History Wars
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An Undeceptions Podcast. Apparently, the collective noun for historians is argumentation. An argumentation of historians. That's what producer Kayleigh says. She showed me a History Today online article that makes that claim, as well as a dodgy Wikipedia list. But no authoritative or primary source...

She also showed me a BBC article that no one really decides what is a legitimate collective noun. As we learned in our English language episode earlier this season, English evolves with its own momentum. So I'd like to start the ball rolling on a new collective noun. I propose not argumentation, but an investigation of historians. Here's hoping that takes off.

Still, many would say that an argumentation of historians is a more apt description. After all, historians have argued from the beginning.

The father of history, in the view of many scholars, was Herodotus of Halicarnassus. 400 or so years before Christ, he wrote about the legendary Greek and Persian wars. Except he was trying to distinguish between the legends of the bards, think Homer's Iliad, and the events as they really happened. Here's his opening line, speaking of himself in the third person.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time and great and marvelous deeds, some by Greeks, some by barbarians, may not be without their glory. Herodotus calls his project an inquiry or investigation.

which is why I think it should be an investigation of historians, just for the record. The Greek word he uses in this opening line is historia, which gives us the word history. History, in this original sense, is an investigation into past events put together into a glorious story.

And then along comes an Athenian general named Thucydides, 25 years or so the junior of Herodotus. Thucydides thought Herodotus was too flowery and too willing to report tales. He wanted to report just the facts. His topic was the great war between Athens and Sparta, and he was near enough to the events to engage in a more rigorous historia or investigation.

He admitted that his project was a little more boring, but boring is good because the truth is more important than a good story. So a good story or the truth? It's a debate that's been going on since the birth of history writing. American historian Peter Novick once said that, quote, history is like trying to nail jelly to a wall, unsatisfying and messy.

There's something there in history, of course, there are some facts, some real events, but then there's also a lot of ideology at play, some of it quite wobbly, to extend Novik's jelly metaphor. It's no wonder that many today have given up on history, not just as a subject at school and university, but also as a way of knowing anything real about the past.

My guest today reckons this is a problem.

We are living in an ahistoric age, she says. We don't care about tradition. We're sceptical about the past. And if your version of the past doesn't suit my current political outlook, no worries. I can revise or erase history. After all, it's the past. Why would it matter?

I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by our friends at Zondervan Academic. You can get discounts on their master lectures, video courses, and free chapters of many of the books we talk about here in the podcast.

by going to zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Every episode of Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, science, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Undeceptions

We can think of history as a kind of academic discipline, that's one thing. But I actually think we need to think about history as something that we inhabit and that we pass down as like regular human beings because history is about how we make sense of the past and how we're able to actually engage with the past in such a way that passes down these stories that makes life meaningful. I mean, there's no...

human civilization or culture which has existed for any period of time which manages to do so without some kind of sense of who they are in time.

That's Sarah Irving Stonebreaker, Associate Professor of History and Western Civilization at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. Sarah's a friend of the pod. She was a guest in our very first season, actually, episode nine, called Dominus Illuminatio, which is part of the motto of the University of Oxford. It basically means the Lord is my light. Sarah Irving Stonebreaker, Associate Professor of History and Western Civilization at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney.

Sarah was a research fellow at the University of Oxford after completing her Doctor of Philosophy in History at the University of Cambridge. Sarah's new book is called Priests of History, Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. It's a cracker.

My approach to history is actually shaped by the fact that, well, the reason why time is meaningful and we understand that we're kind of, you know, we're beings who are bounded by time because we're mortal and we're finite and yet at the same time we are just drawn to this sense that there is something which is beyond time

The reason why time is meaningful is because we have a God who is, in fact, a God who creates everything and who acts in time. So I actually approach history now, I didn't always because I didn't grow up a Christian, but I actually approach history

history as a Christian and understand how we actually make sense of the past in terms of how we're actually supposed to kind of steward it, how we're supposed to tend and keep the past. Someone might hear that, Sarah, and think, oh, so you're just a biased historian? Yeah, okay, well, so yeah, gosh, look, we all have biases, I suppose, and all that means is that we all come to our understanding of the past with some kind of like background set of

ideas and assumptions. Like we all have a worldview in other words. I think the question is really like, what is this worldview? What are those set of assumptions? And how robust are they? How compelling are they?

Historians are sometimes viewed as little more than journalists of things past. I don't mean to criticize journos, but a recent Gallup poll found that just 19% of Americans rate journalistic integrity as very high or high. I'd be fascinated to know if the public thought any better of historians. Are they just out for a good story? But there are good journalists and there are good historians.

Good historians are always worrying about bias in the sources and in themselves, but they begin their research with the surviving evidence, and they constantly strive to submit their accounts of the past to the evidence. Despite postmodern claims to the contrary, historians are trying to describe what was once true and real.

We aim at objectivity about the past, even while recognising that all intellectual endeavours, including history, have a human element.

What drew you to history in the first place? Was it just something you excelled at so you thought, I should do the thing I'm good at? Well, I've actually wanted to be a historian since I was about eight or nine years old. My family went to England on a trip and we went to all the kind of, you know, the ruins of medieval monasteries and castles and villages and towns old enough to be in the Doomsday Book of William the Conqueror.

And I remember around the time of my ninth birthday, actually, deciding that when I grew up, I wanted to be a historian. And so that kind of, yeah, that passion kind of, yeah, drove me. And your dad was a historian too. And my dad was a historian, is, yep, is a historian too. But, you know, one of the wonderful things, just getting back, you know, a moment ago about...

you know, some of the things you were bringing up about people having different perspectives, different backgrounds, different biases, is that, you know, even within my own family, I have some of the most, you know, fruitful and beautiful conversations with my dad, who has a completely different approach to understanding history to the one that I have. And actually, I think one of the things that we need to do more than ever in this, you know, sort of contemporary age, which I think is really profoundly ahistorical, but...

is we need to actually have conversations about history in which we learn to actually understand where other people are coming from, but to disagree well about the past, right? To understand that we can look at the past and see something of its complexity and actually learn to have conversations in which we engage with that and disagree peacefully about it.

History has often been a battlefield of the culture wars. Competing narratives seek to become the official versions. In March 2015, a black South African student threw a bucket of poo over a statue of the 19th century British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, which at the time held pride of place at the University of Cape Town.

He viewed Cecil Rhodes as a symbol of colonialism and the violence that accompanies it. This activist's actions sparked protests across South Africa, spreading to other parts of the world, including the University of Oxford, where there is a famous Rhodes Scholarship. Rhodes was devoted to the British colonial project and drove the annexation of vast swaths of land in southern Africa.

Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, were named after him. So when British rule ended in those countries, so did the Rhodes Rhodesian name. On his death, Rhodes left the equivalent of 17 million US dollars to Oriel College at the University of Oxford, where he'd studied as a young man, and a statue of him was erected in his honour at the college.

For many years, even before the protests in South Africa, many students and academics, including historians, have called for its removal. Instead, the college has erected a plaque next to the statue, and it reads...

Rhodes, a committed British colonialist, obtained his fortune through exploitation of minerals, land and peoples of southern Africa. Some of his activities led to great loss of life and attracted criticism in his day and ever since. In recent years, the statue has become a focus for public debate on racism and the legacy of colonialism. In June 2020, Oriel College declared its wish to remove the statue.

but is not doing so following legal and regulatory advice. Of course, the plaque did little to assuage those who wanted the whole statue removed.

It also managed to incense others from a different perspective. A history professor at Oxford objected to the wording of the plaque. He told the Daily Telegraph that the plaque should be "balanced and measured. It should look at the whole of Rhodes' career, explaining properly who he was and what he was trying to do. One needs to explain where he stands in the context of the attitudes of his day."

He believed he was bringing benefits to Africa. We might now argue that he did more harm than good, but one has to understand what his intentions were. He is portrayed here as some sort of devil incarnate. It's complicated. Should the statue have come down? Should the plaque outline the good and the bad?

On the one hand, Sarah says, these highly politicised protests show the passion some people have when it comes to history's symbols and what they represent. On the other, we're losing the ability to grapple with the ethical complexities of the past, the intertwining of good and evil, of bullies and saints, in the same historical figure. History then becomes a cartoon.

Made up of goodies and baddies. And mostly baddies.

You claim that our world now is an ahistoric age. Yep. Yep. Okay, so what is an ahistoric age? Yeah, yeah, okay. What has really struck me is, particularly in about the last five to ten years, is just how disconnected our contemporary societies seem to be from history, from the past, in the sense that we don't know why history matters. It kind of seems irrelevant.

We tend to be fairly ignorant of history. We tend to kind of reduce history to ideology too. So in some, we tend to kind of

be unable to engage meaningfully with the past. You don't just mean that fewer students are doing history at high school and university. It's not just that, is it? No, though I think that is an important part of it. That's a kind of symptom, I think. I think, OK, there are probably three things that I would identify as being kind of indicative of this kind of ahistoric age. The first is this kind of sense that history and the past

is irrelevant to our culture and in particular to like what we think of as the good life. Like when I talk to my students about what they think

good life is or what basically I say to them, you know, what does our culture say is the kind of life worth living? They basically all say something along the lines of, you know, it's about finding and then being your true self, right? So our culture is basically saying look life is all about self-invention and self-fulfillment and

But to that project, right, history is kind of irrelevant because we're basically kind of autonomous beings who live this life of relentless self-creation. And so the idea that there might be a kind of givenness to our identity, a kind of givenness that might stem from having inherited histories, transcendent narratives, stories, inheritances, traditions that are passed down and helped to shape us, that kind of idea is kind of irrelevant.

is anathema to that kind of culture. We are basically kind of proudly authentic, but ultimately rootless. So that's the first thing, a kind of irrelevance.

In 2023, a survey of close to 700 school kids across Australia found that two thirds of them thought the Anzac story, long considered the foundational story of Australian history, was boring and irrelevant to their lives. This historical apathy made headlines at the time, with one of the researchers saying that the students were less interested these days in traditional and nationalistic stories.

ANZAC, for my international listeners, stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and the term was first used to refer to Aussies and Kiwis who fought alongside each other in the First World War. On the 25th of April 1915, about 16,000 ANZAC soldiers landed on the shores of Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, or Turkey Air as we say nowadays.

I still think of it as Galatia, Asia Minor, Pontus by Thinnear, you know. They came under relentless fire. Our soldiers had hardly been sent into battle before. Many of them were farmers, pretty good at shooting rabbits and kangaroos, but not humans. The hard-fought eight-month campaign was ultimately a failure. Half of the Anzacs died. Our national myth is basically a failure.

But the event cemented the Australian self-perception, some might say myth, of a people willing to sacrifice, willing to put up with pain cheerfully, and especially of a people who will stick together to the bitter end. This is the Aussie idea of mateship.

But here's the thing. Today, almost a third of Australians were born in another country. And commentators have begun to question whether this foundational history, this national myth, has any relevance today. As a culture changes, it loses its connection to the past. It drops its own history. The question is already being raised in Australia. Should we bother teaching about the Anzacs at all?

So the second thing is ignorance. I think increasingly our culture tends to be, when I say culture, you know we live in a global world, but I'm particularly talking about the kind of contemporary sort of liberal, post-liberal cultures in the contemporary west. But we tend to be increasingly I think ignorant of history and even you know historical literacy I think is really on the decline.

So, for example, you know, in the public sphere, in the media, we often have discussions about the relationship between politics and religion or the individual rights and dignity of every kind of human being, sort of human rights, as it were, the extent to which governments might have jurisdiction over or kind of encroach upon the private lives of individuals.

constitutional limits on the rule of law, all these kind of ideas, they didn't always exist. They didn't exist in other civilizations. They have very particular histories, and yet we talk about them so often, and yet

And yet we do so without any kind of historical grounding or... We sort of universalise from what we see in front of us. And just turn it into ideology. And I think the part, so the thing you mentioned before about, you know, history enrolments declining, there's empirical data to kind of back up the ignorance thing too. So, you know, history enrolments, history majors kind of declining. And also some really interesting empirical data coming out from the US where they measure things like, you know, what is the kind of general knowledge that different generational groups over time have about history?

And that is really on the decline as well. So historical ignorance, I think in a way that in previous generations we didn't have. And the third one is ideology. With ideology, this is the kind of sense that history basically, we tend to reduce to an ideological battleground. And I think this is so tragic. You know, we talk a lot about the culture wars these days.

And really the culture wars, you know, exacerbated so much by the way that the digital world works and by the way that social media works. The culture wars tend to reduce, you know, when we do talk about history in the public sphere, it tends to reduce it to this kind of almost Manichean sense that historical figures or movements or phenomena like empires or whatever are either beyond redemption, you know, black or white, good or evil, right?

And so we're unable to disagree well about the past. We can't understand that there are ethical complexities in the past. And I think even more so today, in our ahistoric age, we tend to reduce history just to ideology. History classrooms have become the focus of these culture wars.

In America, for example, my adopted country, many progressives fear the U.S. history curriculum is a whitewashed fable suppressing uncomfortable truths about slavery and race. And it's out of this concern that the famous 1619 Project was born.

It reframes American history by saying that the real founding of the country was not 1776 and the Declaration of Independence and all that, but 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. Conservatives in America rallied to rebut the 1619 project, worried that teachers and students will be swept up in a hypercritical obsession with race, a kind of projection of contemporary problems onto the history.

In March 2024, researchers from the American Historical Association published an article that was clearly in response to all of this in Time magazine, and they told everyone to calm down. We'll link to the full article in the show notes, but here's the basic message for teachers of history.

The friction of recent culture wars offers a unique opportunity for teachers and other historians to clarify what's exciting about history and how it's distinct from ongoing red versus blue conflagrations.

Ultimately, what history teachers teach their students about – cause and consequence, structure and agency, context and complexity, contingency and continuity – bears little resemblance to what partisan culture warriors argue about, who we are as a nation, and how we should feel about it. The former trains the mind for judgment, the latter for propaganda.

If I'm honest, I find that a bit wishy-washy and a bit patronising, as if the goal of history is to stand in judgement over our forebears, when I think we should be at least open to them standing in judgement of us, at least on some things. But the basic point of this article, I think, is solid. History shouldn't be about contemporary politics.

Some people are wary of the discipline of history precisely because can't you make it mean anything? So why bother? You sound like a, yeah, like you're kind of channeling a certain kind of undergraduate student there. No. Okay. So history as a discipline has all kinds of established methodologies. You read sources. I mean, gosh, John, as you, you know, as you know, and as you have written about so well, right, we engage with the sources. There's a kind of

analogy between the way that we deal with evidence and the way that forensically, you know, legally you deal with evidence. You weigh up and you think about the reliability of evidence. People forget though, don't they, that there is a factness to history. There are things that are just there, letters, laws, inscriptions, remains, and you have to deal with them. So there are

There's always an objectivity to history, even if we bring ourselves to that history. In his book, Will to Power, the great philosopher of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, railed against the so-called positivists who said it's all about facts. In fact, there are only facts. He replied, no, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact in itself.

Applied to history, that means history is just what you make of it. It's all ideology, interpretation. Nothing is solid. A lot of people feel that way about history. But I feel like replying, tell that to the first enslaved Africans in America. There's only interpretation, no facts. Tell it to the people who lost their lives in the American War of Independence or the Anzacs at Gallipoli.

The truth is both facts and framing have to be recognised in good history. There's a recursive relationship between the two. There are facts to explore, whether letters, inscriptions, wider archaeology. And when the historian has explored all of the available facts, he or she then proposes a theory, a story that best explains the facts in context.

But that story must always be submissive to new facts or to new theories that better explain the existing facts. History isn't purely factual like mathematics, but it is scientific in the sense that the existing data is what gives rise to, or at least should give rise to, our understanding of the past. And that evidence or data always takes precedence over our theories.

Let me give you a small example from my own field. In the Gospels, we frequently read statements like in Matthew 4, Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news. The mention of synagogues in the Gospels was always intriguing to historians because no evidence had been found that there were synagogues in the first part of the first century in Galilee or Judea.

There were synagogues outside of Israel from that period, and there were synagogues within Israel from a much later period, but none had been found that could be dated to Jesus' own time and place. So what do you do with a statement like, Jesus went throughout the synagogues preaching?

We could say with confidence that by the time of the Gospel writers, 30 to 60 years after Jesus, there must have been enough synagogues for it to make sense for them to write that Jesus preached in the synagogues. But we couldn't say for sure that Jesus really preached in synagogues.

Maybe this was a true remembrance of Jesus' ministry, but maybe it was an innocent retrogression into the story of Jesus. And maybe it was a deliberate attempt to make Jesus seem more Jewish than he really was. And all of these interpretations were on the table, and they are found in the textbooks right up until about 15 years ago, which is basically yesterday in ancient history.

In 2009, archaeologists discovered a lovely pre-AD 70 synagogue in the Galilean town of Magdala, the home of Mary Magdalene. Later, the same year, I mean, this was a fluky year, they confirmed another synagogue in Kerbet Wadi Hammam. And then in 2016, they discovered a third pre-70 synagogue at Tel Rechesh near Mount Tabor.

And then, weirdly, just in 2021, they found another first century synagogue in the town of Magdala, 300 meters from the one they found back in 2009. It turns out that not only did some Galilean towns have a synagogue, some Galilean towns had more than one synagogue. No one was expecting that.

It's probably fair to say that as at 2024, no one still argues that the repeated mentions of synagogues in the Gospels were innocent retrojections into the story of Jesus, let alone deliberate attempts to make Jesus seem more Jewish than he was. These theories have to submit to the actual facts, to the evidence.

The theory that best explains all of the data, both the testimony of the Gospels and the archaeological record, is that Jesus was a Jewish synagogue preacher. This is what I mean by a recursive relationship between evidence and interpretation, facts and story. History isn't just a list of facts that would give us no understanding of what those facts mean. Nor is history just story, let alone propaganda.

When our story of the past is contradicted by an accumulation of facts, the story has to bend and bow and sometimes break. Speaking of break, we'll be back in a minute.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. What does it matter? I mean, we're wanting to progress. Why do we have to keep looking back? Well, you know, any society, it should strike us actually that any society

Any kind of revolution that wants to kind of completely obliterate a society begins by obliterating history and by starting again. So if we have any kind of sense of the kind of, you know, phrases that you just used about progressing and thinking about the future, we can't do this at all without realising how we've been actually formed by the past and what it might teach us. What would we gain if we all developed a deeper love and appreciation for

of the discipline of history or just more practically the past? I think like when you look at culture, you look at society differently.

parts of society are going to gain different things. I mean, I think broadly as a whole, you look at a culture like Australia or like America, and there is a sense in which, you know, we are now grappling with a generation that I think Jonathan Haidt quite accurately used the phrase, the anxious generation. There is a lack of rootedness, a lack of grounding. Now for Haidt and people who are doing that kind of sociological and psychological research, there are different kind of approaches to that.

to dealing with that kind of rootlessness and disconnection and mental health epidemic. But actually, broadly speaking as a society, we need to ground ourselves in history in order to understand the grounding from which we have actually came in order to understand who we are and how we are formed. Now, I happen to be a Christian, as I mentioned, and so

what I'm actually also really interested in is thinking about, okay, like how can we make sense of history? How can we engage well with history in such a way that we can actually steward it and learn from it? So for example, can it help us to engage with one another in such a way that helps us overcome the culture wars? And I think we can actually. You say that Christians have a special role in

stewarding, recovering, reminding people of history. So can we just focus on that idea? What special role do you think Christians have in this? Well, I think Christians are called to steward the past, to tend and to keep the past. And what I mean by that is that, well, the whole idea of like stewarding the past, of tending and keeping the past, is a metaphor that comes from

to us from this idea of what priestly work is. Because I, yeah, I love this idea that Christians are called to be, well we talked about in the New Testament, in terms of being a royal priesthood. So priestly work is this work of tending and keeping.

And that involves kind of two things. The tending work is a kind of more progressive idea that you kind of uncover with relationship to the past. You tend to kind of uncover and cultivate the stories of the past that we don't actually know about, including stories that might sit quite uncomfortably with us, stories which might involve sin in the past. Like we deal with that and we uncover that and pass it down and to tend it.

But then the keeping part of the past is the more conservative aspect of actually kind of preserving, like conserving the past and passing down that kind of cultural heritage. And so in that sense, there is kind of two aspects of this, the kind of the tending and the keeping.

Sarah talks about tending and keeping history in the same way that the scientist Robert Boyle talks about tending and keeping nature. Boyle was hugely influential on Sarah as she began to look into her own worldview at university and whether it held up to scrutiny. There's a kind of story behind that metaphor, which is that

When I was kind of thinking through, thinking in this context when I was writing this book about how should Christians actually approach the past?

I was kind of reminded of my own kind of story and how I began to kind of think about history as a historian back when I was doing my PhD in Cambridge. Because, you know, like I mentioned, I wasn't a Christian at the time. But I was reading, spending, you know, long summers kind of reading the work of various natural philosophers in the 17th century. But one in particular, Robert Boyle, one of the founders of what we now call modern science,

Boyle in his scientific works kept kind of talking about this kind of image of being a priest of nature. And so here's Boyle writing works that we expect to kind of think of as scientific and he's quoting Psalm 8. And so for Boyle what this means, he's not a historian, he's what we now call a scientist, but for Boyle what it means is to be a priest of nature is to be somebody who studies the creation, the natural world, in order to kind of bring praises to God.

And I remember, you know, sitting in Cambridge kind of reading that, being an atheist and kind of finding really compelling and beautiful this sense that Boyle had this understanding of why his own kind of vocation in life, like why his own discipline was so meaningful for him. And I would sit there as an atheist thinking, you know, here I am kind of devoting my life to history, but like what is...

What does this actually mean? And I was kind of aware that atheism couldn't provide me with that same kind of meaning. I mean, I remember you telling me people like Boyle messed with your head. Yeah. Because...

He's smart. He's science. Yeah, yeah. And yet devout. And then you kept on finding more and more people like that. Yep. I remember you telling me you started reading old sermons. Yes. When you were in Oxford. So tell us something of that story. Yeah, yeah, sure. So I arrived at Cambridge Firstfall to do a PhD with, you know, very kind of horrible straw man caricatures of Christians. And really, like you mentioned, really,

Robert Boyle, one of my favorite people, has basically began to unpick every kind of assumption I held about Christianity and what Christians actually believed. So for one thing, I was sitting there, you know, kind of reading Boyle in Cambridge and realizing that, you know, the more that Boyle was talking about the Psalms and the more that he was writing books called The Disquisition and Things Above Reason and talking about theology, I couldn't actually dismiss that anymore.

So in the world where there are so many inanimate and irrational creatures, that neither understand how much they owe to their Creator by owing Him even themselves, nor are born to a condition enabling them to acknowledge it, man has born the priest of nature, and as the most obliged and more capable member of it, is bound to return thanks and praises to his Maker,

not only for himself, but for the whole creation. Robert Boyle, 1663.

And then it's not just Boyle that, you know, his whole circle of people in the 17th century, every single one of them that I read was profoundly influenced by their faith. So this wasn't just a window dressing. And moreover, it revealed to me that this kind of assumption that I'd held for a long time growing up, that this thing called science and religion were sort of inextricably opposed, that couldn't be maintained either. But then, you know, it was still many years away from me becoming a Christian.

But then after my PhD at Cambridge, I had a junior research fellowship at Oxford.

And one day I kind of realised that the desk that I always sat at in the library was in front of the theology section. And I think the reason why I picked up a book of sermons that day was that I had briefly attended a series of lectures that the well-known atheist philosopher Peter Singer had been giving in Oxford, lectures that I'd kind of expected to present a very kind of compelling atheist vision of human ethics, but actually which kind of

pulled the carpet out from under my feet, as it were, because I realised that my deepest moral intuitions about the kind of innate equality of human life and the dignity of all human life just weren't sustained by atheism at all. And so I was kind of in this, at sea, as it were, in Oxford, and kind of pulled out a book of sermons one day and began to read. And to be honest, I think I was too arrogant even at that point to kind of read the Bible and

And so I was reading sermons and actually began to realise that the picture they painted of who God was and also who humanity was, oh my goodness, this idea of this kind of brokenness, not only of every human being and of every society and every civilisation, but also the kind of profound brokenness in the depths of the human heart, that that explanation of the kind of fundamental truth

character of human life and human society was profoundly compelling. And I think what that did was make me realize that I basically dismissed Christianity arrogantly as if I actually knew something about it without actually having known anything about it at all. And then not long afterwards, maybe about a year or so, I moved to Florida to take up a post as an assistant professor at Florida State University. A friend there gave me C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

And that book began to kind of unpick at every kind of assumption I'd held as well about Christianity. I found myself one Sunday morning deciding that I was going to go to church by myself. And I

I remember kind of having this moment too where I kind of wondered whether what okay so what we might call metaphysical naturalism so this idea that the only things that exist are matter in motion and actually to be honest as an atheist that's what I believe to be true about the world right that there is no spiritual reality there is nothing transcendent the only things that exist are a matter in motion and I remember as I kind of approached the church in downtown Tallahassee that morning

It was just kind of empty and silent and just wondering whether or not there was actually anything else. And then I walked into church and the church that I went to engaged in the Lord's Supper that morning.

and there was a hymn by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and there was, so it was strongly kind of a historical, a historically kind of richly grounded service. I just sat in the pews and listened and was profoundly moved. Actually, even, I haven't said this in many places, but I'll say it here, even to the point of tears, to be honest, because there was an experience there of a God who loved me and from whom I realised I was always running away,

And who was welcoming me home or was inviting me to come home and to recognize what a broken person I was and what kind of forgiveness that

through the Lord Jesus, he was actually offering me. And so there was something about that liturgy, to be honest, of the Lord's Supper and hearing these words, you know, this is my body broken for you, and blood poured out for the forgiveness of sin, that invited me into this story about a God who saves a people in history and who renders time precious.

and human life meaningful. For a long time I really had to think through like what does this actually mean? What does my faith actually mean for how I practice history? Realising I think how

a-historical our own culture is now, and thinking as a Christian and as a professor of history at uni now, thinking about, well, hold on, this is not what God tells us about history. History is this vast treasury. It's incredibly rich. And I think that actually if we steward the past well, if we tend and keep it and we engage with it, I think it holds these profound riches for us. Many Christians today are striving to be

Oh, yeah. To society. Yeah. And so they shun tradition, which they see as regressive, backward. You see it differently. Is this just because you're a young fuddy-duddy? It's just because I'm excessively...

Hey, producer Kayleigh here. I'm just chiming in to say that when researcher Al first heard the tape of John calling Sarah a fuddy-duddy, he was like, what the heck? He's brilliant, but he's also a millennial. And John isn't. So for those like Al who didn't quite know what the word fuddy-duddy meant, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that fuddy-duddy is a noun. It's also slang. It means an old-fashioned person, an ineffectual old fogey.

which is not very nice. The earliest known usage of the word is from 1904, but we don't actually know where the word came from. Fuddy-duddy typically occurs about 0.02 times per million words in modern written English.

Forgive me, Undeceptions only approved my full Oxford English Dictionary subscription a few weeks ago and it is way too fun. Okay, back to our two fuddy-duddies. A couple of things. First thing is, I don't know that tradition for tradition's sake is not kind of what I'm on about.

Actually, I think what I'm trying to say is that there are incredibly rich practices historically throughout Christian history. And when I say that, what I mean is like spiritual practices, like this thing called Protestant meditation, for example, night watches, liturgical hours, things like this.

incredibly rich historical spiritual practices, intellectual practices, traditions, for example, of engaging with sacredness and beauty, which Christians from a variety of different denominations and traditions have practiced over the centuries.

And which I think can be more helpful than ever today in a world in which, A, we're kind of ignorant of it, or B, we kind of just tend to, I think, like, to be honest, almost excavate the world of any kind of sense of God's profound transcendence today.

Meditation is a bit of a 21st century buzzword and most often linked to Eastern spiritualities like the Buddhist traditions. But in the late 16th century, Church of England Bishop Joseph Hall wrote several books on Protestant meditation. It was bringing into the Reformation a tradition that had been in Christianity from pretty much the beginning. This was a way, he thought, to orient the soul and ignite its love for God.

In her book, Sarah encourages us to try out this practice. Christians have been practicing meditation for centuries, so why not give it a go today? Because it can be a deep and rewarding way to connect with the Bible. Even if you don't believe, why not give it a go? Take a passage of scripture that means something to you and dwell on it in silence.

See what this ancient practice brings. You never know what new discoveries come from very old things. Augustine, who also meditated on God's word, wrote of his own conversion experience, Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you.

You know, Isaac Watts used this beautiful metaphor, the vast treasury of the past. If we lean into that kind of vast treasury of the past, I think there's a kind of richness there that will actually be profoundly attractive. And the gospel, like, to be honest, and I'll say this as somebody who, like I mentioned, has been an atheist and has become a Christian. The promise of a God who loves you and who has faith

forgive, like who will forgive you if only you will come to him and trust in him. That offer of what Christians call the gospel, that profound and beautiful truth is something which is attractive regardless of how we try to dress it up. So I think, you know, forget about trying to be cool. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I love about your book is this confidence that actually you

eternally true things can be preserved in these traditions that are the most relevant things even if on a superficial level they don't seem relevant or they certainly don't seem cool. But in a sense the more you strive to be cool for this moment

you're actually going to lose the next moment. Yeah, that's right. Whereas there are things that can sustain us throughout. Yeah. I mean, look, here's a pretty beautiful example of that. One of the things that I've found is that giving people the Book of Common Prayer is

And talking about, and I've talked about this with people who are young and cool. And believe it or not, the funny thing is the liturgical prayers as a kind of devotional device to this kind of idea that actually there are these long historical traditions of structuring our time liturgically and kind of rendering it meaningful and

and engaging in like that. So what's often called the daily office. So in other words, you know, set hours during the day where people pray. I've found that that has had such a resonance with people in a way that is just totally surprising. Let's press pause. I've got a five minute Jesus for you. There's an aversion in modern Christianity to fixed prayers, liturgies, prayer books, and all of that stuff.

And it's a very modern worry. Hardly anyone in church history would recognize a modern Christian church service or a modern Christian private prayer time and devotional, as they call it. The demise of fixed prayers, like in the prayer book, coincided with the rise of the seemingly superior values of individualism and authenticity.

Unless my devotional practices, public or private, are my own, formed by me expressing who I am in this moment, then they probably lack true significance. That's the idea. There's a related aversion to anything rote. Rote learning in school went out roughly at the same time as the rise of this authentic self stuff.

Rote learning was thought to externalize knowledge instead of helping a student imbibe the knowledge through personal discovery. Worship by rote went out with education by rote. Rote prayers, it was thought, are a mere shell of religion, not the heartfelt center.

But I'm with the ancients on this. Ancient pagan writers like Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Plutarch and many others all knew that rote learning could of course be abused so that a student never moved beyond the fixed forms. But they also insisted that rote learning was the foundation of genuine intellectual creativity.

The person who learnt to recite large portions of Homer's Iliad, for example, would over time gain an ear for the very best of Greek grammar and poetry. Those who memorised the best speeches of the most famous orators eventually imbibed what makes for compelling rhetoric so that they could produce their own.

They thought about rote learning a bit like the way musicians think about learning scales or learning the standards of a musical genre. This doesn't hinder authenticity and individuality. It provides a platform for them. Well, that's how I think about the prayers of the prayer book. They are the best of Christian history. They lift me above my ordinary self.

I don't want to pray just according to my ever-changing spiritual moods. Praying how I feel in the moment might be authentically me, but I'm not sure the best spirituality resides in me. I'm a very low bar. Fixed prayers lift me.

I'll get Al to put in the show notes my favorite prayer book prayers. But more importantly, Jesus himself taught a fixed permanent prayer to be said word for word by anyone who wanted to be his student. We call it the Lord's Prayer or the Our Father because it begins Our Father in Heaven. Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Then there's a little extra bit the church added a few decades later. There's a modern evangelical worry about even seeing the Lord's Prayer as a fixed prayer.

This would seem totally weird to just about every Christian from the first century to the 19th century. I mean, one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament is the Didache from the very end of the first century, and it urges people to say the Lord's Prayer three times a day.

The modern aversion to this is sometimes justified by reference to the word how in Matthew 6:9. Jesus introduces his prayer with the words, "This is how you should pray, our Father in heaven," etc. Some say that Jesus just meant this is the how, the style, the vibe of prayer. But there's no how in the Greek. It literally says, "Thusly you are to pray, our Father in heaven," etc.

And the version of the Lord's Prayer recorded in Luke chapter 11 is even clearer. Jesus introduces his Our Father with, When you pray, say, Our Father in heaven, etc. Contemporary culture sometimes dismisses traditions like saying the Lord's Prayer daily as inauthentic. But I'd say refusing to pray set prayers and only settling for my own creations is evidence that I believe in my own soul.

more than external truths. I'll be frank, I've grown tired of chasing authenticity, of striving for what is new. I'm sick of fads. Faddish books, faddish preachers, faddish programs. I want an anchor. I don't want to be at sea. I don't want to be captive to my little moment of Christian history, my blip of culture. I want to swim in the great stream of the very best of Christian history.

Not just the prayer book, but above all, the Lord's Prayer. So whether you are a Christian or not, I want to suggest say the Lord's Prayer. Say it with understanding daily and see what new things this most ancient thing brings. You can press play now.

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So for my more sceptical listener, what do you reckon will be the benefit of them taking history more seriously? What will they get ethically, maybe even spiritually? Well, here's the thing.

I think if you live a life in which you are kind of rootless and you don't understand or really know much about the incredible riches of history, you don't really know anything about, not only about where you've come from or where your society or your nation, your community has come from, but you're also kind of depriving yourself of the incredible kind of riches of the...

the historical processes and the culture that has been created through the centuries. I mean, when you look at the whole history of, say, of literature and art and poetry and music through huge cultural movements like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in Europe, or when you look at the kind of revolutions which shaped the modern world, like the American Revolution or the French Revolution,

there is a kind of incredibly rich, like long conversation there about some of the most important kind of

which we have to kind of engage in, right? There are incredibly rich conversations about what it means to be human. What is the nature of a good life? What is a life that's lived well? How ought society be organised? Throughout history, from Plato onwards, people have been discussing these kind of profoundly important ideas. And so actually, if we, even as like a non-Christian, we re-engage with the past, you actually find that we've

really the most important questions that face us today as a society, like how do we live? Do we have obligations to the poor, to the outcast? What is a life lived well? Is there something, is there a transcendent ground to something like goodness or truth or beauty, morality, ethics?

There are long conversations about this which stretch back for centuries, which we don't even know about unless we actually engage with the past. And actually, I think C.S. Lewis put it best when he says, you know, if you join a conversation at 11 o'clock, which began at 8, you miss the full bearing of what's being said.

Tired of your humdrum life in England? Eager for excitement and adventure? Why not leave it all behind and take on a new frontier here at Mavanna Borne Northern Ireland? Must be a Protestant. Must bring your own arms and parade every six months. Actual land size may differ from contract. Friendly locals not included.

That's a clip from a BBC satirical education video. An English gentleman from the early 17th century is trying to convince you to move to Northern Ireland.

King James I became the first British monarch to rule over Scotland, England and Ireland in 1603. James was a Protestant and wanted to strengthen his rule, particularly in Ireland, where he faced rebellion from the Catholic Irish-speaking population. He and his advisors hatched a plan to encourage people from England and Scotland to move to the lovely northern part of Ireland.

It had become known as the Ulster Plantation. Land was confiscated from the Gaelic Irish peoples and given to loyal British subjects. Thousands upon thousands of Scots and Brits settled in Northern Ireland. Some would say this was the British Empire developing its colonisation tactics before exporting them throughout the world.

Among those who supported the Ulster Plantation was Francis Bacon, the so-called founder of modern science, who also served as Attorney General, then Lord Chancellor for King James I. So, for example, one of the most well-known statesmen in 17th century England, Sir Francis Bacon. During this time, England is establishing colonies or plantations in Ireland and in North America. And

And so the temptation is, I think, to kind of look at everyone in that era, particularly someone like Bacon, who was, you know, most powerful, his Lord Chancellor, briefly, and to think of him as nothing but an ideological apologist for colonisation. No man can, by caretaking, as the scripture saith, add a cubit to his stature in this little model of a man's body.

But in the great frame of kingdoms and commonwealths, it is in the power of princes and estates to add amplitude and greatness to their kingdoms. Francis Bacon of Plantations

And yet, actually, when you actually uncover Bacon's story and you realise that he writes this essay, for example, called On Plantations, where he says, I'll quote him, I like a plantation in a pure soil, that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others, for else it is an extirpation rather than a plantation. So here's Bacon, and yet he's exhibiting these kind of misgivings about how the British are conducting their colonies.

Now, here's the complex thing about that. And here's the really, here's the thing that we can kind of learn from this, right? Because he doesn't fit into our categories. He's neither an ideological apologist for colonization, and he shouldn't be kind of dismissed or cancelled from history. But at the same time, he didn't, he doesn't completely oppose colonization either, right? So when we kind of deal with a kind of historical case, historical figure like

like Francis Bacon, for example, we learn to actually deal with something of that ethical complexity of the past, those tensions, the fact that they don't fit easily into our ideological categories. And I think if we can do that, then we can actually kind of recognise that when we have some historical literacy, we can learn to engage with history without kind of reducing it just to ideology. It feels like there's humility that can come from this. Yeah, I think there really is.

And, you know, one of the things that I tell my students at the beginning of every semester, every kind of, you know, class that you teach, is I basically say, look, you know, when we study this class this semester, we're going to come across people who are going to hold ideas and views that we are going to profoundly disagree with. But, and this goes for, you know, sort of all kinds of views, right? I'm teaching history that, you know, stretches back to the ancient world at the moment.

But here's the thing, what I want you guys to do when we do this is to try to use empathy and cultivate, and I sort of talk about it as an intellectual virtue, try to cultivate a kind of sense of intellectual humility. That doesn't mean that we become moral relativists or anything, not at all.

But what we try to do is to kind of understand that people in the past saw things in very different ways than we saw them today, than we might understand these things today. And that actually even by engaging with these kinds of stories, we cultivate that sense of empathy. We cultivate a bit of intellectual humility.

We lose a bit of, I'm going to quote C.S. Lewis again because I can, we lose that kind of, remember how C.S. Lewis used this phrase, chronological snobbery, right? Like we lose a bit of that and then we can cultivate something of intellectual humility and that helps us. I think it helps us be human, right? Like it helps us actually engage with others with whom we might profoundly disagree. And maybe helps us see ourselves too as the same mixed bag. Yeah.

Yeah, it really does. Here's another kind of fascinating example of what you just said, like how it might help us see ourselves slightly differently. One of the figures well known to your American audiences, Frederick Douglass, you know, he writes, but I think actually your British and Australian audiences may not have heard of Frederick Douglass that much. So Douglass, you know, great abolitionist, right, before the American Civil War. And he writes this, he gives this speech, writes this pamphlet called What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? Mm-hmm.

And in that pamphlet, he calls out this profound sin of slavery, and yet he does it without actually condemning America. And he actually says, I do not despair of this country. What to the American sleeve is your 4th of July?

I answer: "A day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty an unholy license, your national greatness swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless,

Your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery, your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings with all your religious parade and solemnity are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery.

Frederick Douglass, 1852

So here's somebody who in the past has more reason, we would say probably than anyone, right, to be tempted to completely condemn or to cancel or whatever term we want to call it today. And yet he says, he calls out sin, and yet he says, and yet I do not despair of this country. And he maintains hope.

Now just getting back to what you said about history enabling us to see something of ourselves more clearly, the reason that Frederick Douglass can do that is because as a Christian he can see that this, what he calls sin, right, this profound brokenness that lies at the heart, like collectively as nations, but also at the heart of every human being, is something which is universal. So we can identify that there is this thing called sin

And yet it exists in all people. God offers to, as Douglas knew so well, God offers to forgive and there is hope. But he can do that because he sees that sin is universal. And so anyway, look, we can read a story like Douglas, I think, and then

use that to not only kind of see the history of slavery clearly and so forth, but actually to kind of see a model for how to engage with the sin of the past without just degenerating into this kind of condemnation and culture wars. As if we're the righteous ones. Yeah, exactly. At the outbreak of the Second World War, C.S. Lewis made a wry and pointed observation in a sermon he gave at St. Mary's Church in Oxford.

Lewis frequently pointed out how much bad philosophy there was in Britain at the time, and he believed Christians had a sacred duty to remedy the situation, not by mere Christian apologetics, but by superior thinking about all intellectual matters.

Sarah, herself a one-time academic at Lewis's Oxford, has a powerful call to superior thinking on the matter of history. A rephrasing of C.S. Lewis's point seems relevant. We should say, good history must exist if for no other reason because bad history needs to be answered. Sarah's argument for taking history seriously is first and foremost a call to truth in a post-truth world.

We've entered an ahistorical age in which we're nearly incapable of speaking meaningfully about the past, except perhaps as part of the culture wars. Commentators today, and some professional historians, are certainly apt to use historical stories to score moral or political points about sex, science, racism, religion, nationalism, the West, or whatever.

Some of this presentism, as Sarah and others call it, is valid, but a great deal of it is selective and wrong. Good history of the sort championed by Sarah will offer clarity and correction. It will refuse to wield factoids as weapons of war. It will invite the voices of the past to speak for themselves, as if at their own trial.

Sometimes we, the modern jury, may find our ancestors guilty as charged. There's a lot of that nowadays. Other times, if we're honest, they'll prove us guilty of slander and evidence tampering. MUSIC

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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Herodotus. I've got a story to tell and I'm going to tell it Hadley.

Alistair Belling is a writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveston remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwe. Our voice actor today was Yannick Laurie. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com. Letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.