On Posters Professional and Layman
As dangerous as cherry-picked quotes are, imposition of anachronistic narratives and categories on history are worse. These are useful for keeping history tidy for the benefit of later readers but more damaging than proof texting. At least cherry-picked quotes are actual quotes; raw historical data is better than narrative sophistry. Uncritical reliance on received stories derived from oversaturation of secondary literature does not provide nuance or clarity. “Historians” are trained into pompous guild-fealty. While they play the archivist on television, the real crux of their profession is, to paraphrase Roger Scruton, to churn out footnotes about footnotes, to demonstrate their worthiness to the guild.
No subject or period is more oversaturated than the American founding. Most of it is activist garbage, or adherence to the pieties and settled narratives of the profession. In other words, most scholarship is not true scholarship, but admission dues paid in print. Academia is about succession. Nothing is more tribal or more guarded. Regularly, guild members must demonstrate, or attempt to demonstrate, their membership through defense of guild status as special, closed, in possession of special expertise.
As Thomas Kidd has pointed out, for a long time, formal guild affiliations were necessary to gain access to historical materials. Primary sources, cost-prohibitive academic books and articles were all chained to university libraries. Academics could, therefore, make sweeping claims and corresponding narratives with near impunity. Source selection was under interrogated.
The internet changed that. The first generation of truly internet natives is in adulthood. The Zoomer layman can access anything he wants, and he might be neurotically conditioned to be better at research than the PhD candidate who hasn’t adapted. Sloppy mistakes or overreliance on received framing are harder to get away with. The internet now peer-reviews everything. This is destabilizing for the guild, as any democratization of communication and information always is. Optimally, the professionals will be chastened and do better work, conscious of the new mode of scrutiny and adaptive to new modes of investigation. But first, there will be resistance.
Guild members would be wise to simply ignore any contestation of their methods and results, but they won’t. They will obsess over the notion of being challenged because part of their creed is public authority as narrative directors. Historians only matter if they get public attention which they crave. You will notice that if any guild members receive public attention it is met with resistance. The case of Niall Ferguson is, I have always thought, illustrative. In his heyday as a public historian, most of his colleagues barely tried to veil their resentment. Intra-guild competition is aggressive. If an academic acquires public purchase the choice for other academic is binary: either ride the coattails or denigrate the work as insufficiently nuanced and technical. What cannot be tolerated, however, is for outsiders to usurp the role itself. That’s when the real reaction comes, especially if an outsider offers a real challenge.
There is plenty to criticize in the work of David Barton, for example. What is curious is how active guild resistance was to him. Entire books were written to defeat Barton’s books in part out of guild pride but also because Barton was in many ways directionally correct even if he overplayed his hand. What was uncomfortable about Barton’s work is that it met insider activism with outside activism. The Jefferson Lies met the Godless Constitution in the field. Both belong to the same genre and their relationship is symbiotic. Neither type of work is good—there are far more of the latter than the former—but that isn’t point. The point is the dynamics of the episode.
Barton was derided most often for his lack of credentials. He was not a trained historian. Even trained historians like Forrest MacDonald often received critiques in a similar vein because he did not adopt a particular school or strand or forefather in the faith, another requirement of the profession. Moreover, it should be said that assertion of credentials in the face of critique is the best indication that blood is in the water. Recitation of the virtues of professionals is another sign. This condescending reaction is not true of all guild members, of course, but it does characterize the general attitude.
A recent example of this tension in Protestant circles illustrates the point. When the guild is threatened the guild will even contradict its own work and, more likely, expose its own ignorance of said work all while tut-tutting upstarts. If you don’t want online drama to supply illustrations, then blame the trained historians. Here we are.
Last week on X, James Baird, a PCA pastor, quoted without attribution a line from James Hutson’s excellent 2003 collection of essays, Forgotten Features of the Founding, a book that ironically seems to have been forgotten. Hutson demonstrates that the now predominate “wall of separation” metaphor from Thomas Jefferson only recently triumphed in the American public (and jurisprudential) imagination.
“It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that Jefferson’s ‘wall’ formulation has had a short and controversial run of only fifty years compared to the two hundred and fifty years in which the nursing fathers metaphor dominated the church-state dialogue in the Anglo-American world.”
Hutson, the Yale trained long-time chief of manuscripts at the Library of Congress, is not in this instance delineating how the Isaiah 49:23 metaphor was employed, only that it dominated discussions of church-state relations and that alternative metaphors are of recent adoption. That a scriptural metaphor defined political discourse in early America is the least surprising thing given the research of Donald Lutz and Carl Richard.
It is worth recalling that Jefferson’s own intent and understanding of the wall metaphor is absent from contemporary employment of the idea whether from the Supreme Court or historians. So too is Jefferson’s own interpretation of the First Amendment vis a vis the presidency abandoned. It is not as if the wall metaphor has had stable meaning and, as other trained scholars have pointed out, it certainly wasn’t some reconstructed Roger Williams tradition that supplied meaning to said metaphor, mainly because hardly anyone cared about Williams in the eighteenth century. (Hutson affirms the same elsewhere.)
Whatever happened in the eighteenth century, Williams was not driving it from the grave. As William McLoughlin clarified, even the position of the separate Baptists of the eighteenth century was not captured by that of Williams, or James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for that matter. Isaac Backus, in fact, drew very little from Williams which makes sense given that Williams was a Baptist for all of four months in 1639. Indeed, Backus, like most of his fellow Massachusetts men, thought that Rogue Island was a disaster.
So, Baird simply quoted Hutson. The Hillsdale historian, Darryl Hart responded pithily that the quoted statement above was “not true for Baptists,” the implication being that Barid was not accurately accounting for the full historical context or story. Baird, in turn, retorted that the metaphor was, in fact, affirmed by Baptists in the eighteenth century but clarified that not everyone agreed on how much coercive force or government encouragement could be applied. Rather, agreement was found in an ecumenical paternalism imbedded in the metaphor itself.
Again, Baird is doing nothing more than transmitting Hutson. Hart’s rebuttal was to quote a Baptist pastor, Thomas Armitage from 1890, a century after the period in question to the effect that soul-liberty extended to civil toleration for any religion without preference to Christians. Then Baird and Hart traded quotes from Isaac Backus on the one hand advocating for some kind of church-state separation and on the other hand employing the nursing fathers metaphor.
Apart from the fact that Armitage is irrelevant to the scope of Hutson’s claims is the bad history of Armitage himself, since we’re on the subject. Armitage, who provides a dodgy trail of blood history, saw Rhode Island as the paragon of “soul freedom.” “The State of Rhode Island was founded by Baptists 240 years ago, and in that State no man has yet been persecuted for his religion by the civil power.” Curious. In the 1760s, Jews were still denied citizenship unless they converted to Christianity. Even constitutional changes in 1783 and 1798, the civil status of Jews remained ambiguous such that the entire Jewish population of Newport had emigrated by 1822. Until 1783, Roman Catholics could not vote or hold office. Rhode Island blue laws provided partial, mainly agricultural exemptions to Jews and Seventh-Day Christians but still maintained restrictions. Stores and trade activity were still shut down on Sundays without exception.
In any case, Armitage’s propaganda in the last decade of the nineteenth century demonstrates nothing. Somehow the exchange between Baird and Hart moved from whether the nursing fathers metaphor was predominant in the early republic to whether nineteenth century Baptists expressed pluralist sentiments. Goal posts are frequently mobile. Backus is, of course, more relevant to the question of whether eighteenth century Baptists traded in Isiah 49 language. Baird is right given that Backus did, in fact, employ the language. Here’s the quote: “[T]hat promise that kings shall become nursing fathers and queens nursing mothers, carries in its very nature an impartial care and tenderness for all their children.”
Jake Stone, a Baptist who tells us he is being trained in history at Southern Seminary, further tells us that Barid’s invocation of Backus in this context is “problematic” because Baird is trying to suggest that “Backus endorsed the Reformed concept of the civil magistrate as a nursing father,” meaning “to justify the civil magistrate’s role in the enforcement of Christianity.” He was tipped off because he knew Backus would never have approved such a thing. Backus is, you see, one of the good guys and Christian nationalists are simply trying to coopt history for their own nefarious ends. Real historians would never make this mistake. What we need is context and nuance. Fair enough but, of course, Baird’s only (correct) claim was that the metaphor was predominant in circulation at the time. Stone imputes motives to Baird not apparent from the exchange under review. But this is a chance to show the layman what historians of the guild are made of, so we press on.
Actually, contra Baird, Backus was “pushing back on those who used Isaiah 49:23 as justification for the magistrate to interfere with worship and to claim the right of the state funding the salary of the established clergy,” or so Stone tells us.
“The full context from Backus’ work demonstrates a reasoned-out position that the Standing Order of Massachusetts erroneously claimed the concept of kings and nursing fathers as a defense for their blending church and state… Baird thus presents Backus as arguing for the very opposite of what he actually wrote!”
The post, which is mainly a long quotation from Backus that is supposed to somehow be definitive, concludes with injunctions against historiographical shortcuts, imprecision, and mishandling of texts. The discipline must be saved! Basically, the lesson is, please do the reading before you make sweeping pronouncements. Quite right.
And yet, returning to the issue, it is clear that Backus still recognized and used the nursing fathers metaphor but simply thought it had been abused insofar as it was not being applied inclusively. Case closed. Baird is only calling on Backus to say what he said. He could’ve said more, much more. Baird’s betters would have liked it even less.
Noteworthy is that Backus, contra Hart, maintained that virtuous society was impossible absent true religion, and that government’s job was to remove impediments to the exercise of righteousness. All governments were to submit to the lordship of Christ. The only question was how one got there. More than a product of a stable Baptist tradition, Backus was the product of the Awakenings; his political theory was, basically, pietistic, revivalist adjustments to New England Puritanism.
More interesting is that while supposedly trained historians complain about imprecise textual interpretation lacking sufficient exegesis, we see claims like that Massachusetts blended church and state or that they interfered in worship. The Cambridge Platform would straightforwardly disagree. The question is what constituted separation and toleration. Or, for that matter, what constituted coercion, interference, and persecution. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, “we all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”
Without defining the nuanced linguistic contours and context of the debate, the historian shifts from neutral observer to partisan. Imprecision unto activism takes over. What is this but history weaponized for polemics? Trained historians ought not to do this. What is worse, cherry-picked quotes or block quotes? Or rather, how big does the cherry-picked quote need to be to evade critique, to pass over from the land of layman to that of professional? The record can be skewed in both long and short form, on both Substack and X. When it comes to political persuasions, a good rule of thumb is that the record will conform more to the intuitions of the layman than the preferences of the professional.
Jake Stone never mentions that Backus still thought that nations should be Christian and never objected to laws against profanity, blasphemy, gambling, theatergoing, and Sabbath breaking “which [he] accepted as within the domain of the government in its preservation of a Christian society.” Backus did not even object to the Massachusetts government ramming the Westminster Confession down the throats of school children. Clearly, there were limitations to Backus’ conception of “establishment” and to expressions of religious liberty.
McLoughlin noticed that Separate Baptists, including Backus, “showed little concern for other new dissenting groups that arose in New England after the Great Awakening; in the opinion of the Separate Baptists, the Universalists, Shakers, Sandemanians, and Methodists were merely corrupt and dangerous heretics, not allies against the establishment.” The primary goal of the Separate Baptists was to gain inclusion in the tax-exempt status that had been afforded to dissenters who existed before the Awakening. “Backus was positively vitriolic in his tracts attacking Universalists, Shakers, and Methodists, all of whom he considered as dangerous heretics to a Christian commonwealth.”
Backus’ proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution grounded religious liberty in “true religion” defined as “a voluntary obedience” to God’s “revealed will.” Backus famously envisioned a “sweet harmony” between church and state as the hallmark of a Christian government. Perhaps most surprising, Backus in favor of the Massachusetts religious oath for civil officers and further insisted that Roman Catholics should denounce the pope before they could hold office. Magistrates were well in their rights to declare days of fasting and prayer. McLoughlin even suggests that Backus was ambivalent at most about mandatory church attendance. In other words, Backus was what we’d call a Christian nationalist, perhaps a weak one for his own day but positively theocratic for our day (and to most Baptists who now invoke him). Backus’ opinions sound a lot like enforcement of Christianity, promotion of true religion even.
A more general point worth including: “Few nineteenth-century evangelicals saw any inconsistency in supporting laws to enforce the Protestant Sabbath or prohibition, laws against blasphemy and profanity, laws against lotteries, gambling, theatergoing, dancing, and, ultimately, against the teaching of evolution.” (As Philip Hamburger has shown, Baptists themselves, like most American Protestants, did not begin arguing for church-state separation until the 1840s in reaction to waves of Roman Catholic immigration.) Neither had Backus who, McLoughlin is confident, would have decried the Supreme Court cases of the 1960s that pulled the Bible and prayer out of schools. He is surely right given that Backus voted in 1791 to petition Congress to establish a federal commission to license Bible publications. Such dictates were a long way from mere tax voluntarism or “liberty of conscience” for “all Christians except Papists.” Backus never argued for the religious liberty of Papists, Turks, or Jews as Williams had. Once in a sermon, McLoughlin tells us, Backus praised his own grandfather who as a magistrate at Norwich, Massachusetts for sentencing two members of a seventh-day sect to public whipping for traveling on Sunday.
Again, religious liberty, for Backus, meant the end of compulsory taxation of orthodox Christian dissenters. The line between church and state was taxation, and Backus is closer to the Protestant ecumenism of Cotton Mather than the radical separatism of Roger Williams. In the founding era the points of contention were not whether religious liberty was good but whether a general religion tax and religious tests for office violated that good or not. In other words, what Backus wanted was for magistrates to be nursing fathers to all their children, as the quote above states, meaning all Christians. What he rejected was simply that nursing fathers should function, in Hutson’s words, as “paymaster of the church.”
Hutson recounts how, broadly speaking, Baptists and Presbyterians spearheaded this redefinition of the nursing father mostly because they “considered general assessment taxes as a Trojan horse which would lead to the reestablishment of the Church of England in the full plentitude of its pre-1776 power.” And yet, the dissenters worked within the metaphor rather than repudiate it. For late eighteenth-century Baptists and Presbyterians, nursing fathers were to be dedicated to “the church of our common Lord” without denominational preference, and with “an impartial care and tenderness for all their children.”
