From the three historians of early Christianity whose lives and careers Elizabeth Clark discusses in The Fathers Refounded—Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case from the University of Chicago Divinity School—there breathes a palpable air of white, upper-middle-class liberal Protestant complacency and intellectual superiority. Modernists all, they know they are on the winning side of truth because they are confident that they are on the winning side of time. Summarizing McGiffert's distinction between ancient and contemporary Christianity, Clark writes: “Only in modernity, when God's immanence was championed, was the dualism between human and divine in Christ overcome.” “Christ, if he was human,” McGiffert believed, “must be divine, as all men are.”Footnote ³ McGiffert's historiography shimmers with Emersonian confidence and ebullience. In his assumption—his assertion—of “only in,” we hear the ringing sound of modernity's triumphant temporality.

As far as the three church historians were concerned, to make such comments about time was simply factual. This was, in McGiffert's phrase, “the historical element in Christianity,” by which he meant Christianity's empirical movement through time, free from the self-interested formulations of theologians.Footnote ⁴ The others meant this too. LaPiana condemned what he saw as Catholicism's disregard for historical study. As Clark explains, LaPiana critiqued the reigning Catholic historiography, which he encountered first hand as a seminarian in Rome, as being overly theological and hence utterly “static conception of Christianity.”Footnote ⁵ His position, instead, was that “the Church is the laboratory of truth in continuous action.”Footnote ⁶ LaPiana borrowed this phrase from Italian writer Antonio Foggazaro, whose novel, Il Santo, was the modernist counterpart to Giuseppe Mazzoni's traditionalist Catholic (and much, much more readable and compelling) I Promessi Sposi. Case defined Christianity itself as “the totality of the on-going historical movement.”Footnote ⁷ But as even these brief characterizations indicate, religious historiographical modernism was as much metaphysics as method (despite their avowals to the contrary). “Nothing is, everything becomes,” LaPiana wrote.Footnote ⁸ There seems to be a rule in play here: when theologians do theology, it is theology; when historians do theology, it is history.

It turns out, however, that the Emersonian confidence was running a bit thin in the early twentieth century, amid the changed social, racial, and economic circumstances of life in the United States (if Emersonian confidence were not, in fact, always shallower than it seemed). By walking her readers painstakingly toward her protagonist's historical and theological assumptions (they might have denied they had any theological assumptions, but Clark makes clear they did—as so many other scholars of religion, then and since, have done and do, and deny) via the pathways of their lives, Clark shows us that McGiffert, LaPiana, and Case were forever peering anxiously over the walls of their academic redoubts toward the threatening masses outside but coming closer and closer. The history of white liberal Protestant Christian historiography—in other words, of church history as a modern academic discipline in the United States—does not merely reflect, but was constituted by, a profound fear of the other, in particular, of working-class Catholics, African Americans, and evangelicals, and of their religious practices and imaginations. None of the three professors were interested in what has come to be called lived religion, in the ancient past or in the present. Rather, they tracked back and forth between ancient Christianity and their fears of contemporary working-class Christians, Black and white, and as they did so, they recreated each in their image of the other. “Christianity was largely a lower-class movement,” Clark writes of McGiffert's pedagogy, “the ‘superstitions, prejudices, and obscurantism’ of those classes found a home in Christianity, ‘like the Salvation Army and fundamentalists’ today.”Footnote ⁹ LaPiana followed the lead of his mentor Ernesto Buonaiuti in lamenting the degeneration among the masses of Catholic sacramental practices into “quasi-magical forms”Footnote ¹⁰ of the sort LaPiana might have seen among southern Italian immigrants in the streets of Boston's North End, had he ventured across the Charles River. Even Case, who directed his students toward the “spiritual energy expressing itself in all of life's activities”—a proto-Tillichian Christian existentialism—excoriated the premillennial evangelicals of his time as “peculiarly vicious.”Footnote ¹¹

Moreover, race was at the core of the modernist reconstruction of early Christianity, as it was to modernism generally. LaPiana was especially interested in “Africanness” and characterized Latin African Christians, Clark writes, as “impulsive, fickle, ambitious, aggressive, insincere . . . of vivid imagination . . . [and] bent toward sensual pleasures.”Footnote ¹² Theirs was, in LaPiana's words, a “temperament that made room for the supernatural and miraculous in life.”Footnote ¹³ McGiffert maintained that Saint Paul was confident in leaving newly founded churches to administer themselves because these early converts did not belong to “an alien or lower civilization,” as was the case, McGiffert averred, in the mission fields of his own times.Footnote ¹⁴ Such racist judgments take on added significance in relation to the violent imposition of “slavery by another name” on free African American men and women after the Great Betrayal of 1877, the spread of lynching as a device to discipline and punish African Americans in the very years the modernists were writing, and the beginnings of the migration of the children and grandchildren of freed slaves northwards, many of them to the new Black neighborhoods not far from the upper West Side, Hyde Park, and Cambridge. McGiffert's contemporaries used the same sort of language about African American Christians as he did about Africans, and for similar reasons.

It is too bad, I found myself musing after reading McGiffert's comment about lower civilizations, that the Union Theological Seminary professor never sat in on Franz Boas's anthropology seminars across the way at Columbia, where Boas taught from 1899 to 1945. If he had, he would surely have run into Boas's student, Zora Neale Hurston. McGiffert would have learned that Boas and his students were challenging the idea of a hierarchy of races; they offered other ways of thinking about race, culture, and religion. Or what if he had attended Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s sermons at Abyssinian Baptist on Christianity and racism?Footnote ¹⁵

But it is likely McGiffert would have remained unpersuaded. At stake in his historiography—as in LaPiana's and Case's, too—was not only the story of ancient Christianity but also a normative account of modern “religion” itself and of the distinction between good and bad “religion,” tolerable and intolerable “religion,” as well as an argument about the kind of “religion” the religion of the twentieth-century American nation was and ought to be. Good religion was a matter of the mind not the body, of reason not emotion. Good religion fit within the ambit of bourgeois respectability and manners. It was universal, not local (or “tribal”). Good religion was also optimistic about capitalism—oriented to the ameliorating work of social service but removed from class struggle. Despite its universalist aspirations, finally, good religion was inevitably nationalist in identification: Christianity was universal, but its American variant represented its highest and most perfect form. Determined to represent Christianity's essential nature as ethical rather than experiential and immanent rather than supernatural, the three white liberal Protestant professors of The Fathers Refounded rejected what they saw as the behavioral and imaginative excesses of Christians—ancient and contemporary, Black and white—and built this rejection right into their historiography and pedagogy.

The history of ancient Christianity taught in twentieth-century American liberal Protestant seminaries and divinity schools was developed not only in explicit engagement with the religious worlds of the contemporary Black and white working and lower classes, in other words, but as a safeguard against them. Case spoke explicitly of secular religious scholarship as a “weapon”Footnote ¹⁶ against dangerous religious others. Religious scholarship in elite divinity schools and the study of religion that developed out of it in subsequent years were assigned—and assumed—a disciplinary role in the public life of American religion, under the guise of an ostensibly nonmetaphysical, nontheological, positivist historicity.

The modernists were not wrong to be apprehensive about what was stirring on the American religious landscape, to be sure, as we have had ample opportunity to see in recent years, although their own racist assumptions blinded them to the worst of it. They were worried about fundamentalists and religious experience, less so, if at all, about lynching. But by offering the study of ancient Christianity, of Christian history broadly, and of religion itself as the academic medium for elaborating and enforcing a normative version of white American “religion,” they hampered the development of the critical, theoretical, and methodological tools for studying religions in the United States in all their polyvalence, ambiguity, contradictions, and violence. The Modernists contributed to stubbornly persistent racial, class, and experiential hierarchies in the public construction of “religion” and to the role this “religion” so construed plays in law. They also passed on to their students the expectation that scholars of religion were responsible for authorizing the good/bad religion distinction.

The full-throated support for the current deranged American political regime among most white evangelicals and middle-and-upper class Catholics presents itself to many as a mystery, but it ought not. To “make America great again” means to make it Christian in the way that first liberal and then conservative Protestant and Catholic church historians in the United States defined and authorized “Christianity,” “Christian history,” and “America” for most of the twentieth century. The Fathers Refounded sets us on the path of this genealogy. It is an extraordinary study not only of the historiography and teaching of ancient Christianity in twentieth-century America but of the intellectual, political, and legal fate of “religion” in the United States today and of ancient Christianity's entanglement in it.