The book is a linear narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of an distant, though important, trading post in western North Dakota. Fort Union was the longest serving fur trading post in the American West, but Matzko devotes just a chapter to describing the fort while it was actually in operation during the mid-19th century. The preponderance of the book is devoted to describing how an unlikely mixture of amateur historians, community boosters, and government largesse transformed the fort from ruins into a full-scale reconstruction.

Matzko’s story of Fort Union’s reconstruction will be of greatest interest to students of public history, especially those focusing on the debate over preservation versus reconstruction. Preservationists oppose rebuilding historic sites because the reconstructions are inevitably flawed, inhibit the imagination, and are expensive. Reconstructionists support rebuilding because reconstructed sites often attract more visitors, more funding, and allow them to indulge in romantic, firsthand “experiences” of the past. Matzko is sympathetic to the reconstructionists and so Reconstructing Fort Union is an ascension narrative.

Those who study the fur trade or the history of the West will also profit from Matzko’s work; the sixty pages of footnotes would be a useful resource for those interested in a deeper study of those topics or who are preparing for comprehensive exams.

Yet Reconstructing Fort Union received some negative reviews. As is wont in the profession, the book was most criticized on a topic that was almost incidental to the main thrust of the story. Historians who specialize in Native American history were not enamored of Matzko’s descriptions of the local Indian tribes. “The life of Indians along the upper Missouri was often nasty, brutish, and short” (14). Matzko went on to describe tribes ravaged by venereal disease and which were prone to cruelty. The ire of a reviewer for the Public Historian was raised by Matzko’s claim that native religions contained “few ethical or moral values” (16). The reviewer retaliated with the ultimate historian’s diss: Reconstructing Fort Union is a “whiggish narrative”!

Matzko may have anticipated such outrage when he wrote that although “the inhabitants of Fort Union were rarely exemplars of Western civilization, neither were the Indians who traded there gentle children of nature. Recent attempts to romanticize them [the Indians] reflect more the anomie and lost spirituality of contemporary society than nineteenth-century reality” (14).

Matzko’s story reflects poorly on both politically-correct attitudes and politically-trenchant Washington bureaucrats. National Park Service bureaucrats consistently resisted development of Fort Union. Ironically, the very thing that they most detested, a reconstruction, may have been in part a result of their unwillingness to compromise with local boosters and amateur historians earlier on.

In the final analysis, Reconstructing Fort Union is well written, well researched, and a contribution to several fields.

[Blogger's Note: The Native American history people attack targets on an equal opportunity basis. Accusations of "whiggishness" pale in comparison to the treatment of Andrew Isenberg over The Destruction of the Bison. The lefty Princeton professor had dared to write that "The rise of the nomadic, equestrian, bison-hunting Indian societies of the western plains was largely a response to [the] European ecological and economic incursion” (32). Furthermore, he noted that Indians were hunting bison at an unsustainable rate prior to the decimation by European hunters. Although he won a prestigious teaching award at Princeton, he was denied tenure.]

I’m sure Obama supporters will claim McCain started it first, and they may be right. But I believe this strategy will backfire big time.

Obama has been running on image, a fresh new way of engaging in politics. By getting down in the mud his campaign runs the risk of sullying that image. I even wonder if older voters, who already trend toward McCain, will be driven further into the Republican fold as Obama’s campaign mocks John McCain for his inability to email.

The new Obama ad campaign might run into further trouble if articles like this spread into the general conciousness. McCain can’t type because of his war injuries in Vietnam. It seems like the Obama campaign has, I hope unintentionally, started by attacking a war hero for his disability. I bet the demographic of tortured, slightly-disabled veterans over the age of 70 is small and already trending toward McCain anyways, but I just don’t think this is a smart, or particularly ethical, move.

Asimov was a great author not because of the excellence of his prose but because of the breadth of his vision. His Foundation series and invention of “psycho-history” is the ultimate historian’s fantasy. Asimov was a man of many gifts, a renaissance modernist; he was a biochemist, a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, as well as the author of over 400 books (including science texts, popular histories, and a guide to the Bible).

The collection of Asimov’s stories that I first came across was his I, Robot series (the plots of which are not to be confused with the Will Smith extravaganza that bears only occasional resemblance to the original stories). I enjoyed the “Three Laws of Robotics” and robo-psychologist Susan Calvin as a kid, but most of Asimov’s social commentary was way over my head. I just reread one of the stories titled Evidence when I stopped dead in my metaphorical tracks. Asimov provides a definition of Fundamentalism in this story that dates to 1946!

This inadvertent discovery amazed me. Let me give you some background. My advisor at Temple University, David Harrington Watt, has taken a leave from teaching this year to write a new academic work examining how Fundamentalism became defined as a “dangerous other.” His central thesis argues that the term Fundamentalism was defined not by self-described fundamentalists, nor even by their modernist foes.

Watt believes that our modern conception of Fundamentalism was shaped by secular intellectuals who describe Fundamentalism as a reaction against modernity. These intellectuals, including sociologist Talcott Parsons and historian Richard Hofstadter, defined modernity as progression towards a improved society as measured by the ideals of the European Enlightenment. Thus anyone opposed to scientific or social progress must be a Fundamentalist. Over time this definition turned Fundamentalism from a specific description of militantly orthodox American Protestantism into an ambiguous phrase used to describe global reactionary groups whether they be Islamic, Jewish, or even essentially areligious.

The interesting thing about Asimov’s story is that it was written before many of the works by intellectuals Watt was researching, a fact which could support his argument. So what does Asimov say?

Evidence uses robots as a metaphor for the improvement of mankind. The story describes a candidate for mayor who is accused of being an android, or life-like robot. When rumors are spread among the populace to that effect, the people begin to worry. Asimov describes it with these words

It was what the Fundamentalists were waiting for. They were not a political party; they made pretense to no formal religion. Essentially they were those who had not adapted themselves to what had once been called the Atomic Age, in the days when atoms were a novelty. Actually, they were the Simple-Lifers, hungering after a life, which to those who lived it had probably appeared not so Simple, and who had been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves.

Later the accused robot is advised that he is in danger: “Is there a threat of violence? The Fundamentalists threaten it, so I suppose there is, in a theoretical sense. But I really don’t expect it. The Fundies have no real power. They’re just the continuous irritant factor that might stir up a riot after a while.”

When the protagonist proposes giving a speech, he is told not to by his campaign staff: “Look, that mob has been organized by the Fundies. You won’t get a hearing. You’ll be stoned more likely.” Sure enough, a couple paragraphs later: “From the start the speech was not successful. It competed against the inchoate mob howl and the rhythmic cries of the Fundie claques that formed mob-islands within the mob.” At the end the mayor is revealed to the reader, though not the the people, as a robot by a robo-psychologist who makes the point that it is impossible to tell a robot from a really decent person.

As should be expected from a secular intellectual, Asimov’s Fundamentalists are reacting against Modernity, which is symbolized by opposition to progress, both scientific and social. His Fundamentalists are not American Protestants, indeed they aren’t particularly religious at all. Yet the Fundies form mobs that threaten to stone the opposition, a deft use of Biblical imagery by Asimov.

PS – I find it intensely ironic that Asimov may have coined the use of the slang “Fundies.” It is a logical shortening of the mouthful “Fundamentalism” and serves the double purpose of auditory trivialization. “Fundamentalist” sounds a whole lot more intimidating than “Fundie.” It amuses me that when I grew up at Bob Jones University, a bastion of Fundamentalism, the malcontents liked to use “Fundies” as a term of derision. Little did they know that they were imitating a famous atheist!

In Social Sources Richard argued that sectarianism within Christianity is caused by social, economic, and political pressures. For example, he pointed to Weber’s thesis about the Protestant work ethic in order to argue that the capitalist spirit aided the advance of Calvinism. Niebuhr also believed that socio-economic tensions contributed to a class division between “respectable” middle class churches, like the Lutherans and Calvinists, and lower class Anabaptists and Methodists.

Niebuhr applied his thesis to the fundamentalism of his generation. He proposed that Fundamentalism was principally a rural phenomenon that was reacting against “modern science and industrial civilization” and found its root in the agrarian populism of William Jennings Bryan. Modernists, centered among the urban bourgeois, embraced progress and enlightenment.

Niebuhr’s argument has a fatal flaw. He leaves no room for doctrine. According to his model, sectarianism is always socially explicable, a view that should have been alien to a lineal descendant of Martin Luther. Unsurprisingly Niebuhr called for a reunification of all Christian churches.

Also, Niebuhr’s acceptance of Beardian determinism is dated. Economic forces are insufficient by themselves to explain sectarianism. He thought that Fundamentalism arose as a result of depressed crop prices post-World War I, a view that completely ignores Fundamentalism’s ideological origins in the 19th century.

Of course, Richard saw Fundamentalism as a backward reaction to modern civilization. By 1937 it appeared reasonable to assume that Fundamentalism was a dying movement. Ironically a recent study by Pew shows that mainline Protestantism, which largely endorses the modernism espoused by Niebuhr, now has fewer adherents than modern Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism’s child.

Niebuhr’s choice of Bryan as the archetypal Fundamentalist proved inaccurate. In many ways Bryan was the exception rather than the rule. While Bryan was an agrarian populist, Fundamentalist leaders like Clarence Macartney, Gresham Machen, and J.R. Straton were urbanites.

Yet although Niebuhr’s central thesis and his definition of Fundamentalism are inadequate, some of his arguments are valid. I agree with him that much of what we do, and even some of what we believe, is a function of the culture in which we were raised. Let me define a peron’s culture as the sum of all their experiences and influences. My current beliefs and attitudes were shaped not only by the Bible, but by the middle class family I grew up in, the Fundamentalist school I attended, and the popular media I consumed. That holds true for the Church as a whole.

We like to think that everything we do has a Biblical basis and in spirit I agree. Yet the way in which Christians apply Biblical principles has changed drastically over time and between cultures. A few examples are pertinent: Why do some churches pass offering plates while others pass a bag or have a collection box? Why do some churches have choirs while others use worship leaders or stick to congregational singing only? Why are some pastors elected while others are appointed? Why do we baptize the way we do?

I am convinced that these differences, with the partial exception of baptism, are driven more by culture than by the Bible.

Before anybody starts chucking stones at me, let me hasten to affirm that the Bible is the source of all absolute truth. Yet often the way that Scriptural truth is expressed is influenced by the culture in which it acts. The interaction between absolute Biblical principle and contemporary culture is not inherently harmful, a position sometimes expressed by extreme separatists.

To illustrate this idea I would put forward the example of women wearing skirts or pants, an often tense debate within my Fundamentalist subculture. The Biblical principal of modesty is absolute. Women must glorify God with their dress and in doing so should dress in such a way that they are beyond reproach. The principle is of course sound, but who defines how modesty looks at any given point in time? Culture does, and as culture changes its definition the expression of that Biblical absolute changes with it. Thus my grandmother would not be caught dead in pants in public while my sister frequently indulges.

This argument is equally valid on both the individual micro- level as well as on the macro- Christianity level. For example, American churches tend to have a stronger executive role for pastors than do many Australian churches. That tendency is the result of cultural, not Biblical, differences.

I do not believe that the interaction between Biblical truth and culture is a debility. Rather I would argue that the flexibility of the Bible is one of Christianity’s greatest strengths. Other religions become dated because they have very specific guidelines (think Islam and burkhas or Mormonism and racism). These religions are often forced to drastically reinterpret their scriptures in order to change with the times. Yet Christianity maintains the essential message of the Gospel in a culturally transcendent way by relying on Spirit-guided principled living.

Larson’s Pulitzer was well-deserved (I’m sure he is relieved to know I approve). He displayed no discernable bias in his treatement and presented the foibles of both creationists and evolutionists with equanimity.

Summer for the Gods repudiates the popular image of the Scopes Trial as a battle between scientific progress and fundamentalist intolerance, portrayed in the Oscar nominated movie Inherit the Wind. The actual case was much more complex and John Scopes was hardly a victim. When the Tennessee legislature approved legislation prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools, a businessman in the aging boomtown of Dayton, who was a transplanted New Yorker, lept at the opportunity to put Dayton back on the map. He gathered support for a test case from several other prominent Daytonians, some of whom personally approved of the anti-evolution law. A delegation than asked John Scopes, a local math and physical education teacher who had filled in for a biology class, if he would be willing to be the defendant. Most of Dayton seemed excited about the national publicity that Dayton would earn.

Clearly the Scopes Trial had little resemblance to any normal criminal case. The prosecution brought famous Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan on board thus prompting infamous defense attorney Clarence Darrow to offer his services to John Scopes. All the subsequent emotion that errupted in attacks on nihilistic rationalists and narrowminded fundamentalists obscured two very real legal principles.

1) Darrow argued that the individual liberty of speech denied the state the right to restrict the teaching of evolution.

2) Bryan argued for majoritarianism and the idea that the public had the right, through the legislature, to teach, or not to teach, its children whatever they wished.

Today, Darrow’s argument has pretyt much completely won out, shown by the recent Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado.

When I finished the book, I asked myself the question, “If I lived in Tennessee in the 1920s would I have supported anti-evolutionary legislation?” For quite some time I struggled to balance the marketplace of ideas approach to education with my natural sympathy for my own creationist beliefs. But then I realized that to some degree it was a moot question.

The problem stems from the arrogation of educational responsibility from the family to the state. Biblically and historically the family was responsible for education. If the family preferred to send their children for training as an apprentice or at a religious school, than that was their choice. In the nineteenth century well-meaning evangelicals and secularists formed a progressive coalition that passed legislation state by state requiring state sponsored mandated education. Thus the responsibility has shifted and opened a Pandora’s Box of problems. Who gets to decide what is taught and what values are instilled? The family? The school board? The NEA?

If we reform our broken public educational system to promote family choice, whether through privitization or school vouchers, the issue mostly goes away. Parents could send their kids to a school that promotes Creationism or to one that favors Evolutionism. Unfortunately our current system forces one or the other to be taught as the law of the Medes and Persians.

Anywho, though I’ve gotten way off topic, Summer for the Gods is a must read for anyone interested in creationism and evolutionism. I would also recommend reading The Creationists by Ronald Numbers if you have a particular interest in the history of modern creationism.

But by the time I finished the book (a relatively quick read at 89 double-spaced pages, though taking far longer than the page count would indicate owing to Henry’s obtuse writing), I was convinced by parts of Henry’s thesis. Henry argued that Fundamentalism (broadly defined since he is writing in 1947 before the new-evangelical split had occured) had reacted against the modernistic social gospel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The modernists were mostly post-millenial, believing that the Kingdom of God should be ushered in by social reform. Fundamentalists were mostly pre-millenial, thinking that the world was hopeless depraved and only redeemable by the second coming of Christ. Fundamentalists reacted against the modernist emphasis on social reform, instead see-sawing towards the opposite extreme.

This first part of Henry’s argument makes sense, except for a number of inconsistencies. Fundamentalist leaders remained very engaged in politics, both local and national (for example, see the fundamentalist reaction against Al Smith’s candidacy for President in 1928). They also advocated some relatively profound social reforms like Prohibition and vice laws.

Maybe Henry was just annoyed that Fundamentalists failed to address the issues he cared about the most, like labor disputes and war. I wonder if some of the Fundamentalist failure to engage those issues stemmed not from a reactionary theology, but because of their almost uniform political conservatism and their shared Southern roots.

Still, I agree with Henry that Fundamentalists were far more likely to preach redemption for individual spiritual needs rather than broader social ills. He posited that the message of redemption from sin applies to both the individual and to society. He backed up his argument with a discussion of Luke 3. John the Baptist calls for those truly desiring repentance to prove it by giving their extra possessions to those without, to not abuse their contracts, and to stop extorting money by violence. He then announced the coming of the only One who could enable John’s listeners to perform those good deeds.

I reject the calls of some emergent theologians who see in this passage a call for radical redistribution of wealth, but despite exegetical abuse, the text strongly argues for the importance of a social conciousness for true followers of Christ.

Henry believed that it was wrong for Fundamentalism to cede leadership of social issues to non-evangelicals, including modernists and non-theists. He believed that the message of redemption from individual sin was the heart of the gospel, but he argued that the gospel had broader social implications. I agree.

Christianity has a long history of radically challenging culture on race, gender, and class. Jesus preached an equal spiritual need both to the Jewish elite and to the common people (He did choose to be born in a carpenter’s home in the first place!). His gospel brought spiritual equality to slaves, freemen, men, and women. Post-Reformation evangelicalism continued that rich heritage with opposition to the slave trade, ministers who ignored class lines, and greater opportunities for women in the Church.

Unfortunately, Fundamentalism has a mixed record on social issues. Fundamentalists typically ended up reacting to the extreme left on social issues like women’s rights and racism rather than engaging those issues with the gospel. That doesn’t mean that Fundamentalists should have been more liberal per se, but they should not have abandoned the balanced middle ground in reaction to leftist leadership on those issues.

Henry’s original ideas appear valid. However, they were taken to an unfortunate extreme by some of his contemporaries, like Ockenga, as well as later evangelicals. The history of Fuller Theological Seminary, portrayed by George Marsden in Reforming Fundamentalism, tells part of that sad tale.

We constantly balance on a narrow tightrope between the two extremes of complete cultural disengagement and the social gospel. Thank God for His enabling grace through the Spirit that gives us the hope of a balanced walk!

PS [2/12/08] -  My brother-in-law wrote a paper in seminary reviewing Uneasy Conscience. The last couple pages are particularly interesting, when Henry analyzes the results of his ideas. If you are interested in reading it email me at paulmatzko@gmail.com and I will send it to you.

After the evening service Dr. Michael Ward of Cambridge presented his dissertation work on the Chronicles of Narnia, recently published as Planet Narnia by Oxford University. Dr. Ward’s presentation was flawless and his evidence compelling. He titled the talk “Imagining God: CS Lewis and the Seven Heavens.”

Ward’s premise is that CS Lewis organized the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia around a hidden theme. Lewis scholars have long posited a variety of themes, including the popular Christological motif with Aslan as the Christ figure and the tales organized as the story of redemption. The principle problem with a strictly Christological organization is that Aslan only directly appears in three of the books and has to share time with Father Christmas, dryads, nymphs, and other mythological creatures.

Ward’s epiphany came while reading a book of Lewis’s collected poems. He came to the Jupiter section from ‘The Planets’ and read the phrase, “Of wrath ended and woes mended, of winter passed, and guilt forgiven.” Realizing that he had heard that line before, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Ward looked closer and found overwhelming evidence that Lewis had organized the seven books of the Chronicles around the seven heavens of the old geocentric cosmology.

Each book corresponds with one of the seven planets. In medieval and renaissance cosmology the planets were named after gods and assigned personalities. Lewis was an expert in medieval and renaissance literature and often lectured on the practice known as transferred classicism. Renaissance authors commonly used mythological figures and stories to illustrate Biblical truths. Lewis’s books were meant to illustrate different aspects of God’s character through transferred pagan and classical symbols.

Ward’s work should make literary scholars rethink the literary quality of Lewis’s work. The Chronicles had been considered something of a hodge-podge before, but a unifying theme tying in medieval cosmology should raise Lewis’s literary stock considerably.

I am not a literary critic by any stretch of the imagination, but his argument was so masterfully presented that Michael, Scott, and I were enrapt the entire time. All you literary scholar friends of mine (Lincoln, Abby, Jessica, and Timmy, I am talking to you) should check this book out. I also believe the argument clear enough to be understandable and enjoyable for the layman(myself) who enjoys literature.

For more information about Michael Ward and Planet Narnia here is his website: www.planetnarnia.com