The popular communication of history: what I've learned at Christian History magazine - part I
A talk at the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, Oct 2024, Samford University
This talk to a group of fellow historians considered our potential vocations as what might be called "public intellectuals," drawing on the presenter's long experience as a managing and senior editor of Christian History magazine. In it, I considered why and how historians - especially (but not exclusively) church historians - can present their subject matter to a wide audience: specifically, an audience of interested non-specialist Christians, such as we might encounter while presenting at churches, or blogging, or podcasting, or giving a public lecture at a university or seminary, or writing for the press. In this brief presentation, I offered (1) vocational reflections, (2) suggestions for praxis, and (3) anecdotes from the 40-year run of this venerable quarterly publication.
Introduction
In 1984, a year before my conversion, I was reading Jonathan Edwards in a college religion class and sensing he was talking to the people in the pews at my parents’ suburban charismatic megachurch in Nova Scotia, Canada. At that point historian Richard Lovelace had a regular column on the back page of Charisma magazine, in which he attempted to reconnect the do-it-yourself religion of that movement to the foundations of Christian tradition. Ten years later I was in Richard’s classrooms at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, and reading his Dynamics of Spiritual Renewal.
Throughout my graduate study I learned a lot that prepared me for the popularizing vocation of the public intellectual – three scholars in particular helped me on this matter.
The first was Garth Rosell. Twenty years ago, facing classes full of Christians many of whom had narrow views of what makes a true Christian, Garth introduced these suspicious conservative students to group after group of devoted Christians from history who fit none of their criteria. We left his classes newly challenged and convinced of the biblical fidelity and missional effectiveness of so many groups we had previously written off.
The second was Grant Wacker. A historian with the soul of a poet, Grant taught all of his students not to treat religious groups as just religious – somehow abstracted from the real stuff of human life. In particular, we learned under Grant to attend both to the inner life of religious actors, and to the interactions between the religious sides of their lives and everything else going on in their surrounding culture.
The third was Jon Pott, then Editor in Chief of Eerdmans, who said something at a Duke student meeting that set me on this path of the public communication of history. Jon argued forcefully and memorably that the vocation of the popularizer is a legitimate vocation. As you know, the “research one university” is not generally congenial to this vocational view. But I took it seriously and have since lived by it.
The magazine
History and mission
Now, a bit more on Christian History magazine.
Christian History started almost accidentally over 40 years ago, in 1982. It was founded by the late filmmaker Ken Curtis when he became aware that evangelical Protestants don’t know our own history. The magazine was originally published as a giveaway added to historical videos produced by Ken’s company Gateway Films. It built up a loyal audience in its first seven years and then was sold to Christianity Today International in 1989. I joined the magazine as managing editor in 2002—ABD. In 2008, years after I had left that position to teach in a seminary, CT stopped publishing the magazine. But in 2010 it was picked up again by its founders and has been published continuously ever since, and I’ve been honored again during that time to serve as first managing and now senior editor.
Over the years, each single-topic quarterly issue has featured 6-7 main articles plus a variety of regular features including a timeline, interviews with scholars, a recommended reading list, and for the past few years, discussion questions for use in group settings. For all four decades of publication, each issue has been advised and almost exclusively written by scholars.
Our readers are mostly “educated but non-specialist Christians” – not all evangelical. Not surprisingly for a history magazine in America, our readership also skews to the over-60 crowd.
And at least at one point, at least 40% of our readers taught at some level – from adult Sunday school to college to seminary and grad school.
Now, I want to briefly take you through some of the issues we’ve done over the years and some things we’ve learned, then I’ll wrap up with a few concluding remarks. We’ll proceed in reverse chronological order:
Selecting and presenting topics, and a few things we learned as we did so, issue by issue
· 149: Revival, the first thousand years – the concept and title of this issue had a message for those caught up in debates over the “Asbury revival” – revival is not some newfangled American evangelical thing—it’s been happening in the church almost since the beginning.
· 142: Divine healing – this has been a perennially controversial topic in America. Sometimes you have to find just the right scholar to pull such a topic together. This time we absolutely did: As a Harvard-trained historian who has traveled internationally with healing ministries, my longtime friend Candy Gunther Brown of Indiana University has done spectacular work on this topic area, without reducing the matter to naturalistic or skeptical categories.
· 134, 137, 139, 141: church and science, marketplace, higher education, and civic engagement – a number of lessons here:
o First of all, I had a strong research interest in this material and pitched these four issues as a series – we ended up calling it the “faith and flourishing” series – to a private foundation, who supported all four issues. What did we learn from that?
o First, foundations tend to like high-concept, topical stuff—so broader topics are often more appealing to them than issues on a specific figure, for example.
o Second, given that modern American evangelicals have long had a tendency to major on “spiritual flourishing” and largely ignore human material and social flourishing, it was high time for historical treatments of the latter—and we can also include here issue 101 on the Christian history of hospitals and healthcare, issue 104 on Christian responses to the new industrial economy, and issue 110 on vocation and calling – for all of which I was involved in the planning and development.
o The lesson here? Editors are who they are. I have special interests in culture creation by the church, human flourishing broadly conceived, Christian humanism, medieval faith, and the breaking down of the quasi-gnostic sacred-secular divide in some parts of the church. If you’re a writer, get to know editors you want to work with. As human beings, they’ll get more excited with pitches that scratch their own research itches!