Dr. Robert Nye
The question I ask here puts into the interrogative the assertion by the French World War One Premier, Georges Clemenceau that "War is too important to be left to the Generals." Clemenceau meant by this that though Generals might know how best to fight a battle, they were too enmeshed in its details to see the bigger picture into which their battle fit, or the political or human consequences it might have both for combatants and civilians. As far as the writing of history is concerned, enforcing this principle would have deprived us of some of the great monuments of historical scholarship: German history written by Germans, art history written by artists, science history written by scientists, and so forth. Still, we all recognize the temptations and pitfalls of "in-house history" to exaggerate or conceal unflattering facts or interpretations.
This is perhaps more true of the history of religion than any other subject. We all know about the huge gulf that exists in contemporary American debate between the scientific and religious views of life and nature. This debate has not always been as acrimonious as it is now, but that is what happens when science and religion get mixed up with politics. Histories of religion have also been marked by similar moments of conflict between confessional perspectives or between religious or secular apologists. As a discipline, history began to diverge from its origins in literature and philosophy in the middle part of the nineteenth century. Though there have been backslidings and some spectacular individual failures, history gradually became professionalized, developed some methodological conventions for assessing the evidence of the past, and laid claim to standards of objectivity that have guided historians and reassured their readers. But it was long thought that the history of religion simply did not lend itself to the sort of detached perspective cultivated by professional historians. To begin with, no one could agree on what the history of religion was a history of. Was it the history of the "mainstream" religions, of religious rituals, of spirituality, of religious institutions or law? Where one drew the line between religious and non-religious phenomena often boiled down to a historian's own religious or perhaps anti-religious convictions. Confessional differences, sometimes especially those within the great world religions, have made for interested, not disinterested history. And to this problem there has been added, after 1850 or so, various strands of anti-religious thought whose proponents believed that the history of religion was the history of superstition and oppression.
In the Christian West, the obstacles to writing religious history that satisfy the conventions of fairness and objectivity of the historical profession have only slowly disappeared. Indeed, one might say that only in the last half-century or so has religion ceased to be thought of as an impossibly controversial subject for historical analysis. What I want to do today is discuss a part of the story in which the history of religion came of age as a legitimate historical subject and how the problem of religious partisanship in serious historical writing has been substantially mitigated. Of course, volumes of Christian apologetics making no claim to neutrality still far outnumber these more serious works, and there is no shortage of recent, virulent best-selling attacks on religion by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and others, but I am confining my story here to serious historical work.
I am no specialist in this field, so forgive me for bringing the story into terrain that is more familiar to me: European and particularly French history in the modern era. I will begin with a brief summary of the way Europe's religious history has been different from North America, with the exception of Mexico, whose religious history has been more like Europe's than its northern neighbors. Europe's monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries enforced religious uniformity as best they could-whether Catholic or Protestant--and stifled dissent from religious minorities. Many of these minorities fled to North America, where they could practice their religions freely. Thus, in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment took hold, European thinkers critical of state religions took enlightenment to mean freedom from religion, whereas the new colonists understood enlightenment as justifying the freedom to believe. The more radical critics of state religions in Europe eventually became critics of religion itself and ardent proponents of secularization. This word originally meant the transfer of the lands, wealth, and functions of religious institutions to the state, but in the 19th century it came to mean the wholesale replacement of the sacred symbols, rituals, and ideas of the public sphere by secular equivalents, as was noted by the great German sociologist, Max Weber.
Partly as a result of these developments, the desacralization of the public sphere has progressed further in Europe than in any other part of the world. Poland and Ireland still have church attendance rates in the 60% range, but the Scandinavian countries, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, even Spain, once the home of the fearsome Spanish Inquisition, have attendance rates between 8 and 15%. In France, which leads the European Union in non-attendance, over 60% of the population "never goes to church". Even more tellingly, a recent survey in the UK has found that 43% of the public think that religion is not a force for good in society and 39% said Christianity does not have an important role to play in public life.
By contrast, Americans seem to have been largely inoculated against a similar decline in religious sentiment. The disestablishment clause of the constitution was designed to acknowledge the reality of early America's sectarian diversity and promote religious liberty. This has freed the U.S. from the kinds of conflicts in Europe that have left the authority of traditional religion much diminished and religious observance considerably weakened. 85% of Americans call themselves Christian, church attendance in this country rivals the highest rates in Europe, and some polls suggest only 2% of Americans do not believe in a personal God. At this moment in history, America is the largest Christian nation that has ever existed. Ironically, the kinds of anti-Christian diatribes that used to be common in Europe seem to have surfaced now in America. The politicization of the religious right has aroused a vigorous opposition here that has criticized the application of religious standards to issues of marriage, sexuality and reproduction, defended the teaching of mainstream science in the schools, and produced some best-selling criticisms of religion itself, most recently Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, in which the author sets out to "demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms."
Such vituperation was common in European anti-religious discourse over a hundred years ago, but, with some exceptions, the rhetoric for and against religion has cooled a bit on the European continent. This ebbing of religious convictions and the passions they once generated seems to have provided an opportunity for European and American historians of European religion to reassess the history of religion there in a new way. But this is a recent development. When we look back into the 19th century, we see Europeans, particularly the French, in a virtual war over the place of religion and the established church in modernizing societies. Many European nations after 1870 experienced some degree of open resistance to the reservation of elective offices, education, and citizenship for practitioners of the established or majority religion. By degrees, this struggle for rights turned into an attack on religion itself, as the Catholic Church, in particular, led by a newly-militant papacy, defended its traditional prerogatives.
The French chapter of this story began in 1789 with the French Revolution. At that time French Kings still claimed their authority and legitimacy from God, Catholicism was the state religion, and pastoral authority reinforced the power of the monarch, the hereditary aristocracy, and male heads of families. In the first years of the Revolution, Catholicism became the religion of the majority of the French rather than the protected state religion, all monastic properties were confiscated and sold, priests were obliged to swear an oath to the state and receive their salaries as civil servants. The Revolutionaries who directed this assault upon the church also excluded women from the vote, office holding, and, in effect, from full citizenship. This exclusion had the effect of driving women into the arms of the church and establishing a political and religious division between men and women over religious affiliation that has endured for the whole of French history. Male citizens feared the influence of priests in the confessional, whom they suspected of undermining familial authority by inciting wives and daughters against them. Finally, and this will be important to my story later on, this growing gender divide had the effect of profoundly feminizing the culture of the Catholic church throughout Europe, not the male hierarchy and "official" ritual of course, but the nature of popular religious piety.
A celebrated French novel satirizes this secular-religious gender divide in France in hilarious fashion. Clochemerle, Gabriel Chevalier's 1934 novel about a little town in Beaujolais, sets the local male political establishment at odds with the female Catholic population over the proposed construction of a pissoir, the infamous outdoor cast-iron, male lavatory that once dominated urban landscapes. The urinal was to be built, not coincidentally, just outside the local church and, more crucially, under the window of the most pious woman in the village. The women mobilize, rumors fly of papal conspiracies and freemasonic plots, and a culture war breaks out neatly divided along religious, political, and gender lines. By 1934 it might have been easier to laugh at something that had divided families a few generations earlier.
The re-establishment of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815 preserved the legal arrangements of the Revolution, but restored much of the former social and cultural power of the church and its dominance of education. This compromise was maintained until the 1860s when a network of institutions of secondary and higher education were set up that rivaled the church schools. The word "laic" was coined at this time to express the alternative to "clerical" control over education and culture; "laicité" eventually came to mean complete secular dominance and the exclusion of all religious practices or symbols (including, nowadays, the veils of Muslim girls). In the 1880s, with the establishment of the Third Republic there were further restrictions on religious schools, and a ban on any religious teachings in the state schools. This evolution was capped in 1901 with the complete ban on Catholic teaching, the dissolution of the teaching orders, and the nationalization of the last of church property. The church was now fully disestablished.
In the 1850s when the laic challenge to religion was just beginning, there was another revolution taking place in France in historical method, especially as it concerned the history of religion. German higher biblical criticism, the scholarly investigation of the textual and historical origins of the gospels, made its way to France. At the same time the École des Chartes in Paris was developing methods still in use today for dating and authenticating medieval and early modern manuscripts. Most of the writers who made use of these new historical methods were not Catholic. Catholic historians were usually priests, who were content to write old-fashioned ecclesiastical history and hagiographies of the saints. The new historians, of whom Jules Michelet was the most important, used the new methods to write laic interpretations of French history which found fault with Catholic versions of important events like the religious civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the French Revolution. Alphonse Aulard, who held the first chair of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne in the 1880s, wrote volumes of deeply unflattering portraits of Catholic treachery and anti-modernism, contrasting it with the progressive humanitarianism of the Revolutionary Republicans. The masterpiece of this era of historical ferment was Ernst Renan's Life of Jesus, published in 1863, offering an account of Jesus as a noble human being whose goodness is rightly celebrated, but who was only a man, and by no reasonable standards of evidence the son of God.
Renan's book was the bible of the laic cause, converting many readers on the spot to the anti-clerical crusade. To this intellectual challenge the church had no adequate response. Catholic authors fell back on biblical chronologies dating Adam and Eve, the Flood, the Decalogue, and the life of Christ. Instead of engaging in the new historical scholarship, the church reaffirmed traditional authority. The Syllabus of Errors, published by Pius IX in 1864 condemned democracy, religious toleration of Protestants and Jews, and much else of modern life. A Papal Bull of 1870 proclaimed the pope "infallible" in matters of morals and dogma, reaffirming centuries-old doctrines that condemned dancing, liberties for women, and which urged priests to use the confessional to damn and censure sinners. In the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, a new pope, Leo XIII, accommodated the church to democracy and liberal ideas, but two years later he also affirmed the inerrancy of traditional Catholic biblical exegesis, forbidding Catholic scholars to engage in the kind of critical biblical scholarship that prospered in Protestant lands and which was being used by opponents of the church to undermine the gospels as literal truth. As Ernst Renan wrote "A single error proves that the church is not infallible; a single weak link proves the book is not revelation."
In short, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church and its laic critics were on different sides of a great cultural divide. Lay Catholic writers who defended the dogma and history of the church took their direction from the papacy. They remained aloof from Protestants, condemned liberalism, democracy, labor unions, and feminism. For them, the history of their religion was a history of revealed truth and the steady accretion of dogma. Professional historians, many of whom were anti-clerical, took it for granted that their work was a secular task telling of secular events affirmed by evidence. For them, the history of religion was a history of error, superstition, the arrogance of power, and stubborn anti-modernism. Indeed, for Michelet, Aulard, and later historians, religion was a topic of second-rank status. They believed that progress, technology, modern manners, and mass education condemned religion to a slow but inevitable irrelevance. It still possessed the power to do harm, but would be swept away by a new religion of humanity that reflected an optimism about the future, not a religious conception of life as a vale of tears. Indeed, neither side seemed to care about telling the history of religion in a detached way; there was too much at stake in the political and ideological battles of the present, in which the Church was allied with the nationalist and monarchist Right and the anti-clerics were allied with the Republican left. In 1908 the German historian, Richard Fester, expressed doubt that either Christians or anti-Christians could write the history of Christianity. As he wrote, "The best history of Christianity will probably be written by a Buddhist or a Moslem."
To this point, I have stressed how the struggles for the historical high ground revolved around the institutional history and dogmas of the Catholic Church, which was the focus of the polemics between the two sides. On the margins of this great struggle for the soul of modern civilization, however, religious phenomena of a different kind were in full flower. Over the centuries the Catholic Church had both profited from and been vexed by forms of popular piety that were deeply embedded in traditional folkways, many of which probably pre-Christian in origin. I refer to healing rituals, healing shrines, and a variety of prayers and celebrations in honor of local "saints" who had never received official Church recognition. Many of these may be traced to early medieval times, but there were periodic crests of apparitions and miraculous cures in plague time, famines, or social upheavals that have continued right up to the present. The most common apparition was the Virgin Mary, whose usually gentle, but sometimes scolding personage, served as an approachable mediator in the prayers of rural Catholics. The Church had periodically recognized some of the more popular Marian apparitions, but was wary of watering down established dogma with folk superstitions from all corners of the Catholic world.
Beginning in 1830, with the Virgin of the "Miraculous Medal," whose image has been reproduced in over 100,000,000 replicas, major apparitions occurred every decade or so in France through the turn of the century. La Salette in the Alpine foothills in 1846, and Lourdes in the Pyrenees in 1858 became the most popular of these Marian sites, but there were 9 apparitions in the 1870s, another 5 in the 1880s and 2 more in the last decade of the century. The Church eventually lent its support to most of these "miracles," many of which featured healing shrines, and by the end of the century millions of pilgrims from all over Europe were visiting them. In all but one or two of these events, the virgin appeared to children or sometimes to young women--the innocent of this world. Apparitions were subsequently experienced by hundreds at these original sites, mostly by women, cures were widely claimed, and the faithful came in huge numbers to be in the presence of the divine. Other places in Europe undergoing rapid social change or anti-clerical attacks on the faith also experienced hugely popular apparitions: Marpingen in the German Saarland in 1876, Fatima in Portugal in 1916, Ezkioga in the Basque region of Spain in 1931, and 65 cases of apparitions in divided and foreign-dominated Germany between 1947 and 1950.
Meanwhile, the struggle between churches and their anti-clerical critics continued on through WW I and into the interwar period. European nations went to war in 1914 for "God and country," and all national clergies assured their citizens that providence was on their side. The carnage of the war provoked a notable rise in suspicion about the wisdom of providential claims, but it was the epic ideological struggles of WW II that seem to have most transformed our ability to treat religious history with some combination of sympathy and objectivity. While reading for this lecture, I came across Arnold Toynbee's An Historian's Approach to Religion, which he delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1952-1953 at the University of Edinburgh. Toynbee, some of you may know, was the last scholar who was bold enough to write a multi-volume history of the world by himself. In this book I take his message about how we should write the history of religion in a post-holocaust world to be emblematic of his generation.
Toynbee begins by writing that the historian's craft teaches one to respect the relativity of time and space and to prize an attitude of detachment that neutralizes one's own selfish judgment. He calls this process "self-correction through self-transcendence." Have we not learned from the last war, he asks, the terrible dangers of quasi-religious ideologies like National Socialism and Communism? And do not these forms of national and social self-idolization mark much of the history of the higher religions, causing them to apotheosize their founders, their revelations, and Holy Scriptures as unique and final truths, and to murder apostates and heretics in their name? Toynbee asserts that the true subject of the history of religion is the "encounters between human beings and the Absolute Reality that is beyond ordinary experience." The historian who has studied the span of human history will know best how to "disengage the essence in mankind's religious heritage from non-essential accretions." In other words, the historian can fruitfully study the ways and the times God has revealed himself to man and be properly suspicious of claims by religious establishments that this or that revelation is the final or best of all the revelations that have come or are still to come. Indeed, Toynbee felt certain that the historic human desire for contact with an Absolute Good would strengthen in the atomic age as humans sought "spiritual" comfort from the specter of total annihilation.
There are two lessons here. One is that historians should study the religious experiences of ordinary people outside the mainstream of established churches, for it is the worldly pretensions of the churches that have enjoined the bitter conflicts for and against religion. Secondly, Toynbee teaches us to think of political and social ideologies like Communism and National Socialism as essentially religious movements that draw on the human capacity for belief and the search for meaning. As Toynbee knew, he was indebted for this idea to the great sociologists Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, who analyzed many social phenomena as religious phenomena, but he thought that by also applying the principle of "self-correction" to the study of national and social ideologies, historians could reach a fairer and more objective perspective on them as well.
In the spirit of the times, by the 1960s social historians had begun to explore the history of the anonymous and the downtrodden and this led to a new focus on the history of popular piety. Thomas Kselman, a pioneer in the history of miracles and prophecies, teaches history at Notre Dame University. He writes that social historians have learned to study religious experience as "an irreducible given" and to consider "belief" as an active force capable of shaping the world of believers. We are learning, he writes, to think about miracles and those who testify to them not in terms of the evidence for and against them, but in terms of the belief system that informed the experience of believers and the influence it had their lives. This requires us to think of belief not only as an individual experience, but as a community experience shared by fellow participants in rituals or revelations. This approach emphasizes the agency of believers and the practical quality of belief.
However, the "irreducible given" of religious experience of which Kselman writes does not presume some religious sentiment or psychic faculty or bit of DNA present in all humans. It is, as William James has written, an empirically knowable phenomenon to which we gain access on the basis of experience alone. As James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience: "The roots of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians." (p. 34). What recent historians have added to James' formula is the importance of historical contingency. Every religious experience is shaped in and through the cultural materials available to the believer and his or her community or kin. As a result, the best recent scholarship on religion makes an effort to closely observe the local roots of religious practice. One of the great pioneers of this kind of study, William A. Christian, has written that despite the efforts of the Roman papacy to centralize dogma and ritual, the history of Catholicism reveals numerous variations influenced by cultural hybridization, which were often tolerated by local clergy. Leaving aside for the moment the question of their authenticity, we should therefore expect to find some of the best examples of religious experiences in local religious cultures operating outside the normal jurisdictions of the official Church. It happens that the Marian apparitions that were so commonplace at the high point of 19th and early 20th century anti-clericalism have been fruitful sites for conducting such searches.
A recent book on the shrine at Lourdes by the Oxford historian Ruth Harris, entitled Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age, is one of the most successful of these recent studies. Harris begins her book with a detailed account of peasant beliefs in the French Pyrenees, the tradition of local healing shrines, and popular belief in fairies, many of which may even have preceded the Christianization of the region. The peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous was 14 years old in 1858 when she had a vision in a grotto on the outskirts of Lourdes. As she described it, her vision of the "virgin" was a young girl dressed in white, who gestured and spoke to her while she was in a trance-like state, a condition eventually witnessed by hundreds of observers. Instructed by the apparition to scratch down into the earth, Bernadette opened up a small spring and eagerly drank the muddy water. It was taken as a sign by onlookers that the virgin had revealed a healing spring of the sort long visited by local people, and the first "cures" took place shortly thereafter.
The pilgrimages to the shrine that followed were fully in keeping with the healing and devotional practices of Pyrenean religious culture; as Harris points out, it was at first the water rather than divine intercession that was believed to be the cause of the cures. Peasants ordinarily avoided contact with water, believing that dirt provided a natural envelope for the body that protected it from harm. In the healing experience, it was believed that with the envelope of dirt removed in the waters of the grotto, the material body was opened up to spiritual influences, permitting the virgin to work her miracle of healing. The cure narratives that circulated in the first years of the shrine were patterned closely on those that could still be found in the local devotional literature harking back to early modern times. In time, however, as crowds of the infirm and hopeless cases descended on Lourdes, a precise documentation arose, the aim of which was to verify the "true" miracles that occurred there. Tens of thousands of cure narratives have been deposited at the shrine written by sufferers and their families, which provide insight into the nature of their experience. As Harris learned, most scholars, including Catholic historians, have mostly looked at these materials for documentation of the handful of cures the official medical board has certified as "miraculous"-defined as inexplicable by any known natural cause. These examinations were of such a rigorous and persistent nature that the vast majority of sufferers decided to forego them.
The real story, she says, lies in the narratives of pain, renunciation, and spiritual preparation of sufferers before they arrived at Lourdes, the emphasis on the moral and spiritual transformation they experienced there, the validation in the act of pilgrimage of their own piety, and the corroborative testimony of their friends and kin, whose ministrations to the sufferer wrought changes in them as well. Were there cures? Not many claimed complete cures, (of the 60 or so miracles affirmed by the church, many were partial or temporary), but many pilgrims testified to feeling improved in mind and body, convinced they had been touched by divine grace, and reaffirmed in their faith.
The Harvard historian David Blackbourne has written about another famous shrine of the era, Marpingen in the Catholic West of Germany shortly after unification and just at the outset of Bismarck's war against the Catholic Church. The virgin appeared to some small village children in 1876 and, like Lourdes, Marpingen quickly became a destination for individuals and families for whom medical science had no answers. As Harris found for Lourdes, the journey itself constituted a kind of spiritual experience for sufferers. Blackbourne writes, "As Victor Turner and Iso Baumer have suggested, journeys of this kind create meanings for those who make them. It was widely believed that any sacrifice or discomfort entailed by the pilgrimage was itself a source of blessings and grace for others-the living and the poor souls in purgatory. The journey also tended to create a heightened sense of community among pilgrims as they stream toward their common goal. Many Marpingen pilgrims indicate how arrival at the blessed place released spiritual longings and an almost painful sense of rapture." As at Lourdes, "true" cures were few amongst the tens of thousands who visited before 1900, but many more claimed relief from pain and from the sense of hopelessness of their condition.
In some ways the most impressive piece of scholarship on these phenomena is a book entitled Visionaries by William A. Christian on the Spanish apparition at Ezkioga in Spain's Basque country in 1931. Christian is the author of an earlier book on apparitions in early modern Spain (1981), which has been a model for many of these new histories of religion. Christian tracked down some of the survivors of this extraordinary period of effervescence in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees and consulted all the eyewitness accounts and memoirs. As with the other major apparitions, the virgin appeared first to two small children at a time of crisis. The Basque separatist movement was just beginning, times were hard for local farmers, and only the day before the first apparition, a new Republican and anti-clerical government had been elected in Madrid. The site eventually produced numerous trance-like visions by other children and women who assumed a characteristic posture, glazed eyes tilted heavenward. Some prayed for the virgin to save the Basques, others to save Spain, but it appears that most people sought the virgin's counsel for personal reasons: to know of their salvation or the fate of a beloved relative (heaven, hell or purgatory), to pray for the conversion of a husband or son, or to catch a glimpse of the future for themselves or their community. Christian has identified many of the folk beliefs and even witchcraft symbols that were incorporated into the visionaries' devotions, but he credits the "hunger for the divine" and contact with the beyond as the best explanation for these phenomena. He shows how they stimulated new forms of popular spirituality such as hymns, new devotional rituals, and a network of confraternities devoted to the virgin of Ezkioga.
In Christian's view, visions like those that took place for a few years at Ezkioga were an effort by common people to seek divine intercession in their affairs when their needs were not being met either by the official Church or by the anti-clerical regime then in place. He dismisses anti-clerical interpretations of the visions as an official Catholic plot, but he is also critical the Church's politically motivated refusal to embrace the visionaries and acknowledge the power of popular piety. In short, as other students of Marian apparitions seem to think, modern apparitions are a kind of protest against secularization and a cry for a personal and more intimate kind of mediation with the divine than could be supplied by Sunday mass celebrated by the local priest. Though they are not, ultimately, sui generis phenomena because they take the form of a principal Catholic icon, their many syncretic elements are perfectly consistent with the history of Catholicism as local practice. Indeed, the sheer physicality of the visionaries' behavior makes them direct descendants of the sensuality of the baroque religious practices of early modern Catholicism, perhaps especially as these played out in the colonial world, as my colleague Nicole Van Germeten has shown in her study of Afro-Mexican confraternities. As Nicole and several other scholars have argued, devotional raptures are sought for their transformational power, in which individuals and groups may experience through suffering, piety and ritual repetition, as Richard D.E. Burton has written "the foundations of sacrifice enacted on Calvary."
The other insight that these scholars of popular piety bring to their work is their challenge to our classical conceptions of secularization. The secularizing aspects of modernization are not incompatible with spirituality or the miraculous; on the contrary, they may stimulate religious and spiritual revivals, especially when, as we have seen, the moral pretensions of anti-clerical movements have been greatest. Secularization and religiosity are not players in a zero-sum game. The material and technical aspects of "progress" may simply prompt those so inclined to embrace the magical or the spiritual dimension of life.
This turns out to be true even of those most committed to reason and science. As recent scholars have argued, it was France, the heartland of anti-clericalism, which produced the greatest array of spiritist and occult movements seeking new ways of communicating with the divine. Reincarnation was a popular theme, adopted by the followers of Allan Kardec and a branch of Freemasonry called the "Martinists". Both groups developed techniques and employed mediums for communicating with the next dimension, exactly like the Catholic visionaries for whom they had such open contempt. Both invented rituals, according to the authors of these studies, Lynn Sharp and David Harvey, resembling those of the Catholic Church, blessing and sanctifying the faithful, and both were squarely in favor of modernity, though of a kind that permitted some kind of spiritual redemption. As Allen Kardec was fond of saying: "Birth, death, rebirth, and progress without end, this is the law." My favorite secular sect is the subject of a new book by Jennifer Hecht on atheist anthropologists in 19th c France. A group of irreligious anthropologists and medical doctors founded a Society for Mutual Autopsy in the 1870s dedicated to examining the brains of deceased members in the cause of science, and commemorating them in ceremonies modeled on Catholic funerals. The obituary written for one of the group's founders, Charles Letourneau, quotes Letourneau's own words to illuminate the group's conception of the meaning of life: "This perspective of unlimited progress is the modern faith: and to our advantage this new belief replaces the mirage of a lost paradise; it sustains and consoles us in our public and private trials. Encouraged by it, we regard ourselves as laborers in an always unfinished work, but a work to which all men great and small, obscure and celebrated, can and may lend their hands. As cruel as may be the miseries, injustices, and calamities of the present, we may regard them as mere accidents in the long voyage of humanity toward a better life and accept them with patience, all the while seeking remedies."
Recent historians of religion have taken such avowals of secular faith seriously. Caroline Ford writes about the "laic faith" that drove the anti-clerical "crusades" in France, and my colleague Bill Husband, who has written a book on the Soviet effort to extirpate religion in the 1920s and 30s, has described the atheism of the activists as a "belief system." When Bertrand Russell returned to England after a visit to Russia in 1919, he wrote about the new "Bolshevik religion," which he did not mean as a compliment. It is not uncommon for us to see parallels between religious and political movements or religion and patriotism, or to see individual zeal of any kind as religious in nature. But so far professional historians have not gone so far as to ascribe to the "sacred" the quotidian experiences of community, fellowship, love of nature, or patriotism. The work I have just reviewed defines religious experience rather narrowly as the effort to find meaning and direction in life through the invocation and intercession of the divine. In any case, my answer to the question with which I began this lecture is a qualified yes. The best recent historians are respectful of religion and evince empathy for the religious without surrendering the detachment that allows them to understand the social and cultural origins of religious experience. In the tradition of William James they consider the authenticity of religious testimonials to be a matter of personal experience and are content to explain them in context. David Blackbourne even warns against "disdaining too much those who were themselves disdainful" of religion, and to "enter generously" into "both mentalities." In our post-modern and confessional manner, most recent authors feel obliged to add something about the nature of their own beliefs. Ruth Harris, the historian of Lourdes, a secular Jewish woman whose parents live in Israel, bathed in the grottos of Lourdes to experience the shock of the water and commune with pilgrims, but reports she was not converted by the experience. Tom Kselman, the Notre Dame historian of popular religion in France, writes that he does not share the views of the people he writes about. William Christian, whose empathy with his rural visionaries seems unbounded, bluntly disavows sharing their beliefs. Stephen Prothero and Richard Fox, the authors of two recent histories of Jesus in America claim to write for "believers and non-believers alike," and Fox, for his part, writes of his Catholic childhood with affection but makes no claims for his present convictions. Finally, Robert Orsi, who spoke in the Horning series a number of years ago and who is a distinguished historian and student of Catholic devotionalism, tells a story about himself in the introduction to his book on women's devotion to St. Jude, the Patron Saint of lost causes. Orsi was in an airport holding pattern and feared missing an important meeting. He whispered, "St. Jude, I need to land in New York-please," at which point the Captain came on to announce the landing. As Orsi writes, "I am not a devout, but I promised to tell this story at the time, and here it is. I would still say to the women who asked me that I do not believe in St. Jude. But what's belief got to do with it?"
Without leaping to the conclusion that non-believers are the best historians of religion, though I am sorely tempted to do so, or declaring that believers should be disqualified from writing the history of (their own) religion, I have noticed in my superficial survey two qualities in the practitioners who are most highly regarded by their peers. First, is an empathy with the devout that does not condescend. This is hard to come by, but the number of declarations I read in book acknowledgments of love and respect to devout parents by non-devout children suggests to me that a happy and loving religious childhood and the desire not to give offense to kith and kin is a key ingredient. Second, is personal integrity, which may be rarer still. Robert Orsi promised to confess his slightly embarrassing little prayer to St. Jude, and he did, though he must have been imagining the smiles of his non-devout friends as he did so. I have developed a healthy respect for many of the historians whose work I have read for this lecture. I don't have a shred of religiosity myself, unless worship of Franz Schubert and Julia Child is a form of religion, but I recommend the fascinating books I have mentioned to believers and unbelievers alike.