been the victims of hate. That supposedly devout Americans live in large suburban houses with two luxury vehicles even as their sisters and brothers in this country and around the world die of hunger, thirst, and disease. In Bono’s words, paraphrasing the psalmist, “How long? How long must we sing this song?”
The most honest answer: I don’t know. I am after all a historian, not a fortuneteller. I don’t know how the relationship between religion and the American nation will continue to evolve; I don’t know how religious persons and institutions will shape – and be shaped by – the still unfolding stories of American democracy and global capitalism, of relations between persons of all races, classes, and genders. But I do know this: history is meaningless unless we are open to being changed by it.
So be changed. When in a hundred years someone writes your history, let it not be a story about how well you looked out for your own best interests. Let it not be a story about how you turned your back to injustice. Let it not be a story about how you lived the American dream – well-fed and well-clothed and well-educated and well-loved – even as others stood in desperate need. There is a better way, but it is certainly not the path of least resistance. Whatever your thoughts on God, on religion, or on history for that matter, I can tell you that there is no more difficult way to live than this: love your neighbor as yourself.
