Laurie Maffly-Kipp's insightful address about the perils and promise of church history concludes with an invitation “to begin a conversation” about how “the ‘church history’ of this new century can be both creatively forward-looking and respectful of the lineages that have brought us here.”Footnote ²⁷ I offer here some brief remarks on her address as a small contribution to that conversation.

At a certain level of abstraction, Maffly-Kipp's essay considers a conundrum historians in general must regularly confront: how should we incorporate new questions, perspectives, and theoretical frameworks that enhance our understanding of the past, without losing sight of established approaches and knowledge whose marginalization would diminish that understanding? Her address analyzes a good case in point, because of the many ways in which “church history” in the last half-century has become the “history of Christianity” within the “history of religion” through the influence of ideas drawn from sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines, as well as through the asking of new questions about race, class, gender and other issues in relationship to Christianity. That this expansion has brought real gains is something virtually all historians would acknowledge, but Maffly-Kipp fears it has also involved (largely unacknowledged) losses related to the displacement of the category “church” and the scholarly allergy to the term “church history.” Her essay calls attention to these losses and signals the abiding importance of institutions and socially constituted experience in combination with individual identities and agency. I completely sympathize with the thrust of her remarks, which might be even more strongly put. For although I regard myself as a historian of Christianity and would not describe myself as a “church historian” because of the term's confessional connotations, I no more think historians of Christianity should marginalize “church” as a category of analysis than I think historians of modern politics should marginalize “state.” Regardless of contemporary social trends or new scholarly questions, doing good history simply demands as much. Maffly-Kipp states that her point “is not normative as much as it is suggestive of the narrowing down of interpretive possibilities that may result from the loss of the rubric of the church,” but this seems to me unduly tentative given the commendable methodological implications of her essay.Footnote ²⁸

Perhaps because this piece was a presidential address for the American Society of Church History, Maffly-Kipp's diagnosis of “the burdens of church history in our time” devotes attention especially to this Society's institutional history.Footnote ²⁹ This involves a certain conflation between “church history as a category of analysis” in general and the particular, and arguably quite narrow and problematic, conception of “church” that was operative in church history as practiced by many members of the ASCH, and which since the 1970s has been largely rejected. The latter is far from coextensive with the former. Simply because the decidedly liberal protestant conception of church history previously assumed in the ASCH demonstrated its weakness is a fact logically unrelated to the general turn away from ecclesiastical institutions and collectively constituted experiences in the study of the history of Christianity. What was needed beginning in the 1970s was therefore not a rejection of the category as such, but a recognition of the need for a better conception of the category, historically sensitive to the full range of ways in which Christians, from the ancient world to the present, have in fact understood, experienced, and inhabited the church and churches. Yet as Maffly-Kipp suggests, this is largely not what happened. An inadequate notion of institutions cannot be corrected by jettisoning a concern with them in favor of the exploration of individual experiences and extra-institutional identities set within the assumptions of the liberationist narrative of Western modernity; it can only be fixed through a better understanding of institutions in combination with other scholarly concerns. Maffly-Kipp clearly understands this in her wariness about the general inattentiveness to institutions that can result from abandoning the category of church history. To my mind, however, for historians as historians, the “most significant potential loss” of abandoning the importance of churches in our scholarship is not that “downplaying the power of religious institutions may lull us with a false sense that institutions in general really do not matter or have any power over us,” important as this concern is more generally for us as human beings and citizens in the early twenty-first century.Footnote ³⁰ Rather, for historians as historians, the biggest problem with marginalizing or ignoring churches as institutions is that it leads to impoverished history.

In my opinion, here is where Maffly-Kipp hits the nail on the head: “A failure to acknowledge the power of religious institutions may lead to incomplete historical understandings of the behaviors of others, past and present, for whom religious agency was, or is, more integrally tied to the life of organized churches.”Footnote ³¹ Precisely because we want to understand past Christians' experiences, identity, and agency well, we must heed their inseparability from the churches to which they belonged. Particularized with respect to the African American Christians Maffly-Kipp studies, “Since the church and church history mattered for them, I must take it seriously and understand it.”Footnote ³² This key point cannot be stated more plainly. There is simply no getting around this, unless we choose to practice history with the guiding assumption that those who saw the world differently labored under a false consciousness that it is the historian's duty to unmask on the basis of her own beliefs. But if we want to understand rather than explain according to our own commitments the vast majority of Christians who have lived between the first century and the present, the church as a category is indispensable, regardless of how it was institutionalized, experienced, and conceptualized. In my own area of expertise, the Reformation era in Western Europe, trying to extrude ecclesiastical institutions and their influence from the lives of the Lutheran, Reformed Protestant, Roman Catholic, and (eventually) Anglican Christians baptized into them would be as foolhardy as pretending that ecclesiological disputes were unimportant in the division of Latin Christendom. Nor, with very few exceptions, did radical protestants in the Reformation era live apart from the church as they diversely understood it, or experience their Christianity independent of the way in which it structured their lives—Anabaptists staked their identity on and endured persecution for refusing one conception of church and embracing another, which differed dramatically from the churches of Roman Catholics and magisterial protestants. This does not mean sixteenth-century Christians lacked agency or individual experiences; it means rather that to construe these at the expense of the institutions they inhabited, and the social relationships fostered by those institutions, is to misconstrue that agency and those experiences. It produces sub-par history. “Seeing religious life as primarily a process of choosing individual identities,” Maffly-Kipp writes, “also threatens to obscure the importance of religious institutions and doctrine in our studies.”Footnote ³³ Amen.

Yet Maffly-Kipp's address manifests a certain ambivalence that strikes me as unwarranted. It seems to me that she conflates a practical concern about the accessibility of our scholarship with theoretical issues about how we ought to study religious people. Anyone who has ever taught in a university classroom, or who has published on the history of Christianity, knows that “we face the expectations and assumptions of those groups of students and others to whom our scholarship must speak.”Footnote ³⁴ Fair enough. But what should it say? At times Maffly-Kipp seems to imply that we should emphasize extra-institutional, individualistic religious experience in our scholarship because “all around us we see evidence of a flight from anything smacking of ‘church’.”Footnote ³⁵ (If she here applied her own exhortation that “church history must become even more self-consciously comparative and international,” she would presumably agree that this flight captures some but far from all of what is going on with Christians around the world, and indeed in the U.S.Footnote ³⁶) But surely any such imperative grates against the historian's task to take seriously and to understand what was important to our protagonists in the past, whether or not this happens to dovetail with the expectations of students and readers today. Indeed, one could argue the opposite: that it is precisely in reconstructing as well as possible the disruptive, unexpected alienness of past people's lives that historians perform their greatest service to the otherwise more cramped, taken-for-granted perspectives characteristic of anyone who has never seriously been confronted with the contingency of their assumptions and beliefs. Historians have no obligation to confirm present-day predilections. Maffly-Kipp recognizes this in framing her essay with reference to the depth of the puzzling, even frustrating, attachment of some of her African American Christian subjects to the churches that mistreated them—in sources that are “difficult to read, much less to understand”—but she also comes down where a historian serious about her work must, namely in the endeavor faithfully to understand and re-present her protagonists and how they understood themselves and their world: “The goal was to wrap oneself in a community across time and space, beyond national borders or economic arrangements, and to thereby efface individual particularities. That submission provided strength, value, joy, and even freedom.”Footnote ³⁷ In fact, it is exactly when the words of men and women in the past “so chafe against a modern sense of what we want to find there” that historians face a major challenge and have a great opportunity: to render the strange comprehensible as best they can while simultaneously interrogating the seeming inevitability of familiar assumptions.Footnote ³⁸ The alternative is to select the subjects and sources that serve our preferential values in the service of hagiographical history, whatever its informing commitments, peopled with “heroes, larger than life Christian church members,” whose words and actions in the past prefigure what we affirm as right and good in the present. This obtains whether the governing commitments of hagiographical history are religious or secular. Maffly-Kipp rightly resists and rejects this.

A few other points might be raised. It seems to me that the perceived inadequacies of traditional confessional history have been at least as important for the marginalization of “church history” as the flight of individuals from ecclesiastical institutions. Maffly-Kipp perhaps gestures toward this in her reference to a “mov[e] away from an older model of providential history,” but it warrants more emphasis as an explanation for how we have arrived at current scholarly self-understanding.Footnote ³⁹ In Roman Catholic history, for example—which because of its absence in Maffly-Kipp's address one might almost imagine lay outside the purview of “church history”—Eric Cochrane's classic essay in the Catholic Historical Review in 1975 at once summed up the waning of confessional Catholic “church” or “ecclesiastical history” and pointed a new way forward, one that was already being practiced in the 1970s.Footnote ⁴⁰ Generalizations are hazardous, but it seems to me that by comparison with liberal protestant church history, the institutional aspects of Roman Catholicism have been less neglected—even if they are no longer studied in the insular ways they once were—in subsequent scholarship that has integrated questions about individual experience, race, class, gender, sexuality, identity, and other issues into the study of Catholicism. That might well be because Catholic institutions—from parishes and confraternities through bishops and religious orders—are comparatively less avoidable even if one's principal interests lie in “the life of the laity and the myriad practices of Christian life that comprise religious experience.”Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, more attention to Roman Catholicism might have strengthened Maffly-Kipp's address in other ways as well. The emphasis on the “New Evangelization” that began with Pope John Paul II, for example, is resolutely ecclesial and has influenced millions of young people around the world in ways that run counter to any institutional flight from churches. And I would argue that modern Catholic social teaching since the papal encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) contravenes her claim that “visions of the unhindered free agent remain unremarked, inasmuch as there is no other model of the self in community by which one might critique these aims.”Footnote ⁴² The unanticipated election of Pope Francis two months after Maffly-Kipp delivered her address has only underscored this point.

Finally, with respect to Maffly-Kipp's concluding recommendations, I concur that church history should become more “self-consciously comparative and international” and less beholden to the nation-state—so long as the nation-state is not neglected, wherever it is important for doing church history well (as it is in a great deal of modern European church history).Footnote ⁴³ Else in marginalizing the nation-state we would make a mistake structurally analogous to that of scholars who have neglected the church as an institution in probing individual religious experiences. And although the phrase “the leading edges of Christian experiences” would need to be unpacked and its criteria justified, Maffly-Kipp's call for scholarship that combines the relationship between individuals and institutions in all their diverse, co-constitutive character across space and time seems to me just right. We are indebted to her for opening a conversation that I hope will continue.