Taki Magazine

Respecting History

by Grant Havers on February 26, 2009

I was delighted to read Paul Gottfried’s recent piece on the politics of presidential rankings, and how these exercises in ideological gamesmanship reveal more about current political agenda than they do about the brute facts of history.  As Paul astutely observes, the ranking of Lincoln as the greatest president for his prophetic role in advancing progressivist and imperialist causes in the 20th century is particularly egregious, since Honest Abe’s own views on equality and democracy-building bear little resemblance to those of leftist social engineers who came to power over 70 years ago. To add insult to injury, hardly anyone in the general populace questions what I have called here the “straight line” approach to history—the temptation to draw a straight line between the events of the distant past and the present day—without taking into account ruptures and discontinuities along the way.  The avatars of this defective historiography can be found across the political spectrum (including, yes, the paleo-side), who either credit or blame Lincoln for everything from the civil rights movement to global warming.

The best historians on Lincoln’s legacy have long wondered whether his influence even survived the 19th century.  I recommend Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (2006) as an insightful corrective to straight-line historiography in the Lincoln Bicentennial year.  Noll, who is one of America’s top historians of politics and religion, contends that Lincoln’s speeches on the republic far surpass in sophistication anything offered by preachers of his age, or any age since:  “it is worth noting that Lincoln, a layman with no standing in a church and no formal training as a theologian, nonetheless offered a complex picture of God’s rule over the world and a morally nuanced picture of America’s destiny.  By contrast, most of the country’s recognized religious leaders offered a thin, simple view of God’s providence and a morally juvenile view of the nation and its fate.”  (Has any theologian since Lincoln come close to rivaling the president’s second inaugural address for sheer rhetorical brilliance?)  Moreover, Noll concludes his study with an implicit indictment of what passes for Protestant political theology today:

(T)he Civil War took the steam out of Protestants’ moral energy.  Protestants remained divided North and South…The theology that had risen to preeminence in the early nineteenth century continued to work effectively for vast multitudes in private; but because of its public failure during the war, it had little to offer American society more generally in the decades that followed the war.

If Noll is right, the “Protestant Deformation” kicked in long before the twentieth century.  Noll, who is famous for lamenting the “scandal of the evangelical mind”—the pervasive anti-intellectualism of Protestants which has contributed to their diminishing influence in the culture at large—provides a fascinating and disturbing counterpoint to leftists who darkly warn about the influence of the Protestant Right in American politics; as Noll shows, this influence has been on the wane for some time now.  His observations also help to explain how Lincoln’s heirs in the most liberal Protestant churches today often show little respect for their hero or historical truth when they eagerly lap up the siren songs of leftist politicians who justify a bigger Leviathan in the name of the Great Emancipator. 

• Print Article
• Email Article
• Email the Editor