George Marsden: Many Thanks!

George M. Marsden celebrates his 87th birthday today. I celebrate him.

I have known Professor Marsden for more than 45 of those 87 years, so I’ll refer to him as “George” in what follows—not (heavens, no!) as a peer, but as a very-much-junior whom he early on welcomed into friendship.

According to Wikipedia, George is best known for his multiple-award-winning biography of Jonathan Edwards. But that splendid book came late in a career that was already powerfully influential on other fronts.

He didn’t start with a blockbuster, however. George’s first book, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth-Century America (1970), made an impact on the vast audience focused on New School Presbyterianism. Both of those scholars likely revered it. That might strike you as a disrespectful joke. Trust me: George will like it. His books don't regularly manifest his wit, but his public addresses and private conversations brim with mordantly wry observations. I remember him once remarking on the idolatry of sports in the American psyche and his concluding with the hilariously mild comment, "Well, as we say at Notre Dame, 'It's only a game.'"

He himself joked once that his first book took him a year and a half to write, and he thought the next would take the same. Ten years later, however, he produced what has been hailed as one of the most important books on American Christianity in our time: Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (1980).

I began graduate school at Wheaton College that year, and my young supervisor, Mark Noll, raved about the book. (Those who know Mark will appreciate that “rave” perhaps overstates the case: but he was quietly affirmative.) It was the first major work, in fact, from the new array of historians of evangelicalism that would rewrite American religious history—as this group inspired those of us in other countries (notably, Canada, Australia, and the U.K.) to rewrite church history in our own lands.

Fundamentalism was very much in the news in Reagan’s America. So George made headlines in the 1980s as an expert witness in several public hearings and even trials held about the teaching in schools of evolution and creation—including the then-new “intelligent design” approach.

George went on to write several more books on evangelicalism in America, and that biography of Edwards (Jonathan Edwards: A Life [2003]) is a fitting capstone to this career’s-worth of scholarship.

As George was making his way in academe—first as a professor at Calvin College in Michigan, and later at the University of Notre Dame—he reflected more and more about how Christianity affected, or should affect, the writing of history. He never wrote a full book on Christian historiography, but his essays on the subject are unsurpassed for insight. Mark Noll made sure I read him as I was learning the craft.

This alertness to questions of worldview and method bore rich fruit in a whole new research program, issuing in numerous essays and several books—one historical, the other a more ruminative essay—on the interaction of Christianity and American higher education: The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994; updated in 2021) and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997). To this stream he latterly added a fresh take on The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (2014).

Along this busy way, George guided dissertations at Notre Dame; worked with Noll, Nathan Hatch, Edith Blumhofer, and others to direct the fruitful Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College; wrote opinion pieces and gave speeches; and otherwise served as the elder brother of the effloresence of evangelical historiography in our time.

I bear testimony today that he also made time for the likes of me.

George Marsden on the Spot

I was never George’s student. I never worked for him or with him. I lived for a while in the United States but have spent most of my life and career in Canada. There has therefore been no reason for him to feel obliged to spend a single minute of his precious time on me and my doings. And yet, here’s a glimpse of a long record of his kindness.

George first showed up personally in my life as I was completing my master’s thesis at Wheaton. Mark Noll had mentioned to George that I was writing on Edward John Carnell, a once-influential apologist and briefly president at Fuller Theological Seminary. In the early 1980s, George was preparing to write a commissioned history of Fuller—later published as Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1995).

Mark suggested I send a copy of my thesis to George, which I did—with no expectation of even a reply. After all, this was George Marsden, author of what, by 1982, was already hailed as the book the rest of us aspiring evangelical historians wanted to write.

George did read my thesis. Better, he replied with a thoughtful, generous, and deeply encouraging letter. (I have kept it tucked into the bound copy of that small work.) Best, he both cited and quoted me in the resulting book. The magister stooped to learn from even the likes of my young self.

Look at the notes in George’s books. They are replete with similar citations—not only of obscure books and journal articles, but doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. George has learned from everyone, and honoured us all in turn.

George blessed me next when I completed my next, and last, degree. As I was brimming with excitement and relief at finally completing my education, I surveyed a few eminences as to whether I should seek publication for my dissertation—a key step in a fledgling scholar’s career.

I asked my doctoral supervisor (Martin Marty), of course, and presumed on my master’s thesis supervisor (Mark Noll) as well. The late George Rawlyk, who had interested himself in my career when I took a course with him at Queen’s as an undergraduate, also was asked to weigh in.

For some reason, however, which I cannot now recall, I dared ask also the eminent George Marsden for an opinion. This would have required him to interrupt his own work to at least to scan a 300-page student paper and give a career-affecting opinion. And he did.

George agreed, in fact, with the others: It was fine as a dissertation, they all said, but they also all said that it needed (a lot) more work in context and updated research to be publishable. I took their advice, and five years later produced a book 50% bigger (and, I trust, at least somewhat better): Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to Its Character (1993).

That book emerged while I was on my way up the academic ladder at the University of Manitoba. It helped qualify me for promotion to associate professor and for tenure.

I then, however, endured a weird year searching for the next research project in Canadian church history. For twelve months I considered various topics. I came up empty.

Anything I found interesting enough to write a whole book about—my number one interest was a biography of Egerton Ryerson as a way to write about nineteenth-century Canadian Protestantism as a whole—would require whole summers in Toronto, apart from my young family. I had already spent weeks away from hearth and home one summer in researching Protestantism in Canada a century later (for a book edited by Rawlyk), and I never wanted to repeat the experience. So I was stuck. My scholarly career had apparently petered out already.

One afternoon, however, my department head happened by my office. He said that a colleague’s course was popular enough that he wanted me to teach my own section of it in order to increase the department’s census. Would I do my own version of the course on “God and Evil”?

I had coveted that course ever since I had arrived at Manitoba in 1990. Now I had departmental encouragement to take it on, and I did, with gusto. Indeed, my gusto was such that it produced my second book, Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil (1998).

The province of Manitoba at that time was not strong economically. The flagship university, at which I taught, was tight for funds. No annual pay increases were forthcoming—a problem that resulted in a faculty strike while I was there. The only way for me to provide better for my growing family was to seek another promotion ASAP. So I applied for full professor in 1996, nine years after receiving my Ph.D.

Another time I’ll tell you the story of how that nice department head tried to shaft me in that process. Today, though, let’s focus on the happy ending, an ending due largely to George.

Key to the decision about promotion to full professor at the U of M, as at many other places, was the opinion of two external experts. Because I had developed a weirdly dual disciplinary profile—it is unusual for a professor to work in such disparate pursuits as history and theology—finding appropriate external referees was a challenge. The university decided on two historians who nonetheless had worked also in religious studies and possessed at least a nodding acquaintance of theoretical matters.

Those two external examiners came through for me as they reviewed my published work and commented on the manuscript for my forthcoming book on God and evil—for which I had received a contract, so everyone knew it was accepted for publication and would appear soon. They both made clear to the committee that this new book wasn’t merely a rehash of previous arguments but makes some fresh contributions to this most-perennial of questions.

One reviewer was Harry Stout, head of Religious Studies at Yale. The other was George Marsden, by this time the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. A friendly informant later told me that when the University of Manitoba committee received the two thumbs up from Yale and Notre Dame, their meeting was brief—and affirmative. I spent the academic year 1997–98 as a full professor at Manitoba. And that promotion qualified me to apply that fall for a chair at Regent College. But that’s another story.

Had George Marsden helped me only this much, it would have been more than enough to warrant an encomium.  Since then, however, George has served as an academic reference for me on several occasions. He has endorsed a couple of my books on their covers. Even more importantly, he has read and commented on work in progress, sent along encouraging words when reading other things of mine along the way, and been available for fork-in-the-road advice at more than one key juncture along my life’s path. He has been an elder brother to me, too.

It was a delight to dedicate to him my account of global evangelicalism: Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction (2022), wherein I called him our ”evangelical interpreter ne plus ultra.”

On this splendid occasion, therefore, I join with fellow historians and his global readership to wish George Marsden the happiest of birthdays—a mentor who models at once the highest competence, the keenest Christian commitment, and the greatest magnanimity.