Well, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Martin Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, begins his projected four-volume history of modern American religion with the following sentence: “The theological modernists were male members of the privileged subculture, almost all of them Protestant.” The rest, as they say, is coda.

Actually, the introduction should have been warning enough. It tells us that the theme of the first volume, which covers the years from 1893 to 1919, will be “irony,” which seems to be the reigning category of postmodern thought. According to Professor Marty, an ironic situation “occurs when the consequences of an act are diametrically opposed to the original intention” and the “fundamental cause of the disparity lies in the actor himself, and his original purpose.” Now, right up front, I will admit that, in another life, I have been known to use irony as a historical theme myself. But, after being bludgeoned with irony by Professor Marty for 319 pages of text—from the book’s subtitle “The Irony of It All” all the way to “Conclusion: On Ironic Interpretation”—I promise not to do it ever again. By the way, in case you’re curious, the theme of the second volume, which covers 1919 to 1941, is “conflict.” Really?

In fact, the two volumes now in print were originally published about five years apart, the first in 1986 and the second in 1991. The University of Chicago Press has recently reissued them, presumably to take advantage of the scholarly interest generated by the Fundamentalism Project, a massive compendium of primary source materials edited by Professor Marty and R. Scott Appleby. In the first volume of the current history, Professor Marty sets himself the task of describing how American religion encountered “the modern,” by which he appears to mean a combination of Darwin, science generally, industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the other changes of the period between the end of Radical Reconstruction in the South and the beginning of World War I. In the second, he extends the discussion to the interwar years, in an account dominated by the Great Depression and the approach of World War II. The first is largely a story told from the inside out; the second, conversely, is told from the outside in. More of this in a moment.

During the five years between volumes, Professor Marty apparently experienced a significant change of heart, a change evident in his more sober assessment of religious liberalism and in his decision to concentrate primarily on the story of those “male members of the privileged subculture,” a group now expanded to include Catholics and the occasional Jewish observer. Moreover, the unbearably coy tone of the first volume— epitomized by such chapter headings as “Peoplehood as a Cocoon,” “Denomination as a Canopy,” and “The Carapaces of Reactive Protestantism”—has subsided into chastened sobriety, only occasionally broken by such irrepressible rubrics as “A Culture of Cross-Clefts and Criss-Crossings” and, my personal favorite, “Red Scare, Yellow Peril, White Hoods.” (After all, how often can a work of religious history put you in mind of that old country and western standard, “Red Necks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer”?) In any event, the two volumes are rather different, and what is true of one is not altogether true of the other, which makes for some difficulty in reviewing them as a piece.

Now, personally I have a weakness for what one might call synthetic histories, the types that tackle a major movement, say the Reformation, or a large chunk of time, say the Victorian Age. (Usually I prefer the one volume variety, but I am willing to branch out to a series on occasion.) Such histories represent a genre that tests the historian’s art to its fullest; it is no mean task to construct a coherent narrative that says something significant about the broad sweep of events and that neither wields the pruning shears too vigorously nor leaves an impenetrable thicket for the ordinary reader. Moreover, the constraints imposed by the medium mean that the author’s selection of incidents, his choice of an organizing theme, his historical perspective, all are readily exposed to the reader and reveal equally much about historian and history.

Professor Marty’s previous foray into this kind of historical writing, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America, won the National Book Award in 1972, and, even if you disagreed with his thematic take on Protestant nationalism, it was, at the very least, a good book of its type. Unfortunately, the current volumes fall far short of this mark. Not only is Professor Marty’s reading of events rather shortsighted to my way of thinking, but the entire account is deficient in historical craft.

Let me begin with craft. One of the more disconcerting aspects of both volumes is that there is a great deal of shifting and circling, and, possibly as a result, there is much repetition. Even so, much that needs explaining to the intended lay audience goes unexplained. Professor Marty takes up an event—for example, a papal encyclical introduced without date or title or a premillennial approach to eschatology—discusses it for a bit, drops the subject, and then picks up the thread a few chapters later when all is explained, at least sometimes. This kind of unnerving discontinuity should have alerted him to the fact that something was wrong with his organizational categories. Rather than the sweep of history, what emerges seems to be a parade of individual personalities, most of them rather minor figures—and, as best as I can tell, deservedly so—grouped by whether they embraced “the modern” or developed some strategy to avoid it.

In fact, I believe this disorganization indicates a subtle but significant failing of historiographical vision. The great German church historian, Johann August Wilhelm Neander (1789–1850), observed that there are two ways to describe the historical unfolding of a movement such as Christianity: from the perspective of its own internal development or of its reaction to external events. Now obviously, this will have a major effect on the way the writer tells his story. Henry IV in the snow at Canossa is a big deal if you are telling the story of the medieval church from the outside in; a very small matter if you are telling the same story from the inside out. By and large, for Neander at least, the history of religion was best told from the interior perspective if it was to be a history of religion and not of politics.

Now, Professor Marty is part of this tradition; he explicitly accepts Martin Luther’s view that history reveals God’s work through human agency, which ought to lead to thematic unity, if nothing else. But part of the narrative (and conceptual) problem in Marty’s account arises because he shifts back and forth between interior and exterior perspectives without clearly recognizing when he is doing so. This leaves some fairly strange gaps—World War I, for example. It also leads to some fairly odd choices, as when he devotes a significant amount of space to the sociologist Vida Scudder, while concluding that her “vision had more influence than her practical effects.” And, in the second volume, when he settles largely on an exterior perspective, he has little of interest to tell us that is distinctive to religion. He has long chapters on the Palmer Raids, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restrictions, even the Catholic Worker movement, and spends a great deal of time on prohibition and the policies of the Roosevelt administration. All these things are interesting (although I can think of better places to learn about them), but they leave the reader wondering whether there was any religion between 1919 and 1940. The answer, as Professor Marty well knows, is that there was plenty of it, in the popular form of Fundamentalism and Pentecostalism and in the intellectual movement of neo-orthodoxy, each of which he ultimately treats at some length.

As if this weren’t enough, both volumes suffer from a more mundane problem. Beneath all the postmodern posturing, they share a remarkably banal approach to historical explanation. For example, in the first volume, Professor Marty suggests the progressive historians of the early twentieth century—such well-known figures as Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, Edward Eggleston, and James Harvey Robinson—can be understood as products of their common effort to seek “personal emancipation” from a midwestern Protestant childhood. Proponents of the Social Gospel, on the other hand, lacked the security of a protecting father in their childhoods, so they sought one in the divinity. With equal insight (if I may be allowed just one last ironical comment), Professor Marty offers that, during the same period, persecution helped Jews and Catholics forge their identities, although in the next breath, he cheerily assures readers that there was very little real persecution and that most Protestants were easily able to ignore anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic propaganda. As for the very interesting question of why there was so little violence—religiously motivated or otherwise—during the Great Depression, Professor Marty offers the following observation: “The thesis that trauma was preoccupying the cultural center leads to the discovery that potential disruptions from ‘outsiders,’ ‘marginal groups,’ and others did not disturb society at large or even come to public notice.”

This last brings me to a bit of crankiness that may be permitted someone who has read both volumes—every word of them— in close succession. Professor Marty reasonably complains of the “peculiar language of insiders” and the “arcane vocabulary” adopted by antimodernists. Yet, particularly in the first volume, he offers his readers— sometimes repeatedly—such choice phrases as the “hump of transition to modernity,” “rapid Englishing,” “preunderstanding of text,” “hermeneutic circle,” “a common cherishable experience,” to pick among the many. I lost count of the number of times the word Zeitgeist appeared, as in, “A church built upon progressive revelation had no trouble with the zeitgeist” or, if you prefer, “to complete the sweep by the zeitgeist.” And, I spent a few moments frozen with horror contemplating the kind of being one might describe as a “pioneer ecumenical bureaucrat.”

This infelicitous vocabulary is coupled with a prose style that seems to operate on the principle: never use an active voice when the passive can be found. In one chapter that I surveyed, almost every topic sentence contained a passive construction. Where were the copyeditors at the University of Chicago Press, the people who ordinarily save authors from themselves?

But, to return to shortsightedness. In the first volume, Professor Marty sets out to discuss the great variety of religious response to the modern, including the response of many outside the Protestant “core culture,” people he later describes as “the outsiders, the religious groups considered marginal, the overlooked classes and sorts of people.” In the second volume, he apologizes, particularly to his students, for crafting an account that focuses on “the winners from previous centuries,” justifying the choice because it will contribute “to the contemporary debates by showing the trauma of those at the center of the canon.” And, just in case we missed his bona fides, he reminds us that, in the great religious and cultural debate, he has chosen to side with the “pluralists.”

Well fine, but pluralism carries a tariff that Professor Marty does not seem altogether willing to pay. There is, for example, a serious tension between cosmopolitan respect for other religious traditions and Professor Marty’s extremely sympathetic account of Christian missions to convert those of other faiths—and, for that matter, his criticism of liberalism because liberalism cannot generate missionary zeal. Similarly, there is something inconsistent between a commitment to religious pluralism and Professor Marty’s exasperation with people of disparate denominational traditions who choose to maintain them in the face of Christian unity movements. Moreover, there is something extremely jarring about the smug note that creeps into his treatment of Christian neo-orthodoxy, a note that I believe those sharing Professor Marty’s political views would call “triumphalism.” Here, at last, he seems to be saying, is a way to have both left-wing politics and the gospel message of sin and redemption by a transcendent God. For Professor Marty, it’s a winning combination by which to reinvest the Protestant church with power and supreme influence in the wider culture—something that was absent from the agenda of those who criticized the whole ethos of “Christ in culture.”

Professor Marty’s views also lead him to some fairly predictable positions. Christian Socialists are good; social conservatives are not. Fundamentalists are almost invariably belligerent and anti-intellectual; if not, they exhibit “pathos.” Pentecostals are able to generate “group behavior patterns that resulted at least in some measure from their participating within a highly conducive atmosphere.” On the other hand, sometimes these positions, while in character, are not so very predictable at all, as in “Judaism and Christianity had always regarded themselves as agents of therapy. They saw healing, wholeness, and unity to be goals in their program for salvation.” A Presbyterian deacon of my acquaintance hooted when she heard this. And, to the best of my knowledge, Judaism is not and has never been a religion notably concerned with salvation. In fact, the very existence of an afterlife, while often a subject of popular piety, is a matter of disagreement in Judaism’s formal teachings. Remember the Sadducees and the Pharisees, after all? A big difference between the two was that the former denied a personal afterlife while the latter went so far as to believe in the resurrection of the body.

Even Professor Marty’s well-meaning descriptions of “outsiders” have a quaint ring to them. In a four-and-a-half-page treatment of Catholic immigrants from Mexico, a page of text and a three-quarters-page picture go to their “superstitious” devotion to Teresa Urrea, otherwise known as Santa Teresa, a bandit with revolutionary tendencies and a reputation among her constituency as a charismatic faith healer who survived a months-long trance. So-called “ghetto Jews” were unlikely to be aware of anti-Semitism in the American West and South; “only very literate Jews would be at all aware of the anti-Semitism in the elite culture of the literary moderns.” Non-Italians “gaped in wonder as celebrators at festivals and processions pinned dollar bills on statues of the Madonna, paraded, ate spicy foods, or lit the churches with candles.” The Lutherans of the Missouri Synod were “Gemütlich and beery in their own culture”; German Lutherans generally “liked their beer.” The Japanese are “an adaptable people”; Chinese temples are run on a “capitalist” system because the right to sell necessary religious articles is a monopoly given to the “highest bidder.” To state the obvious, these are the very stereotypes that the rest of us would hardly dare in polite conversation. Perhaps there is something to be said for irony after all.