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In the seventeenth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. Jenkins begins by sharing his reflections on how the practice of history has changed over the course of his career. Religion, according to Jenkins, was rarely a matter of concern to historians when he was young. Over time, however, historians realized religion never ceased to exist, they simply ceased to discuss it. If historians were to represent the lives of the people they were studying, a treatment of them as whole persons necessitated their religious commitments be considered. While not seemingly revolutionary, the manner by which a growing number of historians now practice their craft could be described as such. Jenkins then goes on to discuss his own vocation as an historian, a calling he never really questioned since early adolescence and was greatly enhanced during his years as at the University of Cambridge’s Clare College. Jenkins began his professional career at Penn State University, rising to serve as the Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Humanities. The appeal of working with scholars at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion compelled Jenkins to leave University Park for Waco where he claims he receives immeasurable support. In order for historians to honor the commitments of their vocation, Jenkins then cautions against the perils of presentism or the naïve assumption that one’s views are superior to the views of one’s predecessors. As an antidote, Jenkins lobbies for efforts to cultivate humility about what one knows and about the enduring significance of one’s work. Such a posture, Jenkins concludes, is also part of what will allow historians to be of greater service in years to come to the Church.
- Philip Jenkins’s Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religion (Baylor University Press, 2024)
- Philip Jenkins’s Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- Philip Jenkins’s Images of Terror: What We Can and Can’t Know about Terrorism (Routledge, 2003)
- Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2002)
- Philip Jenkins’s Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. Thank you for joining us.
Philip Jenkins: Thank you very much.
Todd Ream: As you look back over the arc of your career, in what ways if, if any, has the interest historians shown in religion changed?
Philip Jenkins: I’ve noticed very large changes through the years. I think people have come to be much more interested in religion broadly defined, not so much the history of denominations, but of what you can call religious ways of thinking and religion as a means of driving action.
Now, you know, we think of some very obvious moments there like in the start of the century, we had the 9/11, we had all the interested follow that, and that was part of a much larger scheme. I think it was very interesting that if you looked at a body like political science, in the political science national association, by far, the fastest growing segment of that was religion and politics. So not just in history. And history, I think religion for many years used to be regarded as this sort of strange, optional thing. And these days I think people realize it is in many ways the heart of the story, whether or not one believes a word of the religious narrative ourselves. Uh, so I think I would argue that that is really a revolution in the way we study, in history in my lifetime.
Todd Ream: When we look at the individuals, the lives of people that historians have chosen to study, in what ways can you see this shift that’s taken place? Are there particular works, for example, you might point to?
Philip Jenkins: I look at particular individuals where you know, religion was not taken terribly seriously. It was marginal. Now, of course, we have a great series of biographies spiritual biographies of leading figures. And you realize just how much religion was the focus of what they were doing, you know?
Um, I have a colleague at Baylor called Barry Hankins, for example, and he wrote a volume on Woodrow Wilson and her religion drove him. Princeton has a terrific series of religious biographies, religious religious lives. My good friend Tim Larsen has done some very good work on that. And as I say, the more you look at this, the more you realize religion is not something marginal. It’s not a hobby. It is the driving motive and it really affects the way in which you read what these people say and write. You have to be consciously aware of how they use religious vocabulary of how these ideas echo back with them. It is a great case for listening.
Todd Ream: When you think about societies or communities and studies of populations such as these, in what ways has this greater interest in religion impacted how we view them?
Philip Jenkins: I’ll give you one very short comment, which is, I think we have made one general mistake when we look at Western or European or American societies, which is we have dated secularization probably about a century or two too soon. Uh, the idea of the secularization of the European mind, the decline of magical thinking used to be very well known, well recognized, and the more we look at them, the more we think that is not something that happens, you know, as the Enlightenment strikes. That well into certainly the 20th century these are very powerful ideas, you know, in Great Britain, for example, where I do quite a bit of work. There was an absolute watershed run about the year 1963.
And if people have said, well, religion declines catastrophically after the first World War, yeah, it does about 45 years later. So I think we always tend to put these things too soon. And the other key point is the decline of institutional religion is not the same as the decline of religious worldviews, religious vocabularies, religious language. So I keep coming back to this issue of chronology.
Todd Ream: To what then, if anything, would you attribute this change of interest, whether it’s the interest in the lives of individuals or the lives and populations of particular communities or societies?
Philip Jenkins: I see a great watershed in the late 1970s. The years up to then were marked by a strong belief in this idea of secularization in politics. I mean, religion was not something that anyone took seriously. And interestingly in the late 1970s, wherever you’re looking at the world, religion comes back very strong. We talk about the empire striking back. Religion strikes back very hard. And that applies whether you’re looking at Judaism in Israel, Hinduism in India, or evangelical Christianity in the United States, or a very traditional kind of Catholicism in much of the Catholic world.
And that applies to what you might call practical politics, but that cannot affect how we look at history. If our narratives have assumed that religion is something that ceases to exist in the first World War, the 1950s, whatever, and suddenly religion is back oh, or rather, religion never went away. Uh, we just uh, weren’t seeing it. You know, as the phrase goes, if I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it with my own eyes. In other words, that ‘s our ideology. Our approaches in that way affect what we’re actually seeing on the ground.
When we look closer in the ground, we see by any number of criteria, any number of sources of evidence that religion never never went away. People just stopped looking at it.
Todd Ream: In terms of how students then look at it and encounter it in the classroom then for example 30 or 40 years ago, in what ways has it changed the undergraduate education?
Philip Jenkins: When you look at 30 or 40 years ago I think a lot of people who believed in religious approaches, they accepted these approaches very seriously but they tended to conceal these ideas or regard them as not something they could almost like raise in polite society. And over time they realized, well, yes, absolutely they could. And this was actually a very good way of understanding that they were part of often a religious culture, and they assumed it was confined to them.
And that was certainly true in large secular universities. A university like my own, like Baylor was obviously much more open to this. So I think people have, pardon the expression, come out of the closet, much more in using their own religious understandings broadly defined.
And again, I separate, I draw a distinction between adherence to institutional religion and following religious ways of thinking religion, including somewhat superstitious, esoteric what, you know, we certainly cannot ignore or need to treat very seriously.
Todd Ream: In terms of this treatment then, for graduate students who are being prepared to do the work of history, in what ways, if any, has this change of interest impacted the historical methods to which they’re introduced?
Philip Jenkins: Yeah, very very important. One lesson is perhaps to take what is obvious out there, what is presented most uh, directly, and not assume that there must be these great social or political or financial agendas behind them that people really are acting in these religious ways because of belief that it is impossible to uh, to separate that.
You know, one, one idea I was trying to get across when I’m dealing with particularly graduate students is the idea of what I call providentialism. The very common idea that people have that when disastrous things happen in the world, there are wars, there are plagues, famine, diseases, that this is because God or the gods are angry. And conversely times of blessing reflect the pleasure of the divine. That may be an obvious statement, but that providential approach drives so much conduct through history.
And when you’re teaching about, for instance, the early modern period, the medieval period, you start from that. That is an essential idea, an essential way of understanding the world. And you think, how long, long in history does that continue? I would say certainly into the 20th century. I mean, I did a lot of work on the first World War. We have a lot of kind of ethnographic evidence about what people actually believed and thought during the first World War.
It actually looks like they’re living in the 17th century. They believed these very, what shall I say, not just religious ideas, but superstitious ideas. And you can look at some of the things they’re doing and believing in, and you think, is this the 30 Years War, the 1620s and thirties, or is it the First World War? And that that is an important way, that kind of providential approach, that openness to superstitious ideas broadly defined, continues way longer.
A student comes to me and says, you know, I’ve got this set of ideas that are behaviors, and I’m almost embarrassed to describe it. I say, well, no, don’t, I would expect to see exactly that people are telling the truth as they see it. Modernity strikes a lot later, I think, than people think. And in many parts of the world, we are assuredly not there yet.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own formation as an historian. You spent eight years at the University of Cambridge’s Clare College, the second oldest surviving college at Cambridge. And over the course of those years, you earned a bachelor’s, a master’s, and a PhD. But at what point in time did you discern the practice of history would prove critical to how you understood your vocation?
Philip Jenkins: Even before that since I was probably 11 or 12 years old, what I was doing was very broadly defined. And when does history start? Is it five years ago? Is it 10 years ago? Is it a hundred years ago? For me, it was always in a sense, 10 minutes ago because history, historical methodology applied whether I was looking at a document from a hundred years ago or yesterday’s newspaper. So in other words, it was a way of approaching the world, a critical way of understanding evidence and documents, which is the core of what historians do.
And by the time I reached university, you know, this was what I did, there really was not really a whole lot of option in that. So what I was doing really all the way through my teens, my education consisted of strengthening, gathering material for that approach. I did not consciously think, you know, I am arming myself for a vocation or anything like that.
But that is the way I worked that out and I did something very useful, which is I read very widely, very extensively in all sorts of fiction and material. And I learned a skill that has stood me in very good stead ever since, which is the ability to listen to and appreciate language. The words that people use often contains so much ideology, so many ideas, their ways of understanding the world. And the more you know about that, the more you can understand the historical context. You watch a film and look at how people talk and how the people act. And what you’re doing is studying history.
Uh, and then you know, Cambridge just offered such a perfect environment for me. Then you in, in a sense, you, you, you learn to find the official correct names for what you have been doing all along. And you uh, you learn the labels, but in a very generous, supportive environment, really could not have been better.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Can you say a little bit about how you intersected with that generous support and in the ways that it formed you?
Philip Jenkins: Well, I would cite one person, who is a scholar of demography and historical demography called Roger Schofield, deceased some years ago. Uh, at the time in the 1970s, he was the epitome of the uh, the cool academic. He was married to a top flight actress. He was a cool person. He was also in the 1970s, somebody who was working with computers. Can you imagine anything more remarkable?
What was so interesting about him was he gave me this framework and this vocabulary for understanding history through the lens of population, changes in population, demography, disease, understanding these hard material facts that could be measured and which gave the foundation for understanding pretty much everything else. You know, a couple of years ago I wrote a book called Climate Catastrophe and Faith, which was about how the history of religion is shaped by changing climate, disease, and so on.
And I very explicitly dedicated this to Roger Scofield and what he had taught me literally 45 or 50 years ago, and I just so appreciated those life lessons which I think many other historians are just starting to understand today. I was blessed, and I had this you know, magnificent teacher. And, and, and there were others, but I always remember that. And at the time, of course, he’s teaching things nobody else knows. It would be 30 years ago before anyone regarded that as at all normal. And these days you look back, oh, it’s very, you know, familiar, regular, normal stuff. Not back then, it wasn’t.
Todd Ream: Yeah, and he was the epitome of cool academic too.
Philip Jenkins: Absolutely, absolutely.
Todd Ream: This is going to be a first that I’m going to tuck away actually, and use for some personal inspiration here. Thank you.
Are there any authors that you encountered during that time who also left their imprint on you?
Philip Jenkins: You know, I’m going to use one very odd example that might sound surprising. We’re talking about uh, cutting edge scholarship in a way. And there were people who were very highly regarded. I fell in love with an author from a much older era, who is the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. And we think of him in terms of books about, oh, highlanders and these very romantic books. If you ever read Sir Walter Scott, he edited and often owned all the official documents that we use as sources on that period.
If he said something happened on February the 13th, 1679 at 4:00 PM, it happened on that day. He was a superb historian. And he had the history absolutely perfectly, and you realized that often the best way of presenting a history was through this imaginative context that cares absolutely for reconstructing the exact language, the thought world.
And this one book particularly, which I was know of his called Old Mortality, which is about the rebellions of extreme puritans in Scotland in the 1670s and 1680s. And by the time you’ve read it, you’ve had a magnificent object lesson in how history works, how documents exist, and how an imaginative author can take that and present it as a novel, while remaining totally within the realm of excellent archival history. And that is very humbling. And it also sends a lesson about how you should communicate. If you cannot communicate your findings, your efforts are void.
And some of the best history that you will find is in the form of historical novels. And so Scott had a really powerful impact on me and I could cite many other cases. He wrote dozens and dozens of books. And sometimes he would think, oh, can I check this fact? And you go off and check it and you realize that you’re going to a book edited by Sir Walder Scott. So, you know, he was so impressive in that way.
There are any number of others, but I always use Scott as an example, a wonderful author and hugely influential in, in the 19th century, also in America. You could write many books about his impact on 19th century America.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Following the conclusion of your studies at Cambridge, you were appointed as Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Penn State University’s University Park Campus. And several of your earliest books focused on crime, including serial homicide, and perhaps one of the first comprehensive treatments of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, a work called Pedophiles and Priests Anatomy of a Social Crisis that Oxford University Press published in 1996.
In what ways did your commitment to the practice of history lead you to a research agenda that was related to and focused at certain points on criminal behavior during those years?
Philip Jenkins: Yeah, this was partly what you might call opportunism in the sense that these subjects arose. What one golden rule for me is very often people try and understand history and speak as if they understand history, but they don’t. So, for example, if somebody says, you mentioned serial murder, in the 1980s there were all these serial murderers and nothing like this has ever existed before. That’s a historical statement. And you can test it. And my hope is to be, in a sense, a social scientist and I test evidence.
And when you test it, you realize that serial murder in American history has come and gone. There is great attention to it in some eras, not in others. And the attention that is paid to it depends on some very familiar factors, such as concerns about what race, gender, sexuality and these kind of concerns. And so when you look at what looks like a true crime topic, what you are actually pursuing is very good social history. So it allowed me to incorporate two different aspects at the same time.
One is that social science issue studying an issue, but also at the same time trying to study it through good history, which I would claim I was using and other people were not. When you make a comment like, oh, this is unprecedented, we’ve never been here before, that is a historical comment that can be tested. And with the clergy sex abuse issue, again, there was a statement, there was a view that this is all part of what is wrong with the Catholic Church. It is because of the celibacy of the clergy.
And when you look at it historically, you learn certain things that really kind of undermines that idea, and particularly a whole series of factors that change about 1980 in American life, which means that there’s going to be a great deal of attention to clergy abuse, and it is going to hit the Catholic Church, whether or not there is more of a problem there than in other institutions. So that was my, um my basic argument.
I also, an interesting issue, issue of crime on the internet got to a very interesting matter of evidences and sources. How can he write the history of the internet, which is such a recent phenomenon. Well, now, you can. Back in 2000, well, it was all very recent.
But I come back to my basic idea. I’m a historian. I study documents, I study texts. I try and interpret them and present them in a way that will be understandable to people. And that doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with something that happened in 1798 or 1998.
Todd Ream: As the Edwin ERLE Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus, you left Penn State in 2012, for service now at Baylor University as a Distinguished Professor of History. Would you describe the discernment process that led you to make the transition from University Park to Waco?
Philip Jenkins: Sure. Penn State is a world class university. It so happened that I left at the time of this horrific Jerry Sandusky scandal, and that that was coincidence, that was not a kind of a causal factor. What had happened that was new was not even so much Baylor, but within Baylor, there was this organization called the Institute for Study of Religion, ISR, led by Byron Johnson, which was just offering such spectacular, opportunities in terms of, well, first of all I could do all these events on the history of religion. I could bring in any number of really distinguished speakers. I could organize these great events. I could pursue any research I wanted.
And whenever I would ask my head there, who is Byron Johnson, can I do this? The answer was absolutely always yes, certainly. Go, go ahead. No, was not in his vocabulary. So Baylor’s a wonderful institution, but it was specifically that ISR, that was the uh, kind of Aladdin’s cave for me. And it’s remained very much like that since, obviously during the pandemic, we couldn’t organize so much programming. We couldn’t bring in people in the same way. But, you know, I’ve managed to research and work with people. I’ve got a terrific range of colleagues. So the move, the move was not so much from Penn State to Baylor. I was from Penn State to Baylor and ISR, and that was the enormous opportunity.
I still have huge regard for Penn State as a university, great great departments, great education, but in terms of what it could offer me, it worked far better with ISR. And I do confess that for my last year or so when I was in Penn State I did have a poster on my door that quoted Davy Crockett’s words that the rest of you can go to hell, I will go to Texas. What might suggest more of a disenchantment than might be, but I couldn’t resist it.
Todd Ream: Well, hopefully some of your more lighthearted colleagues took that for what you meant it then.
In what ways, if any, did Penn State contribute to your understanding of the vocation of a historian, and then how does that compare with your formation since in terms of being at Baylor and part of ISR?
Philip Jenkins: I was very blessed for many years. I was in, as you say, a criminal justice department administration of justice. And again, I had the great blessing of being in a department that basically said, as long as I was producing good scholarship, nobody really tried to tell me what to do. So I was teaching courses on the usual criminal justice type topics of terrorism and violent crime and so on. Greatly enjoying that teaching, but I could do research on whatever I wanted. And that allowed me to integrate my historical approaches freely.
And I’ll just give you an example there. You know, I’ve done a great deal of work through the years on terrorism. You know, I think about it, how do you understand terrorism? And one thing I tried to do was to approach it historically, and there is a very large history of terrorism, of the vocabulary of terrorism, of movements of terrorism. And I published a book on this called Images of Terror, which I’m also pleased with because it didn’t come out from absolutely the best the great or most visible press in the world. But it got the best reviews I’ve ever had for any book ever because of that kind of historical depth.
And I’m so grateful to the head we had at that point. He was a very charismatic figure. A man called Daniel, now deceased just a wonderful scholar. And his view was, you’re doing good scholarship, it’s history, fine. Go ahead and do it. So I’ve always been blessed in that way.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to shift now to asking you about more of the arc of the work that you’ve done. And I want to start by asking you about your most recent book which is Kingdoms of this World: How Empires have Made and Remade Religion, published by Baylor University Press just last year in 2024.
What compelled you to pursue that project and what do you hope audience members get from it?
Philip Jenkins: Every book I write, and I’ve written some 30 odd books, has in a sense grown out of one or two previous books. And so in the previous few years, I’d written on a number of topics such as demography and religion, climate and religion. And as I looked at the history, it occurred to me there was one really big concept that was a terrific driving force in shaping religion in all the eras and that was empire. So in a sense, it was the next contribution in that series, you know, demography, climate, empire.
And I range very widely in that. So I talked about the way Indian empires had promoted Buddhism. I talked about the way Buddhism and the, the way in which Christianity had become a global religion as an offshoot of the British Empire and the French and the Portuguese and so on. And if you can write a book on that, then you don’t just enumerate the facts, you try and say, why? What are the factors about empire that makes it such a prime driver for different kinds of religion? And so I thought about that and uh, that drove that book. It’s, in a sense, a two-sided book. It’s how religion has made empire and empire has made religion.
And I would stress, you know, something that is maybe a little bit surprising for Americans to think about, historically, empire is not an optional add-on. It is the default form of government in most eras. Your ancestors and the ancestors of everyone you know, were either the subjects of an empire who made an empire or they were ruled by an empire. Uh, and that’s a pretty universal statement.
As I wrote the book, it was running out of control in terms of length and the great thing that I could not fit in on that was American empire and American faith. A religion made American empire, how American empire made religion. And that is the book I’m finishing right now.
Todd Ream: I was just going to ask, does that then lead to the next book then, as you were sort of describing how one book leads to the next then?
These themes that you’ve seen and that you’ve focused on, is there one book, if you look back over the arc of your career that was sort of more definitive maybe of the way you’ve gone about your work as a historian than maybe some of the others or maybe even two or three books that you would point to?
Philip Jenkins: Yeah. The one that clearly has had by far the biggest impact was my Next Christendom book, which came out in 2002, you know, many, many centuries ago. And again, the reason I wrote that was because people were making statements about the direction of religion. And in my view, those statements were radically a-historical they were based on a fairly narrow view of Western Euro-American history. But when you looked at things in a global African, Asian, and Latin American sense, you just saw things in an absolutely different lens. So partly, that is shifting the geographical focus, but it is also shifting the chronology. So I’m trying to say, what would Christianity look like if you looked at it from the year 1600, 1000, for example? And the answer is something that is very, very different. Many of the stereotypes.
My achievement there was taking such a vast range of possible material and successfully boiling it down to something that was an accessible length. That was very hard. Uh, often, you know, the temptation to run into 800 pages is uh, is, is a problem. I’ve always followed a golden rule of writing, which is, what is this book about? This book is about 240 pages. That is a golden rule.
And Next Christendom then developed into another book on uses of the Bible. Uh, another book on the history of early Christianity in Asia. Another book on this, another book on this. Each book generates its successor, but if there’s a single landmark, I would have to go back to Next Christendom. If I look into the future and see my obituary, it begins with the line Philip Jenkins who wrote the Next Christendom. And the, the, that, that’s what I’ll be remembered for if I’m remembered.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Before we close our conversation then today, I want to transition to asking you more formally now about your understanding of the academic vocation. And we’ve talked about some of the characteristics in particular that you believe historians need to hold tightly to in terms of how they practice their work.
But what characteristics, qualities, or even practices do you find are most fundamental to how you exercise history and, in working with graduate students, do you hope to pass on to them?
Philip Jenkins: One, everything depends on evidence, obviously. One key point is the selection of evidence and the temptation to say, this is a wonderful story, but how representative is it? And that is why I benefited through the years from working so closely with social scientists. And the key concepts are reproducible, falsifiable. If somebody looked at this topic, are they likely to be able to reproduce your evidence or can they prove it’s wrong? You can never spend too much time with the archives.
And the other thing that has been increasingly crucial for me through the years is to situate any historical study in as broad a cultural field as possible, which means drawing on literature, popular culture, visual arts. So for example, if you are working on the 1940s, for instance, a very, you know, rich historical era, you read the archives, yes, you read the newspapers. You have to know what is happening in film, novels, cartoons and comics. It’s definitely a magnificent resource.
And that is something that I’m always trying to drive home to students and I find them very receptive to this. And initially they’ll say, but that’s not really history. And you say, well, yeah, it, it, it really is. And if anyone says, if anyone responds and says that is not, you know, proper history, then they can be duly ignored. It is so much you can never write, read too widely in the fiction and not just the kind of elite literary fiction, but in the genres.
Uh, if I work in the 1940s, I read westerns, I read horror fiction. Uh, I read science fiction, fun in their own right, but also immensely valuable for the way that people speak and think as a way of assessing the language in which these documents are composed. So and as I say, a lot of that may initially seem impressionistic.
And how do you then frame it in such a way that it is you are presenting a picture that is reproducible, it can be tested, it can be falsified. Imagine you are in a court, where somebody says, well, you claim to be an expert witness how, how can you prove this? Well, this is how I do it. This is how I show it can be reproducible as a real sense. So those are some of the rules that I would use very very strongly. And particularly in any kind of religious history, history of religions, denominations broadly defined.
Todd Ream: When practicing history in the manner that you just described then, what intellectual and moral virtues do you believe are most important for historians to cultivate?
Philip Jenkins: The ability to be self-critical, a major dose of professional modesty and to suggest where I, or we can go wrong in looking at a document the, the modesty that will make us think this is a wonderful document. But is it actually worth anything? Is it actually representative? So that kind of modesty is so important.
And also if you’re talking about virtues and you know, the, the, this one, I suppose you aspire to, a kind of humility about the topic that we’re writing about, because we always assume that what we write about is the most important thing. There never has been anything like this before or since. I can guarantee yes, there has.
Todd Ream: I read a grant proposal just this morning where somebody lobbied that it was the most important study in that field to date.
Philip Jenkins: I hope you gave them the money.
Todd Ream: How could I pass or do my little part in terms of being a reviewer?
So for historians then, what vices, if any, do you believe are most important to confront? And perhaps it starts with what we just were joking about there.
Philip Jenkins: Yeah, one of the, the most difficult to navigate is what’s sometimes called presentism. Um, but by which I mean the idea that we view all these ideas, all these, um documents through our own assumptions today. Now we have to be aware of those. So for example, if we are marketing a proposal to a publisher, what that publisher will want to know is, how can we make this sound as if it’s from speaks to an audience from 2025? And that, that is very fine. But often if you look at these, you have to be aware, you know, there’s a famous phrase from H. E. Bates, the English novelist, “The past is a different country. They do things differently there.” And they and they really do.
And other one I find again and again is there really is nothing new under the sun. If you look at a particular era, it is startling how much you can find the same thing happened 20 years before that, 40 years before that. You know, this is not in terms of great history, but I work a lot in the 1890s as a fascinating era.
One thing that’s very funny there is the popular slang of that era. If you ever read like a contemporary novel, it’s straight from the 1960s. So a girl is cool, she’s out of sight, she’s far out. And you think, well, you know, this is around like 1967. Uh, and you know, people in the past are different. They’re not stupid. They also know a very standard range of possible responses and interpretations, which we might be tempted to dismiss as, you know, the ignorance of the past.
I spent a lot of time working on the history of the discovery of ancient texts and Scriptures, and you look at the years around 1910, common attitudes to like gnostic gospels are pretty much exactly precisely what we would have today, in terms of how many of them they were, how significant they were. Oh, there are all these different gospels. Well, welcome to the world of 1910.
Presentism would be the short answer to that question. There are many others, but that’s a good one.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For our final question for our conversation today then, I want to ask you, in what ways do you believe historians can be of greater service to the Church, and perhaps the Church can be of greater service to historians?
Philip Jenkins: Well, it gets back to what I’m saying very often when uh, a church, the Church makes a statement about contemporary realities, it is assuming that conditions described are wholly new. We’ve never been here before. But churches, by definition have got a couple of thousand years of possible experience on which to draw. And they really need to draw on those records, on those understandings, how did we deal with situations like this in the past? Uh, these are not new. So I think historians can be of enormous significance to understanding debates in the Church.
And again, we run into this danger of presentism, there’s always a risk that people will look back and say, oh, this is just like we, we faced today. And we’ll see something that is just like, what I happen to believe as my partisan cause today. Well, maybe and maybe not. So that would be my answer to that.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Philip Jenkins, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Philip Jenkins: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at seven Christian Scholars reviews conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
