Charlie pointed out to us that white evangelicals often take the brunt of academia’s ironic superiority. There is perhaps a no more popular (and, for some, no more deserving) target of this academic ridicule than David Barton. Circa 2012, when his publisher Thomas Nelson pulled his book The Jefferson Lies from print after finding “some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported,” Barton found himself the topic of numerous biting blog posts. For a while, academics had a field day on the internet with a collective reaction of “can you believe this guy!” coupled with “this is crazy, right?” Barton’s book, and his obtrusive Texas flag button-downs, became a meme for bad scholarship.Yeah, I realize there is a much larger and more interesting world relating to religion and the American Founding than David Barton's missteps.
It's interesting the position we have found ourselves in. It's almost as though in order to begin discussing the topic, whether one is on the left, right, center or libertarian, one is obliged to give Barton a (metaphorical) kick in the stomach and then get to business. It's almost like a throat clearing "may it please the court" that appellate attorneys give during oral arguments.
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I do not think you could substantiate the thesis that conventional academics are paying any more mind to David Barton than they would to any other producer of niche-audience trade books. Barton's been a purveyor of evangelical literature and other media for 30 years. Who, outside of the evangelical fold had ever heard of him?
What you're actually looking at is an obsession entertained by fragments of the status conscious evangelical professoriate. It doesn't say anything good about them. If they had a real research programme, they'd be working on that.
And the contemporary academy would sneer at evangelicals had David Barton never lived. That's just how they roll and how everyone in their circle of friends rolls. People who attempt to appreciate a variety of subcultures (or at least suspend judgment about them) are rare as hen's teeth in this world, at least in certain occupations.
And the contemporary academy would sneer at evangelicals had David Barton never lived. That's just how they roll and how everyone in their circle of friends rolls. People who attempt to appreciate a variety of subcultures (or at least suspend judgment about them) are rare as hen's teeth in this world, at least in certain occupations.
The most revered "evangelical" historian is Mark Noll, who first came to fame as the author of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind"
"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."
Noll decamped from consevative evangelical Wheaton College for the friendly confines of Notre Dame, where he holds all the right and "respectable" positions.
http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2011/05/mark-noll-when-historians-attack.html
Noll's work was reviewed respectfully (along with David Wells) in First Things 25 years ago. That provoked a reply from Carl Braaten or Carl Henry, I forget which. It was still given academics' courtesy in that venue a decade later. I've never been motivated to read it. The reviews made the work and the author sound utterly tiresome and pretentious (especially his 2002 volume).
The decay in the Catholic character of Notre Dame has been a subject for perturbed faculty there for some time. You'd have to scrounge to find a Catholic religious order of some pedigree that wasn't corrupt, and there's no reason to believe the Holy Cross fathers (what's left of them) make for an exception.
Yes, I decided not to screed on Notre Dame. One screed at a time. :-D
But I did intimate something was up; Noll left the evangelicals for the elites.
A recent First Things review gave it to Noll much more big time than I ever did.
http://americancreation.blogspot.com/2017/04/when-historians-attack-mark-noll-part.html
The point stands that Noll remains the gold standard of "evangelical" historians, i.e., just another ally for the secularist left against the religious right.
Ironically, pretty much the same charge made [not unfairly] against Barton:
Unfortunately, Noll’s reliance on a reductive caricature of Protestant political theology causes him to give a false impression of how most colonial American Protestants deployed sacred and secular sources in their political thought. The result is a work of history whose questionable methods and underlying assumptions are every bit as telling—perhaps more so—than the historical chronicle itself.
Noll's long struck me as figure like a caricature of a Jewish mother, forever saying 'not good enough' about historical actors (and some contemporary ones as well). That sort of pose requires a certain vanity.
Moots continues to offer academic courtesy to Noll, but latent in his argument is that historical narrative in Noll's hands is a text for which the subtext is latter day political disputes.
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