What happened at Little Bighorn?

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Donovan gave a very thorough description of the leadup to the battle of Little Bighorn and a detailed account of the battle itself. He also got into the blame game afterwards. I came away from the book with a better understanding of how the battle fit in with federal-Indian relations in the 19th century, and Donovan does well in helping the reader to understand the various whites and Indians involved in the story without romanticizing or demonizing either. There’s quite a bit more about U.S. military officers than the Indian leaders, presumably because there’s much more written down about Custer and his colleagues.

I didn’t get into the nuts and bolts of the battle as much as I might have, but Donovan really tries to provide as much detail as possible, supported by a huge number of footnotes. I might go back and re-read that section someday to get a better handle on it.

View all my reviews

American saints and relics

No, I don’t just copy everything Peter Leithart writes and then post it on my blog.  But it wouldn’t be a terrible idea.  This post of his is short enough that I’m just going to copy and post it here.  Really interesting stuff.  I’m enjoying catching up on his blog after being away.

William Cavanugh notes (The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict): “although Jefferson was responsible for the complete separation of church and state in Virginia, Jefferson wrote in the language of medieval Christianity about the preservation of physical things associated with the creation of the declaration: ‘Small things may, perhaps, like the relics of saints, help to nourish our devotion to this holy bond of Union.’  Of the desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson expressed his hope that we might see it ‘carried in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as the relics of the saints are in those of the Church.’”  Cavanaugh cites a study that shows that “throughout the nineteenth century, virulently anti-Catholic leaders were inclined to borrow Catholic imagery to describe the nation’s founding.  The founders were ’saints,’ they raised ‘altars’ of freedom, their houses were ’shrines’ containing ‘relics,’ and so on.”

Practices, rituals, and language that no Protestant would tolerate at church found their home in American civil religion.

Constitution Day 2007 Speech on the Founders and Ancient History

On Constitution Day, we celebrate the signing of our Constitution and we also reflect on and celebrate the system of government that the Constitution created.  The Americans who set up this system of government were very conscious of their place in history, desiring to set up a system that could provide for both order and liberty in the new American nation.  Trying to convince New Yorkers to approve the new Constitution, James Madison wrote in the Federalist No. 39 that it was necessary for the Constitution to set up a republican form of government.  “It is evident,” he wrote, “that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination that animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”  In other words, the Constitution had to reflect the principles that Americans had fought for against Great Britain not many years before the Constitutional Convention.

The men who framed the Constitution are, of course, a crucial part of our national history and certainly believed that the system of government that they set forth was part of a great experiment in whether people could govern themselves.  But if we look to them as key players in our own history, where did they turn for their own historical examples?  Thomas Jefferson believed that future American students must study British history and American history, but he also believed that ancient history had much to teach Americans.  “History,” Jefferson said, “by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men.”  For the founders of our nation, the study of history had great importance, and it is on ancient history that I want to focus in these few minutes.

Historian Carl Richard, in The Founders and the Classics, details the influence of the writings of Greek and Roman historians that told of the ancient Greek city-states such as Athens and Sparta, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire.  Indeed, many of the founding fathers had read the works of Plutarch, Thucydides, Tacitus, and other ancient historians as they learned Greek and Latin before going to college.  Richard illuminates many of lessons that the founders learned from reading ancient authors, and three of these lessons seemed particularly applicable for Constitution Day.

First, American patriots in the early part of our country’s history believed that liberty was always in danger, that people could easily lose their freedoms.  They saw this in the examples of Greece and Rome, as they read about tyrants who manipulated the people for their own benefits rather than for the benefit of their respective countries.  They saw Julius Caesar, for example, as a destroyer of the Roman Republic, a society without a king that had been governed virtuously by the nobles and the commoners of Rome before it was turned into the tyrannical Roman Empire.  On the other hand, the founders sought to identify with those who had taken the side of liberty rather than tyranny.  George Washington both consciously imitated and was praised for his similarity to Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman who was offered great power in a state of emergency, saved Rome, and then gladly gave up that power when the danger had passed, as Washington had at the end of the Revolution.  Or take the authors of the Federalist Papers, who signed each section “Publius,” one of the founders of the Roman Republic after he had helped to remove the king.

The founders also believed that unity between the states was important.  When they drafted the Constitution, the 13 states were only loosely united.  The framers of the Constitution believed that “a more perfect Union” was necessary for, as they put it, “the common defence” and the overall strength and health of the nation.  They often looked to the ancient Greeks who had fought each other rather than uniting, and earnestly hoped that the states who had recently fought Great Britain would not fight each other.

Finally, the framers believed in the idea of “mixed government.”  Now, we’ve all felt that the government mixes things up from time to time, but mixed government is something different.  The framers looked at ancient Rome and Sparta, among others, as examples of governments that had not just a king or a direct democracy, but rather balanced the perspectives of both the privileged and the common people.  They believed that by creating a presidency chosen by electors and a Senate chosen by state legislatures they could provide the proper balance to a House of Representatives that was very much the representative of the people as a whole.  For the framers, the stability and balancing of different groups’ interests that was present in Rome was far superior to the direct and unpredictable democracy in Athens.

As we remember our own history on Constitution Day, we can see that the framers also saw history as important and tried to learn from it.  The Constitution gives us the protections to freely discuss and debate the great questions of the day.  And so we may ask ourselves, how can we learn from history to preserve the great principles of liberty and justice that our system of government is based on?  And how can we understand where our nation, including even our founders, have failed in those areas in order that we can more fully live up to our lofty goals?

Book Review: Douglas Wilson, “Black and Tan”

While looking at Doug Wilson’s blog one day, I happened to notice that he wrote a book on slavery and culture wars.  Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America seemed to be a great book to pair with America’s God, since both books discuss 19th-century American Christianity.

The story of this book begins in the 1990s when Wilson and his fellow Presbyterian minister Steve Wilkins wrote a pamphlet called “Southern Slavery as It Was.”  Controversy erupted when they argued that the abuses of Southern slavery were exaggerated.

Black and Tan reiterates the main points of that pamphlet and discusses the controversy that resulted from it.  The central points might be listed as follows:

• The Bible does allow for slavery within certain guidelines, although as the gospel does its work within nations, slavery will be abolished because the institution of slavery is against the logic of the gospel
• Racism and the slave trade are roundly condemned by the Bible
• Slavery was abolished in the United States in a radical and unbiblical way rather than that gradual way that it should have been if the gospel had done its work in American culture
• The Civil War empowered the federal government in such a way that it overthrew the truly federal system of government that the Constitution provided for, and this empowerment of humanistic instead of Christian values (which he compares to the French Revolution) paved the way for the current culture wars over abortion and gay marriage by, for example, giving the Supreme Court the power to overturn all states’ abortion laws

This blog post by Wilson also gives a good insight into his purposes.

A different type of “natural aristocracy”

I’ve read that Thomas Jefferson believed that a meritocratic society would allow for a “natural aristocracy” to emerge; those with merit would rise to the top.  As I understand Jefferson’s view, the aristocrats of Europe held their positions only by artificial traditions that didn’t conform with reason and nature.

On the other hand, aristocrats themselves saw their position as quite natural.  Here are a couple of excerpts from Peter Leithart’s blog post on the subject.  (Is it okay to for me to blog about another blog post that comments on a review of a book?  Well, it’s my blog, and Leithart’s involved, so you know he’ll have something interesting to say.)  On to the excerpts:

For the French, [Armitage] points out, nobility was not just a class, but a race question: “Many French nobles, supported by their ideological allies among historians, had long argued that they were literally a race apart from other Frenchmen, decendants of the conquering Franks, not of defeated Gauls.  To strip them of fiscal privileges was one thing; to extinguish heredity in the name of equality was, ‘in noble eyes . . . nothing less than an attempt to change biology.’”

Thus, the story of the “end” of aristocracy is not just about aristocracy:

“On the eve of the French Revolution, most of the Western world recognized three major biologically transmissible relations of power: aristocracy, monarchy and slavery.  In the French case, they fell and rose together,” falling in a brief period from 1790-1794, and rising again between 1802 and 1814.  Few historians have treated these issues as manifestations of the same thing, but the “most thoroughgoing egalitarians of the Age of Revolution, like Lafayette and Thomas Paine” did: “nobles, kings and slaves [were] equal affronts to human dignity because their existence derived from the same irrational exclusionary princple: heredity.”…

Different as France and America were, the example of America was key for French revolutionaries, since the US (in Doyle’s words) “showed the European world beyond America that a society without nobles was possible, and could work.”   American opposition to nobility is enshrined in the Constitution (Article 1, sections 9-10).  For all the “conservatism” of the American revolutionaries, Armitage’s review neatly captures just how radical the American experiment was.  To European conservatives, the US – with its rejection of throne, throne and altar, and nobility – must have appeared to be an effort to change the operating system of human society.

Book Review: Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

My first response to Noll’s work is to express my appreciation and respect for the amount of research and expertise that went into writing America’s God.  Noll has a tremendous grasp of the different theological traditions of 18th- and 19th-century America, and displays impressive familiarity with the broader history of the United States in the same period.  He shows convincingly that theology in America was adapted to the national culture of republican government, suspicion of tradition and claims to authority, and commonsense moral reasoning.

Noll realizes that a history of theology and intellectual developments doesn’t make a history of America, and he acknowledges that this does focus on an elite set of intellectual theologians.  But he makes the case that these ideas were important for the broader society and that theology imported ideas from the broader society.

America’s God can be difficult to follow at times, and I sometimes felt like I was backtracking over the same ground that had been discussed earlier.  Noll writes in his introduction that the length of time that it took him to write this book may have taken a toll on the clarity of the arguement, and I think that’s probably true to some extent.  There are also times where the exploration of theology is incredibly deep, and others where I felt that brief summaries needed to be fleshed out more.  At the same time, the scope of his work probably necessitated that this would be the case.

America’s God is a challenging book.  For someone with a professional, academic interest in American religious history, I would strongly recommend it.  I think that is Noll’s goal: to make a contribution to the field of early American history that includes theological development.  For others, it would depend on your interests.

In his comments on this post, Joel asked me what Noll’s point of view is.  In the conclusion of the book, Noll writes that he finds Jonathan Edwards to be the best American theologian “for the purposes of understanding God, the self, and the world as they really are.”  He agrees with the intellectual and theological depth of the Calvinism of the Puritans, Edwards, and George Whitefield, but also appreciates the evangelistic and social activism of the 19th-century American evangelicals in a cultural environment “with tradition, heirarchy, and deference to historical precedent discredited by the ideology of the Revolution.”  He states:

It is an oft-stated truism, but worthy of repetition, that if the theological and ecclesiastical changes described here had not taken place, it is not humanly conceivable that American religious beliefs and practices would have remained, by comparison with the rest of the Western world, so relatively vigorous as the remain to this day.” (444)

At the same time, he believes that the Civil War greatly damaged this American theology, meaning that “American theology lurched, rather than self-consciously thought, its way into the modern world” (445).  I’d be interested to hear his explanation of what followed it.

Lincoln bests the theologians

The last major chapter of America’s God compares the subtlety and humility of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865 with the way that theologians talked about the Civil War, which Noll finds predictable and self-righteous.  Noll writes that while American theologians in the mid-19th century often believed that they could interpret God’s sovereign will with great certainty, Lincoln displayed no such hubris in his Second Inaugural.  Here is the most theological section (you can read the whole thing here, and it’s not very long):

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Noll does not believe that the American theologians never plumbed great theological depths or that Lincoln was always deep or even orthodox.  He argues, though, that evangelicals had almost conquered America too thoroughly, leaving a “domesticated” evangelical theology that no longer challenged Americans.

Noll believes that this domestication engendered two unfortunate trends (he even uses the word “tragedy”).  For thinkers who found the American theological synthesis inadequate, like Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Lincoln, the quest “to be faithful to the God they found in their own hearts — or in the Bible, or in the sweep of events” pushed them away from the orthodox American church.  For evangelical Protestant theologians, their tendency “was to rest content with a God defined by the American conventions God’s own loyal servants had exploited so well” (438).

I found the conclusion of this chapter very powerful.  It has always happened that each new culture to which Christianity spreads will adapt Christianity to its own culture, and we in America are no exception.  The problem comes when we adapt it so thoroughly that it becomes domesticated and we become less willing to see the necessity of living lives that truly reflect Christ.  It’s a challenge that Christians of all times must wrestle with.

American hermeneutics and slavery

After chronicling the Americanization of Calvinist and Methodist theology, Mark Noll in America’s God turns to American biblical hermeneutics, the way that Americans read the Bible, in Chapters 18-20.  Noll argues that the American approach to Scripture in this period also came from both their Protestant heritage and their revolutionary/early national circumstances.  Noll has argued that republican government and commonsense moral ideas replaced the traditional authorities that held sway in the colonies, and that society was becoming increasingly democratic.  Evangelicalism often followed these trends even as it created what Noll calls “a formidable Christian civilization” (437) out of the former colonies, displaying a willingness and sometimes even a preference to work in the wide-open marketplace of religious choices, offering a view of human nature that owed quite a bit to Scottish Enlightenment ideas, and expressing theology in language drawn from Enlightenment and republican ideas.

Calvinism and Methodism get Americanized

Chapters 13-17 of America’s God consider the process by which the two major theological traditions in early America became Americanized; in other words, each began using the language and assumptions that fit with the broader culture’s republican and commonsense philosophies.  This meant the softening of beliefs about man’s inherent and inherited depravity into a more free-will belief that people chose to sin, influenced by the fall of Adam.  This meant modifying the traditional Calvinist belief that naturally sinful people had to be called by God, and the traditional Methodist belief that naturally sinfully people were rendered able to choose only by God’s “prevenient grace” made possible by Christ’s universal atonement (in other words, only God’s grace rendered people able to choose or reject Christ).  In both traditions, there was also a greater confidence that human beings could know the truths of religion through common sense and a “Baconian” approach to the Bible that imitated the scientific method.  There was also a greater effort to speak about God not as an absolute ruler of the universe, but as a benevolent ruler that did not engage in tyranny, showing the concern of the republican culture in America.

Noll believes that both Calvinism and Methodism became Americanized through different paths, although both involved debate with theological opponents.  For Calvinists, there was a great concern that a healthy society demanded continued revivals, and that the traditional Calvinist emphasis on God’s initiation of salvation did not provide a good foundation for revivals.  The most radical example of this from someone in a historically Reformed denomination is Charles Finney, who believed that overturning the traditional Calvinist beliefs was the only path to revival.  Another part of the Calvinist changes was the debate with the Unitarians, who denied the Trinity.  These debates also helped to “Americanize” Reformed theology.  Noll believes that the modified Calvinists who emerged in the early 1800s did not seek to change theology for the sake of change, but rather to defend and revive the Christian church.  For them, a strong church led to a strong and free society.  Even a conservative leader like Charles Hodge of Princeton Seminary adhered to the Baconian view of reading Scripture, used the rhetoric of common sense, and believed in the agreement of Christian and republican ideas, although his Calvinism remained much more traditional.

Methodists, on the other hand, already had the idea of free will embedded in their theology,  but they did not defend it in American terms (i.e., using commonsense philosophy).  Through the influence of American Methodist leader Francis Asbury, Methodist theology stayed grounded in John Wesley’s interpretation of the Bible.  Noll believes that the Americanization of Methodism occurred as they debated with the Calvinists, and began to explain Methodist free will theology in philosophical terms rather than in Wesley’s terms.  The exception was the “Holiness” strain of Methodist theology pioneered by Phoebe Palmer, which retained its strongly Scriptural base but also did not make much impact in intellectual culture.

Here is Noll’s summary of the different paths toward Americanization:

Methodist theology Americanized as it sought to win respectability and to win over Calvinists, whereas the older traditions from the colonial era had Americanized in order to forge a national destiny under God. (364)

Theological innovations in the American republic

Chapter 12 of America’s God explains the tenets of what Noll calls “American theology.”  He believes that as American evangelicals built a new culture, they also absorbed its assumptions; having torn down traditional authorities, they instead defended Christianity or their denominations with the language of republicanism and commonsense moral ideas rather than relying solely on the theological traditions of their European heritage.  He describes the following developments:

• A greater emphasis on human will to accept God, as opposed to the Calvinist teaching that God’s grace needed to enable a person to believe
• A bolder assertion that individuals could interpret the Bible without any help from tradition, even Protestant traditions
• A diminished focus on the mystery of God in favor of a more confident approach to explaining God’s purposes according to rational principles (for example, Charles Finney’s manuals on how one could guarantee successful revivals by proper planning)
• An identification of human sinfulness with actual sins committed, as opposed to traditional ideas of a sinful nature inherited from Adam
• A new vocabulary to talk about theology that used the language of republicanism and commonsense ideas: “benevolence, common sense, conscience, consciousness, freedom, government, interest, justice, power, primitive, reason, science, simple, virtue” (232)

Not everyone incorporated all of these developments to their fullest extent, of course, but Noll gives examples of how they showed up in disputes between denominations as well as in disputes between Christians and skeptics.

The idea that Christianity could be explained and proved through common sense, Noll argues, was very pervasive.  He also includes some of the criticisms by contemporaries who disagreed (for various reasons) with the appropriation of Enlightenment language and ideas into Christian theology.  This was the most cogent, I thought:

[Common sense theology] reasons from time to eternity with vast dexterity and ease; establishing, by strict Baconian comparison and induction, the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the truth of revelation; but it is all in such a way as turned eternity itself into time, and forces the whole invisible world to become a mere abstraction from the world of sense. (250)

In other words, it imposes our logic on God.  This, it seems to me, is the danger of the developments that Noll describes in this chapter.  If the truth about God is easily seen through common sense, what happens if common sense is more malleable than we think?  What must have seemed like permanent common sense 200 years ago was probably shaped by Christian assumptions.  If that shifts, will Christian teachings always seem like common sense?  Furthermore, it seems risky to think that God can be so easily explained by human logic.  This always risks capturing God in our assumptions.

There’s always a place for appealing to common sense when we explain and defend our faith.  But there’s also a risk in relying on it too much.