In 1922, George Freeman Bragg, rector of an Episcopal Church in Baltimore, published a volume detailing the work of his fellow church members from the colonial era to the present. He painstakingly recorded baptisms, catechists, church growth, church debates, social outreach, and listed prominent leaders in the movement. His work was, in many respects, unremarkable, one of many garden-variety “church histories” that still line the shelves of seminaries and colleges around the country. Their production reminds us of an era of abundant confidence in the efficacy of religious institutions to shape society, and of histories to mold the future of Christian communities.

But Bragg's church history had a distinctive spin. Bragg was an African American. His volume traced the early baptisms of slaves within the church through the era of growing denominational divisions among black and white Christians. He did not obscure the many challenges brought about by racial divisions, and he objected strenuously to the measures taken by whites to exercise “control” over black church members. But in speaking of the notorious slave galleries, he fully accepted their beneficial effects: “the fact is the experiment proved a complete success; for, out of the slave gallery came enlightenment, conversions, and Negro churches.”Footnote ¹ Bragg's narrative thereby interlaced triumphant institutional growth with family separation, social exclusion, and an ever-present threat of violence.

These words, and this volume, are difficult to read, much less to understand. They raise so many questions for his successors in a field we still call “church history.” Many of us utter the term with considerable ambivalence. Others avoid using the category altogether, preferring “history of Christianity” as a description of their work. And still others employ “religion” as a more expansive category of analysis. For many scholars and readers today, Bragg's writing bespeaks an era of misplaced faith in the power of institutions, and downplays the racist character of nineteenth-century mainline Protestantism. I myself have struggled intellectually with these African American Christians over the last decade or so, particularly those like Bragg. He remained fiercely loyal to a church dominated by whites who consistently marginalized African American communicants, and who refused black members equal status. And many others received equally discriminatory treatment. Bragg was not the only black Christian church member who persevered in what had to have been enormously frustrating circumstances: Richard Allen, the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1816, deftly steered a course in which he acknowledged the blessings of Methodist church traditions, on the one hand, while simultaneously fighting against white members who tried to keep black church members “in their place.” But Allen also took great pains to emphasize the aid he received from white Christians in the founding of his church and the apostolic blessings that had been conferred through John Wesley's followers. He did not repudiate church traditions or history; in fact, he seemed to relish the implementation of regulatory structures. The first published volume from the newly formed AME Church in 1817 was a manual of doctrines and discipline—one that hewed very closely to the manuals used within predominantly white Methodist churches of the day.

Now, we might venture some ready explanations for African American membership in Protestant churches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and many scholars have done so: typically, they attribute the desire for membership to political advantage, economic gain, or the securing of a certain kind of social status available through church life. These are the kinds of answers that historians today seek, explanations that conceive of church membership as a process of claiming particular identities, be they racial, gendered, or religious, as well as material advantages. All of these factors are certainly significant. But none completely makes sense of the inordinate desire of many blacks a century or more ago not just to join Christian churches (note that I am distinguishing “becoming Christian” from “joining churches,” as my focus is on the question of institutional affiliation), but to actively relish the meticulous cataloguing, recording, and tracing of collective progression. If African Americans had merely sought political advantage, they would have been better off joining forces with other African American Christians rather than remaining ecclesiastically separate. Indeed, the precursors to the first African churches were African mutual aid societies, without creed or doctrinal status. These groups helped support widows, paid for burials, and provided basic economic security for free blacks who otherwise would have fallen on the decidedly unfriendly mercies of local white officials. But African American leaders fairly swiftly moved to ecclesiastical models—to churches—as a preferred mode of organizing socially, even as they differed among themselves significantly (and still do) about the correct form that these should take. One might also venture that church affiliation brought economic gain or at least a movement out of the lower echelons of a racially divided society. But there were certainly ways to move up without subjecting oneself to an ecclesiastical glass ceiling and the frequent indignities blacks suffered at the hands of white Christian leaders. As for valuing church leadership as a way of assimilating into an American civic culture, it surely was as clear to Bragg or Allen as it is to us that racial assimilation would not come about primarily through membership in biracial religious organizations. Jim Crow held his ground on Sunday mornings. African American leaders also recognized that there was much of their awareness of themselves as descendants of Africa to be lost in that transaction. In sum, none of these instrumental or material reasons can adequately explain the overwhelming importance of “church” to African Americans.

What is it, then, about the concept of church? Clearly, churches—including the antiquated intricacies of denominations—mattered to nineteenth century African Americans and to others whose voices are now only a distant whisper in our own religious settings. The black Baptist minister W. H. Tilman explained in 1888 that Baptist history was “written in blood,” indicating that something far beyond political expediency was at stake. Church was, for many African Americans, material evidence of a community that connected them to the dead, that anchored their activities in the present, and that pointed them toward a different kind of future.Footnote ²

These observations from my scholarship strike me as particularly timely as we peer into our own professional future. What do we as a professional organization in 2013 have to do with the concept of “church”? Obviously, many—but not all of us—have ties of various sorts to specific religious communities. This is not what I have in mind. Instead, I would like to explore the intellectual salience of church as a category of analysis in a moment when the role of institutionalized Christianity in our profession, and in U.S. society of which most of us are a part, is changing dramatically. I would submit that, rather than opening up our historical explorations to a brave new world of cultural analysis, our own concepts of individual identities and selfhood as the preeminent concerns of religious subjects block us from—dare I say it—recognizing the profound ecclesiastical pleasures and collective commitments of historical agents. We live in a world in which being “spiritual but not religious” makes far more sense to our students and readers than does the notion of the church being “written in blood.” And this conceptual shift is reflected in our own professional organization: some twenty years ago, and on several occasions since then, the American Society of Church History [ASCH] has debated whether to change the name of the organization to something other than “Church History,” a discussion stemming from a decided discomfort with that designation. In what was something of a compromise, it was decided instead to add a subtitle to the journal to clarify the breadth of our concerns to encompass “Studies in Christianity and Culture.”

I am fascinated by this elision of “Christianity and culture” with the idea of “church.” I am intrigued in part by how it speaks directly to our understanding of the “church” in the current moment and of our relationship as historians to the dead, with whom we must always continue to speak. And I will say right up front that I approach this as someone who is thoroughly committed to broadening our understandings of the history of Christian life and practice outside of institutions, and exploring the many nooks and crannies in which we find evidence of religious experience. Ever since I joined the ASCH over twenty years ago, I have chafed under the ecclesiastical collar of our legacy, of “church history” as a helpful way to think about what I do. It all seemed so narrow, and so passé. I consider myself a cultural historian, a historian of religion, but very rarely, if ever, have I embraced the identity of church historian. In this, I do not think I am alone. I would dare to guess that very few doctoral students in the United States these days enthusiastically affirm that designation.

But because of my mental conversations with George Bragg, Richard Allen, and many others who lived prior to the mid-twentieth century, I cannot avoid the nagging feeling that since the church and church history mattered for them, I must take it seriously and understand it. Like it or not, there is a staying power to the notion of church history. Recognizing what it has been can only help us better understand our past, and, perhaps, better understand ourselves as scholars in the process. As someone who finds myself constantly humbled by the lessons I learn from the past, I think it is always advisable to tackle the places of silence, to explore the areas in which scholars today have grown tone deaf or disinterested or just plain bored. It is in that stillness that we may find the most acute insights into our own blind spots. As the novelist and critic Marilynne Robinson wrote, “history is a little forgiving. We need only be ready to put aside what we think we know, and it will start to speak to us again.”Footnote ³

I take as my cue for this exploration the insights of the historian C. Vann Woodward, whose work on the American South inspired my title. Woodward, the child of Arkansas Methodists, came of age in the 1930s. During his storied career he published many marvelous meditations on the discontinuities of life in the American South. His most famous collection of essays, The Burden of Southern History, was published in 1960. In that work he tried to come to grips with all that he loved and hated about the South; never one to press historical contradictions into a false homogeneity, Woodward laid out fully the ironies of southern life in a moment of rapid changes wrought by the civil rights movement, the waning of African American out-migration, the growing presence of industrialization, and the dissipation of the southern agrarian economy. Woodward saw in this moment a double threat: on the one hand, the specter of giving in to the worst impulses of violence and exploitation that had always been present in the region, and on the other, the “threat of becoming ‘indistinguishable’” from other localities. He expressed the deep ambivalence felt by many southerners about the transformations occurring—an uneasiness felt even among people who had not necessarily liked what had come before.Footnote ⁴

Although Woodward did not couch his critique in a theological register, his work represented an explicit homage to Reinhold Niebuhr's political realism and invocation of the “irony” of American history. Deeply affected by the neo-orthodox theologian's assertion that “power cannot be wielded without guilt,” Woodward made much use of the illusions of innocence and virtue and what he termed the “ironic perils” of “overweening power and overweening virtue” to frame his moral sensibilities about the South. He called for a realistic assessment of the good that institutions and communities can do, rather than a broad scale flight from all organizations as hopelessly flawed. As Woodward concluded, the United States “desperately needs criticism from historians of her own who can penetrate the legend without destroying the ideal, who can dispel the illusion of pretended virtue without denying the genuine virtues.”Footnote ⁵

It seems to me that we are facing a similarly transitional moment with respect to the notion of the Christian Church. Surely, the cultural flight from religious institutions, be it in the form of principled non-affiliation, or an assertion of spirituality without religion, reflects at some level a rejection of an organizational form that is seen increasingly as impure and hopelessly flawed. The move away from institutional history in our intellectual endeavors mirrors that broader disillusionment. And yet, we speak to and for historical subjects who have staked their lives on those very organizations. How is it, then, that we can acknowledge the burdens of church history while preserving those elements that seem important? Can we penetrate the legend without casting off the category, or at least recognize irony in our own movements away from certain conceptual formations? What I propose to do in the time remaining is to first diagnose the problem of the burdens of church history in our time, and then suggest what we may be in danger of losing as we flee those ecclesiastical constraints. In doing so, I hope to sustain a creative tension between our own organization as a society and the Christian social lives that we study, because they are, I would submit, whether we like it or not, inevitably connected.

I begin by acknowledging that there are very good reasons why recent generations of scholars have moved away from church history as a category of analysis. First, the constituency and goals of our small corner of the academy have changed dramatically over the past several decades. Through the 1960s, the ASCH constituted what Hans Hillerbrand described as a “carefully defined universe.” Early members were nominated and voted into membership individually. The journal's board of editors was all male, and overwhelmingly white and Protestant. The organization was self-consciously U.S. centered. Many members were themselves clergy working as pastors, and many more taught at Protestant seminaries. In an important sense, the goal of the organization was to work toward Christian ecumenical unity from a liberal Protestant foundation. Thus, Christian service in a social gospel vein lay at the heart of the historical enterprise. And practically speaking, the society and the journal assumed the form of a congregation, faithfully recording and marking gains and losses in membership, memorializing departed members, and taking a strong interest in the careers of participants.Footnote ⁶

The close-knit nature of personal and professional bonds among members, one of the greatest strengths of the society, is also what made demographic changes beginning in the 1970s so challenging. As religious studies programs in secular settings became more prominent, and as women and minorities entered the guild in increasing numbers, the mission of the society as well as the relationships among its members shifted. Diversity of all sorts meant that defining common objects of inquiry became more challenging. While it was possible for a presidential address in the 1950s or even the early 1960s to invoke some fairly clearly defined common goals among members, and to recognize the methods and approaches of the scholarship of others, these taken-for-granted qualities increasingly were challenged by members with different and legitimate concerns—about issues of gender, sexuality, racial difference, and theological apples that fell much further away from the Protestant tree. Even those seminaries and divinity schools that at one time had the closest of ties to particular denominations increasingly were populated by faculty who held multiple, limited, or even no attachments to actual church communities. In this process, our own institutional affiliations have, in many cases, diminished to the point where we see ourselves as free agents in a professional world that is defined less by collective belonging than by individual career paths.

Let me emphasize that I am not tracing a narrative of the declension of purity or of the triumph of any particular kind of pluralism. I am describing the inevitable coalescence and dissolution of norms, values, and objectives that are the stuff of cultural change. Our own professional vantages encourage us to see the worlds of our historical subjects very differently; as our own scholarly community changed dramatically, so our object of study also shifted. Of course, it must also be remembered that any notion of what the church was, and what it ought to be doing, has never been stable. Wilhelm Pauck of the University of Chicago, writing in the journal in 1952, surveyed the broad and varied ways in which the Christian “church” had been defined over the centuries. While asserting that it was impossible to be Christian “apart from the social reality of the ‘church,’” he described the many ways that “church” had been theorized from the time of the earliest Christian communities. Perhaps most revealing are the insights he provided into the importance of religious institutional life in the early 1950s. He claimed that contemporary Protestants, in speaking about their religious lives, “stress the duties which they must fulfill as members of the ‘church.’” Pauck attributed this revived interest in the Christian Church to a post-war recognition of the many other competing organizations to which they were exposed, including Communism and Roman Catholicism. He hoped that his historical survey would provide options for modern Protestants as they re-thought the very definition of the church.Footnote ⁷

If social forms and demographics were challenging the church as a central category of analysis by religious historians, so, too, were newer theories of history. Henry Bowden explained that the first iteration of the ASCH disbanded in 1896 because its overt theological slant became an embarrassment to many of the members, scholars who preferred the more scientific methods of history that were coming into vogue at the time.Footnote ⁸ It might be more accurate to point out that the understanding of “church history” as a narrative of the movement of divine will in the natural world has shifted gradually over the last century. No one can gainsay the significance of first social history, then various types of cultural analysis, in turning the focus of religious history toward the life of the laity and the myriad practices of Christian life that comprise religious experience. In moving away from an older model of providential history these developments have, as Amanda Porterfield explained, “enabled many advances, opening windows, removing blinders, and abetting understanding of the forces Christianity has exerted within historical events.”Footnote ⁹ No doubt all of these things are true. It is also the case that they have taken our work out of the church, and certainly have placed us at a far remove from the post-World War II focus on institutional life of which Wilhelm Pauck spoke.

Our community of scholars is also embedded in the broader contexts of a rapidly shifting understanding of religious life, and we face the expectations and assumptions of those groups of students and others to whom our scholarship must speak. All around us we see evidence of a flight from anything smacking of “church.” Evangelical congregations and emergent churches seeking new members among the non-affiliated have taken to meeting in coffee houses, warehouses, movie theaters, and art galleries to avoid the perceived taint of traditional church structures. Some have dropped the words “church” and “church service” altogether, instead adopting the apparently less fraught phrases “spiritual communities” or “gatherings.” Some of the reasons for this are economic: clearly it is less risky and more sustainable to rent or borrow space than to assume a massive mortgage to finance a large suburban campus. But the change of nomenclature and the attitude of church leaders, who speak of the need to be entrepreneurial and avant-garde in their approach, suggests that the declining interest in what we know as traditional organized religion runs much deeper.Footnote ¹⁰ As scholars, we may see ourselves standing above this fray, but surely it shapes the ways that we relate to our students and to broader audiences for our scholarship. Like parish clergy, we also have to reach out with our work, and the expectations and concerns of our audiences do, in some measures at least, shape the way we structure our scholarship. Much as we might like to ignore it, our intellectual projects are implicated in this flight from organized religious life.

So if this is where we now stand, and if we know well the intellectual gains made in our transformed circumstances, what are the potential losses? To take Woodward's (and Niebuhr's) caution seriously we must pause long enough to reflect on what is left behind in this flight from the church as an institution. As historians, surely we know that every movement toward something perceived to be purer, deeper, or truer is fraught with the ironies of unintended consequences, ruptures, or silences. So it seems important to explore the casualties of this transition, and perhaps to reflect that historical awareness in our scholarship. Are there aspects of this rubric of church history that we still might wish to keep?

The most significant potential loss, to my mind, is 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. If we believe that we can free ourselves of the constraints of institutional churches we may become less attentive to the organizations that continue to exert control over our behaviors and even our patterns of thought—as scholars and as human beings. To anticipate my conclusions, I have three chief concerns about what might be lost in the abandonment of the category of church history: first, that it may lead us into a false sense of security that we are unfettered agents if only we can free ourselves from the brick and mortar structures like the church that hold us down; second, and related to the first, is that abandoning organized religion, both as scholars and as participants, leaves us more vulnerable and less cognizant of the powerful forces that shape our social lives; third, that 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. Among many things, churches have provided a critical vantage on those other social forces, and in abandoning them in the name of freedom or greater awareness we may be, in fact, fettering ourselves more completely and less consciously to the other ties that bind us.

The illusion of unlimited and unconstrained subjectivity is a very real side effect of the attempt to find a place for spirituality outside of the institutional church. In a recent piece on the phenomenon of the “spiritual but not religious,” Amy Hollywood discussed the false sense of personal freedom engendered by the association of religious experience with the individual subject. The idea that one can easily isolate religious experience, which is most often presumed to be something privately held by an individual (as in the notion of having a “personal relationship” to God or Jesus) from the rituals or institutions or social norms in which that experience is contained and shaped, is premised on a very modern, liberal concept of the self, one in which the ultimate goal is freedom from submission to all external authorities that might hinder personal autonomy. She wrote, “isn't the desire to constitute oneself as a spiritual person outside of the framework of larger communities illusory, in that we are always constituted in and through our interactions with others and their texts, practices, and traditions?” This illusion of finding a way out of any submission to external limiting factors on religious life prevents us from recognizing the many and varied ways through which we are constituted as subjects precisely through those practices, be they religious, spiritual, or none of the above.Footnote ¹¹

Ironically, our scholarly version of this flight from institutional authority is ingrained in the emergence of the ASCH as a Protestant organization, one which has historically, as the historian Robert Kingdon, president of the ASCH in 1980 characterized it, focused on the church more as an ideology and less as an institution. Inspired by the sincere desires of its founder Philip Schaff to build an ecumenical organization, the society focused its primary attention on the history of ideas. He assumed that the marks of the true church (that which binds all denominations together in a version of Protestant plurality) as codified by Reformation theologians were doctrinal, based on scripture and early church teachings. He rejected many of the overtly institutional marks of a church valorized by Roman Catholics. Kingdon called, in fact, for a return to a rather granular level study of local churches, disciplinary courts, and extra-ecclesiastical institutions such as hospitals and diplomatic efforts, in a recuperation of the material aspects of church life obscured by the prominence of intellectual history. Kingdon's call has been taken up in recent years in a fine range of microhistories and work on church discipline. But his basic concern, that many people see these elements as epiphenomenal to the true mission of the church, still exerts influence. One then has to wonder whether the flight from institutional identity altogether, as Leigh Schmidt's work on liberal spirituality suggests, is only the latest iteration of a process set in motion in the sixteenth century and accelerated in the very American formulation of denominational pluralism. In other words, the attempt to flee religious institutions, paradoxically, reflects a particular moment in church history.Footnote ¹²

What feels or looks like intellectual expansion, however, may in fact be a narrowing of our horizons. Seeing religious life as primarily a process of choosing individual identities also threatens to obscure the importance of religious institutions and doctrine in our studies. I wonder whether, paradoxically, the real problem is not that the subject of church history is becoming too expansive as it is diffused into rubrics of religion, spirituality, or culture, but that it is actually becoming overly constricted into analyses of politics and economics. Marilynne Robinson, ever an intellectual contrarian, mused on the flight of contemporary intellectuals from any sense that religion, art, music, or politics has anything to teach us, since we now seem only to understand these aspects of culture as motivated by the “consolidated power of a ruling elite” or some other show of force. She wrote, “economics, the great model among us now, indulges and deprives, builds and abandons, threatens and promises. Its imperium is manifest, irrefragable—as in fact it has been since antiquity. Yet suddenly we act as if the reality of economics were reality itself, the one Truth to which everything must refer.” Turning the tables on Marx and Foucault, Robinson labeled this a “very crude monism.” “We have reached a point where cosmology permits us to say that everything might in fact be made of nothing, so we cling desperately to the idea that something is real and necessary, and we have chosen, oddly enough, competition and market forces, taking refuge from the wild epic of cosmic ontogeny by hiding our head in a ledger.”Footnote ¹³

Another way to couch this is to suggest that religious institutions, for all else that they might do, provide a critical vantage on other sorts of loyalties and affiliations, as well as offering pleasures of their own. Take, for example, the move of evangelicals out of churches toward “gatherings” in art galleries or movie theaters. Leaders speak of these opportunities as a victory of “entrepreneurialism and innovation” over the outdated constraints of ecclesiastical control. National Community Church in Washington, D.C. recently has established as part of its outreach a coffeehouse, an eminently marketable concept that it is now in the process of franchising. Seeking to give a new generation of adherents (if that word even applies anymore—perhaps religious consumers is more apt) the intimacy and authenticity that it craves, these religious entrepreneurs have shed the church for a concept of community couched in aspirations of free market individualism. The “spiritual but not religious” Huffington Post blogger, B. J. Gallagher, explained her stance as a rejection of organized religion, which “inevitably degenerates into tussles over power, ego, and money,” in favor of a “Burger King spirituality—have it your way,” which apparently represents individuality and personal freedom. Yet there is no questioning of the economic and business models embraced in this transformation, or any apparent worries about the tussles over power, ego and money reflected in global capitalist fast food franchises. 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 ¹⁴

Political identities work in much the same way. National affiliation offers such powerful claims on our loyalties that it is easy to look right past it unless we have other social structures that stand as counter-models. C. Vann Woodward knew this well, since he wrote about regionalism at a time of intense nationalism; his assertions about southern history serve—in ways both positive and negative—as stark reminders of alternative modes of conceiving a political self. He knew that southern regionalism in the 1960s seemed a trifle hokey as intellectual fodder, unless one could see, as I am convinced he did, that it provided valuable lessons about nationalism. In like manner, church history these days may seem quaint, especially to younger historians. And there is no getting around the fact that in many times and places, churches have so closely allied themselves with nation-states that it is hard to see the light of day between the two. Bede's history of England, for example, is as much a case in nation building as it is a story of the church. The ASCH in its early years, in closely equating denominational pluralism with its identity as an American (and specifically, a U.S.) society, also wedded Protestantism with patriotism, as did the notion of the “nation with the soul a church,” a linking of Americanness with organized religion that served as a bulwark against godless others during the 1950s. But these episodes should not blind us to the extent to which church history can also shed light on the porousness of national borders, relativizing their salience by counterposing them with affiliations of theology, doctrine, and institutional purpose. As institutional alternatives to national governments, churches can offer traditions that complicate political claims, or at least give us a different sort of purchase on their meaning.

My point here 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. And it is a loss that threatens our ability to communicate with historical subjects, to hear the subtleties of their concerns and the pleasures they may have taken in the loss of self in something communal, something that we may even be losing the ability to name adequately. African American church life provides a superb case in point, because the words of leaders so chafe against a modern sense of what we want to find there. We want heroes, larger than life Christian church members who use the institution to boost a racial identity, or to help support economic growth within black communities, or to consolidate political gains in the face of oppression.Footnote ¹⁵

What we find in the archives, though, is so much richer and fuller and confounding than this. And sometimes, admittedly, it is tedious and legalistic, making it hard to fathom how anyone in their right mind would spend their time making rules and lists. An early draft of my recent book on African American race histories included a lengthy section of lists: these were lists of books compiled by African American ministers and church members, advertised in denominational journals, and reprinted in the backs of other books. This impulse to canonize among African Americans stretches back to the lists of the first black ministers drawn up by the black Methodist Daniel Coker in 1810. This impulse, as Jonathan Z. Smith would have it, regulated and disciplined literature into specific patterns relevant to race leaders eager to represent themselves and their brethren in particular ways. Such lists of books taught African American readers what it meant to construct a comprehensive view of the world through canonization and bibliographic incorporation. It is worth noting how many of these books, and other books cited frequently by the compilers of race history lists, are almost entirely unknown to readers of the twenty-first century. Aside from Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, Frances Harper, and a few other names that were rediscovered by scholars in the 1980s, most of these authors and their works have been forgotten by subsequent generations. But in 1900, black narrators were looking back, commemorating and assessing the state of their community. By this time, alongside histories of the ancient past, of African and Haitian lands, and of Christian and American legacies, narrators were building another layer of history by writing their own century of struggle into the story.

Sadly, an editor who wisely noted that people do not want to read a book that contains long lists of books chopped those lists right out of my early draft. Fair enough. But my purpose was not so much to marvel at the variety of authors put forward in any straightforward sense. It was to try to invoke that pleasure of canonization so clearly expressed in these practices. In the nineteenth century, African American Christians like George Bragg, with whom we began, used their churches to enfold themselves into traditions, lineages, disciplines, and sacred universes that made their own efforts seem small by comparison. Indeed, sometimes that personal insufficiency and lack of import seems to be precisely the point; 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.

This evening I have run the risk of juxtaposing two subjects we most often separate: the organizing of our own professional lives into communities such as the ASCH, and the study of religious organization by historical subjects. In doing so, especially at the moment of our birthday celebration of the society, is to provoke thought about this title that is our own professional legacy: church history. Like all legacies, it is a burden that many wish to jettison entirely. It is a bond that unites people in common purpose and friendship across generations. It is a continuing link to those we memorialize, celebrate, and mourn. It is all of these things, and it is never pure or uncomplicated in the effects it has on us.

One wonders, then, whether these reflections suggest ways that we can move forward. Is there another way to do “church history” in the twenty-first century? Some of these we already are doing, but it helps to name and list them:

1. 1. Church history must become even more self-consciously comparative and international, in order to shrink the theoretical purchase of the nation-state down to a manageable size. The study of Christian churches in other political and economic settings can be enormously instructive. We are moving this direction, but we have much further to go. There is no good reason, given our subject matter and the demographic realities of Christian dispersion, for the United States and Europe to so dominate our discussions of Christianity.

2. 2. I would like us to remain attentive to the leading edges of Christian experiences, and focus on the broad variety of traditions that comprise that lineage. We have specialized niches for this, and we have made inroads. For example, it is useful to have the study of Mormonism become a more central part of our object of study. But we must continue to push for attentiveness to a broader swath of organized Christian life—as well as greater mindfulness about the contingency of confessional borders that are continually constructed and revised. We also need clearer and more nuanced studies of the varying notions of self in community that make up organizations—including more self-consciousness of our own particular moment as contingent and not determinative of our object of study. I should add that this should not simply entail including more women, more non-Protestants, or more minorities into our accounts. It means leaving ourselves open to alternative understanding of what constitutes church history itself.

3. 3. Finally, I would like to see a more positive appreciation of the pleasures and pains that inevitably arise from life in community—including within our own set of scholars. Perhaps the main reason I have stuck it out here for many years is because of the kinship and connection, the common bonds I have found here. Recognizing the difference between this group and a 10,000 member organization (such as the American Academy of Religion or the American Historical Association) is important and useful—it humanizes this guild and has the potential to transform it from a constantly shifting assembly of scholarly free agents into a community that provides something intellectually richer and more enduring. I believe that we are a society with the soul of a church, a formulation that travels with considerable baggage but also abundant rewards. Fully exploiting this legacy means, I believe, being confident enough to engage in self-criticism, to invite differences, and to recognize where and why intellectual interests converge.

I would call us, then, to begin a conversation about what keeps us from pursuing these ends, so that the “church history” of this new century can be both creatively forward-looking and respectful of the lineages that have brought us here.