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For several decades now, many scholars of American religion have promoted the idea that religion’s central meanings may be found not just in written texts but also in material objects, pictures, and buildings. Those wondering what all the fuss is about need look no further than two new studies of Orthodox Judaism in America and beyond, which illustrate just how revealing a consideration of object and image can be. In the words of Maya Balakirsky Katz, an art historian who has published the stupendous monograph The Visual Culture of Chabad, religious groups represent themselves visually, and “visual culture”—what people look at and how they see—”not only reflects ideologies” and religious experiences “but also often creates them.”

Katz focuses on “the Chabad image bank”—that is, objects and images, ranging from photographs to keychains, produced by Lubavitch Jews. She argues that this “image bank evolved to advance specific religious, political and social goals.” For example, the last rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (who died without heirs in 1994), masterfully used photographs of himself to establish and maintain connections with Hasidim all over the world. This canny use of photography helped transform a religious community that had turned on a personal, seemingly intimate relationship between rebbe and individual practitioner into a sprawling international movement that numbered thousands of people who would never meet their rebbe or see him in person. One telling example: the rebbe rarely performed weddings, but he would marry couples who planned to serve as shelihim (emissaries who moved to far-flung posts, where they established Lubavtich communities and encouraged non-observant Jews to embrace religious practice). When the shelihim then settled in India or Idaho, they displayed photographs of their wedding ceremony prominently in their home, thus giving any guests a visual clue that their hospitality was blessed by the rebbe.

The Visual Culture of Chabad is filled with fascinating readings of individual images. As early as the 1940s, Schneerson understood that he was living in a visual age, and he began to pay “meticulous attention” to the logos and graphic designs that accompanied Lubavitch publications. He wanted them to look modern—Ess zul oys zehn vee Dick Tracy, he would tell the artist he commissioned to work on Lubavitch children’s magazines: It should look like Dick Tracy. But more than merely hip, the logos Lubavitch publishers created under Schneerson’s watch offered, Katz argues, visual protest against popular anti-Semitic images that suggested Jews’ dominance of international media. One 1944 printer’s mark, for example, positioned a modern-looking set of Ten Commandments tablets over a globe. This was a sort of visual response to imagery then in circulation on the covers of anti-Semitic books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: the Lubavitch image “asserts that it was not learned elders who controlled the world through international media influence, but the God of the Jews who bequeathed to them the Ten Commandments and controlled world events. Faced with images of conspiratorial financiers and media moguls, the logo for Chabad’s publishing house reorients the conversation … to the spiritual realm of divine omnipresence.”

The book concludes with Katz’s insightful analysis of the giant menorahs that Lubavitch rabbis have erected each winter from San Francisco to Burlington, Vermont. Katz traces the transformation of the menorah from a small, domestic candelabrum into a monument of public religion. She charts the religious establishment debates that the menorahs sparked in mayors’ offices and courtrooms, and the debates within the Jewish community about the propriety of these giant menorahs. Katz finds that Hasidim invoke a capacious idiom of religious pluralism to defend the menorahs: although Hannukah is, at one level, about Jewish resistance to assimilation, in explaining the monumental menorahs, Chabad rabbis speak in broad, generic terms about religious freedom and offering light to a dark world. Most interesting is Katz’s compelling argument that the menorahs create a visual counterpart, indeed a visual alternative, to Christmas trees: after all, as Katz notes, a Christmas tree (which is shaped like this: Δ) and a Chanukah lamp (∇) form “inverted images of each other.” Many Orthodox commentators may, as Katz suggests, try to avoid drawing too strong a parallel between Hannukah and Christmas, but the very shape of the holidays’ public artifacts invites the viewer to associate and contrast the two.

In Orthodox by Design, Jeremy Stolow considers a single Orthodox Jewish publishing house, ArtScroll. If ever a publishing house merits the attention of an entire monograph, it is this one: founded in 1976, ArtScroll is now a dominant presence—arguably the dominant presence—in the English-speaking Judaica market. Especially influential are the publishing house’s prayerbooks and their Schottenstein Talmud, although their self-help books, explications of Jewish law, and cookbooks are also quite popular. Many observers have commented on ArtScroll’s tacit theological orientation; although their books are (as Stolow shows) used by Jewish practitioners of many different stripes, the publishing house is rooted in the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, and the books tend toward a right-wing, sometimes rigid interpretation of classic texts. But Stolow’s focus is not on the books’ theological location. Rather, he is interested in the ritual life the books make possible, and the way they “design” a particular kind of religious experience; he is interested in “the performative protocols, the legitimating structures, the modes of social address, and the material forces of consumerism, domestication, and communal affiliation that constitute modern religious, print-mediated public spheres.”

Stolow’s account of ArtScroll’s books opens a window onto the daily religious lives of English-speaking Jews. But beyond this, Stolow offers much insight into religious reading and prayer—insight that, mutatis mutandis, extends beyond Judaism to other religious worlds. Especially noteworthy is his discussion of ArtScroll’s siddurim, or prayerbooks. The prayerbooks are popular not only because they are bilingual and set in a highly readable typeface, but also because they contain a wealth of supplementary material: footnotes with biblical citations; a commentary on the bottom of each page, containing interpretations of the prayers and references to germane rabbinic works. Perhaps most important for users who come to ArtScroll books in the midst of a journey from a non-religious life to a life of Jewish observance, the siddurim contain precise directions for how properly to pray each prayer—when and how to ritually wash one’s hands, when and how to bow, and so forth. This supplementary material, the publishers argue, helps practitioners experience the meaning of the prayers, and the ArtScroll customers Stolow interviewed single out the practical instructions and the interpretive glosses for praise. Far, then, from a narrow investigation into one publishing house, this book illumines how liturgy works in people’s lives, and how the objects from which and with which one prays shape people’s prayerful experiences.

I found myself musing about what an ArtScroll-inspired edition of the Book of Common Prayer might look like—I imagine that quite a lot of my co-religionists would appreciate precisely the kind of guidance and auxiliary information that ArtScroll siddurim supply. I can also imagine the fights on the committee convened to draft such an edition; and that musing, of course, leads back to Stolow’s interest in religious authority, in how “religious authority … is exercised and how it is transformed through the multilayered tissues of affect, technology, and institutionally coordinated action that are redefining the place of media in the world today.”

Stolow is especially persuasive when he turns his attention to ArtScroll books as objects. He notices the power ArtScroll authors assign to the books themselves: the house’s authors suggest to readers that “the mere sight of a holy book can jog the memory of previous acts of reading, thereby eliciting meritorious behavior in the present.” And Stolow astutely analyzes the significance of the leatherette or “pleather” covers of many of the ArtScroll prayerbooks—practitioners know that the books aren’t real leather, but even the “authentically fake” leatherette imbues the book with a special status. Once upon a time, I prayed daily from a brown leatherette ArtScroll siddur, and Stolow’s analysis of the pleather strikes me as spot-on. It is not just the holy words inside the covers but also the specialness of the cover itself that prompted me to open that book, and that still commands from me the respect one pays a sacred object. As for my navy blue Book of Common Prayer, its imitation-leather binding sets it apart from the other books in my library, and gives me subtle hints about the kind of book this is, about how it is to be used, how to be revered.

The book’s main limitation is Stolow’s specialist prose. Perhaps it is unfair of me to argue with Stolow about his prose-style—he clearly was not writing for a broad readership, but for fellow academics who will move easily enough in his multilayered tissues of affect, technology, and institutionally coordinated action. Still, precisely because he offers such shrewd analyses of topics that are of vital import to pastors and laypeople in many different religious communities, it is frustrating that few non-specialists will make it through this study. I hope Stolow will draft a lecture or a magazine article that will be a bit more accessible to the so-called ordinary people in the pew. We need his wisdom.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. For the academic year 2010-11, she is a visiting fellow at Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music. She is the author most recently of A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Yale Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

The bicentenary of the outbreak of the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain will soon be upon us. Ask the average Briton or American what they know about the conflict and you will be lucky to be told (at most) that Britain, in a sideshow to the Napoleonic wars, bloodied the upstart new nation’s nose by burning the White House, and that the American republic avenged itself when Andrew Jackson’s frontier crack shots blew away the finest imperial troops at New Orleans. Canadians, when questioned, are likely to flourish their plucky victories against a powerful southern neighbor who had put Upper Canada to the torch. Alan Taylor’s new study offers an escape from these stale headlines. His book is unlikely to be alone in marking the war’s anniversary, but it is hard to imagine that any other will be more freshly conceived, compellingly analyzed, or vividly written. It is bound to find a wide and appreciative audience.

Not that Taylor, a prizewinning historian at the University of California-Davis, has opted to write a comprehensive account of the conflict. The war in the Gulf and the Atlantic barely gets a look-in. He focuses his lens on the region that suffered the greatest fighting and depredation: Lakes Erie and Ontario and their connecting river systems, between Detroit and Montreal. This is “borderlands rather than a national history,” a vivid study of a contest across—and on each side of—the political boundary fashioned by the War of Independence. The Revolution’s legacy was a porous frontier between the new American republic and the British Empire. It left plural identities and loyalties on either side. One of Taylor’s key purposes is to challenge the too-easy misperception of the Revolution as marking a clean break. Americans of the post-1783 era, he declares, lived in a “precarious and embattled” nation, as “the republic and the empire competed for the allegiance of the peoples in North America—native, settler, and immigrant.”

This book, then, is very much about ideology or, less grandly, about how ordinary people understood what it was to be an American or British/Canadian. The Americans’ experience within the empire had led them to fear centralized power. The duty of government was, with a light hand, to protect individual freedom, property, and social opportunity for white men. “Ours is a government of opinion, not of force,” declared a New Hampshire Congressman: in Britain “more power is concentrated in less compass then ever happened to any other nation on earth.” Conversely, the British, celebrating the stability and energy of their “mixed government” and the liberty it nourished, characterized the Unites States as “a Mob Government … too weak to carry its own measure into effect” (Prime Minister Grenville), where the “Glittering Tinsel of American Freedom”—hypocritically offered only to white men and not to African American slaves—had ensnared “Outcasts & Vagabonds” (Admiral George Berkeley). “Seventeen staves and no hoop,” sneered the British spy John Henry, “will not make a barrel that can last long.”

Forty thousand Loyalists chose, or were forced, to leave America for Canada during the Revolution, and another 30,000 Americans—so-called “Late Loyalists” responding to the lure of grants of Crown land as the reward for armed preparedness against invasion—arrived by 1812. Optimists on both sides regarded the border as temporary. Canadian Loyalists expected their political stability and commercial prospects would draw the American rebels back into the empire and end a foolish republican experiment. Americans believed that a tiny imperial outpost would inevitably come to seek protective incorporation within the United States.

Why then did the United States declare war? Taylor believes previous studies have overstated the role of westerners’ appetite for the conquest of Canada, and anger at British meddling with American commerce on the high seas. Instead, he argues for the interaction of multiple grievances that centered on British brutality: the impressment and whipping of “British” sailors seized from American ships and the savage mutilation of American citizens by the tomahawks of Britain’s Indian allies. Flogging and scalping challenged American sovereignty and threatened to reverse the Revolution. The war “pivoted on the contentious boundary between the king’s subject and the republic’s citizen. In the republic, an immigrant chose citizenship—in stark contrast to a British subject, whose status remained defined by birth.” A case in point was Ned Myers, born a British subject in Quebec, who ran away to New York City to become a sailor. He chose American citizenship. The British, however, denied that a “natural-born subject” could repudiate his nation. Captured during the war, Myers was seized from a prison ship by a British gang, and impressed as an Englishman onto a British vessel.

In the struggle for control of Upper Canada (the predecessor of today’s Ontario), Taylor highlights four interacting civil wars. The conflict between Loyalist and republican Americans—mostly kindred peoples—was just one of them. A second brought the United States to the brink of political fracture. The party cleavages that had helped prompt war became a chasm as the blood of Americans flowed. Federalists derided the Republicans’ decision for a land war in Canada as a futile response to attacks on American ocean commerce. Many Federalists worked as smugglers and British agents, while the party’s leaders in New England dallied with secession from the Union. In a political culture where the idea of a loyal opposition lacked respect, Republicans branded their foes as traitors. “There are but two parties,” declared a Republican newspaper: “Citizen Soldier and Enemies—Americans and Tories.” Third, the armies on both sides were composed disproportionately of the Irish. The war of 1812 was in this respect a proxy for the suppressed Irish rebellion of 1798. Irish-American republicans (whose religion, in the words of a contemporary, “was to hate an Englishman”) confronted a British army which included companies like James FitzGibbon’s “Irish Greens” (terrifyingly known as “the Bloody Boys”), made up of refugees from poverty. Finally, the war in the northern arena drew in native peoples on both sides. Indians around the Great Lakes sided with the British to fend off the tide of American expansion, while the Americans looked to their own Indian allies for recruits.

These cross-cutting conflicts weakened the Americans more than they did their foes. President James Madison’s administration governed a fragile nation averse to the taxes that building an adequate army and navy required. But the alternative—dependence on big financiers—proved strategically costly. Instead of contesting the St. Lawrence River and choking the line of supplies to British forces upstream, the Americans concentrated their efforts on Niagara and Detroit, where the war could never be won. To appease David Parish, a German capitalist who loaned millions of dollars to the administration, Madison kept U.S. troops away from Ogdensburg, New York, where Parish owned 200,000 acres and where Canadians erected a border sign for American eyes: “If you don’t scratch, I won’t bite.” The voices of powerful western New York Republicans only encouraged this flawed over-focus on the Niagara front. By contrast, the Federalists who dominated northern New York helped keep troops out of St. Lawrence County. Here the smuggling of cattle, pork, and grain from American farms did much to sustain the British army, whose numbers (14,000 by 1814) came to exceed Upper Canada’s agricultural capacity. “The porous northern border,” Taylor concludes, “became a debilitating open sore for the US.” In the face of British regulars, their flanks guarded by Indian guerrilla fighters, the Americans suffered regular defeats in the Lakes region. Stalemate worked to the advantage of the empire, which needed only to defend.

A conflict that began with (albeit confused) American overtures of friendship to the people of Upper Canada soon collapsed into deepening hostility. Taylor’s narrative vividly conveys the war’s horror and hardships, above all by giving voice to its common soldiers and to the civilian victims of brutality. Michigan governor William Hull’s misguided and bungled campaign to protect Detroit degenerated into plunder and looting. Atrocities by Indians followed. In the summer of 1813, a party of Americans on the shores of Lake Ontario was reported “most shockingly butchered, their heads skinned, the hearts taken out and put in their mouths, their privates cut off and put in the place of their hearts.” The British commander Gordon Drummond’s burning and destruction of the Niagara Valley villages in the winter of 1813-14 shocked Americans into savage retaliation. Unscrupulous Kentucky riflemen ransacked and burned the pacifist Indian mission at Moraviantown. Each side accused the other of barbarism. Taylor calls “flimsy” the excuses of Madison’s administration for the destruction at Moraviantown, York, Newark, and elsewhere: what else could be expected from sending “undisciplined troops and reckless generals across the border to plunder and burn with impunity”? Consequently, “the war hardened bitter feelings along national lines, which gave greater meaning and power to that boundary.” A new British-Canadian “nationality” was born amongst settlers of previously doubtful loyalty to the empire. Paradoxically, the war’s stalemate boosted American nationalism, too, for with the peace treaty came Britain’s acceptance of the United States’ permanence and the opportunity—energetically seized—for Americans to dispossess the Indians, now without an external ally.

Taylor offers a glimpse of the religious dimensions of the conflict. In pre-war Canada, political and social authority lay with the established Anglican Church. Anglicans were ready to tolerate introverted pietist groups—Quakers, Mennonites, and Dunkers—and respected kindred Presbyterians and German Lutherans, but they feared the egalitarianism and “infidel” American connections of burgeoning evangelicalism, most widely represented by Methodists (the largest denomination by 1810) and Baptists. When the fighting began, the dominant religious stories in Upper Canada became those of fierce loyalty or apolitical quietism and pacifism; “sedition,” as in the case of the Baptist preacher imprisoned for welcoming Dearborn and his troops to York, was comparatively rare. The faith-enhanced Canadian nationalism of wartime was a prelude to a sharper postwar ecclesiastical separation. Canadian churches cut their bonds with the United States, honored hierarchy and church establishment, and pursued less enthusiastic forms of evangelical worship.

There is, however, a broader religious story to consider, one which in some respects qualifies the picture Taylor presents in this superb book. For the war did not end cross-border activity and aspiration. The Methodists, the largest force in both countries in the 1820s, continued to work across what remained a porous boundary for them. Many preachers honored John Wesley’s command: “Lose no opportunity of declaring to all men that the Methodists are one people in all the world.” They saw themselves as a transnational “people” concerned only for soul-saving. Topography, more than political geography, shaped their organizational boundaries. Methodist voices renounced jingoism in the face of a calamitous war. “I know not,” said one contemplating the carnage of Sackett’s Harbor, “that I felt any partiality for Americans more than for Englishmen: all of one creation—alike the subjects of redeeming blood, all accountable to the King of kings, and deserving the same condemnation!” Another lamented how the chauvinistic celebration of the return of peace “served rather to feed than to extinguish the flame of political strife and animosity, as well as to call forth and strengthen the warlike propensities of the human heart.” A persisting sense of common purpose meant that Upper Canada continued to be organized within the Methodist Episcopal Church until 1828. At the same time, British ministers worked within the northern reaches of the republic (a church member complained of one that he had been “brought up under a tyrannical government; and if he thinks to tyrannize over us, it won’t answer”). A new, cross-border Reformed Methodist Church was planted in Upper Canada shortly after the war, while the African Union Church organized branches for black Methodists across the national boundary into the mid-19th century and beyond. This suggests that while 1815 may have been a watershed, it was no more a clean break than 1783 had been. And in the realm beyond evangelical religion, too, a similar gradualism and evolution continued to operate. After all, although Britain recognized America’s permanence after 1815, it did so within the confines of a new set of mutually beneficial relations in which the independent United States remained within the orbit of the British system. It would take another century to alter that balance of power.

Richard Carwardine is president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author most recently of Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (Knopf). He is currently working on a study of religion in American national construction between the Revolution and the Civil War.

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He remains to me,” Lord Acton once wrote about Thomas Babington Macaulay, the early Victorian historian who is the subject of this biography, “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” [1] Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at once a strongly ideological Liberal and an entirely faithful Catholic. He considered Macaulay insufficiently liberal, and Acton, as somebody aware of the eternal law of God, felt bound to censure the historian. Robert E. Sullivan, the author of this study, is also of liberal inclinations; and he, too, is a loyal Catholic with a firm moral outlook. The result is a biography treating Macaulay as base, contemptible, and odious.

Sullivan is willing to acknowledge that Macaulay, if not a great master, was a great writer. The historian’s deployment of words was his greatest skill. He could describe the Roman Empire in an early essay as at risk of achieving “a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity.” Few loved the government of Oliver Cromwell, Macaulay noted; “but those who hated it most hated it less than they feared it.” Macaulay was the Simon Schama of his day, regaling a mass public with elegant evocations. Every sentence flowed effortlessly (though, as Sullivan makes clear, at the expense of enormous effort). Every paragraph concluded with an epigram. The verbal dexterity was what made his five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II (1849-61) a triumphant success. Even before its final volume, 46 editions had appeared in the United States. Macaulay was rewarded with the first ever peerage conferred in the United Kingdom for literary achievement.

The author of this new biography also recognizes the enormous influence exerted by Macaulay in matters great and small. He shaped Weber’s formulation of the affinity between Protestantism and capitalism. He sketched something like the theory of Habermas about the creation of a public sphere. He anticipated the recent genre, well developed in France, of the history of memory. Macaulay left a legacy of history as literature which exerted an enduring appeal during the 20th century. But it is as a propagator of national myths that, according to Sullivan, he was most potent. At the peak of Victoria’s reign, Macaulay celebrated the genius of England for moderate constitutional evolution. Furthermore, according to Sullivan, he glorified the capacity of the nation to exert authority in the world. Sullivan also documents how, in British India, Macaulay was responsible for the ruling that English should be the medium of instruction in schools (a decision still commemorated in India on Macaulay’s birthday) and for the codification of the law, even though its implementation was deferred until after his death.

Sullivan performs much of his evaluation particularly well. He brings to his task an enviable familiarity with the classical texts that Macaulay loved. This expertise is a crucial quality in the biographer of a man who, as a civil servant in Calcutta, spent every day from five to eight o’clock in the morning reading the works of antiquity. The historian of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, was his idol, with Herodotus and Tacitus not far behind. It is one of the sharpest perceptions of this biography that Macaulay’s history has to be seen as shaped by the rhetorical conventions of the ancient world. Macaulay did not imitate the scrupulous respect for original documents of his great German contemporary Ranke. He did not even trouble to quote accurately such primary sources as he troubled to read. What he did do was ensure that he made out a case for the causes and personalities he approved with maximum persuasive power.

Another great quality of this volume is its extraordinary range of allusion. We hear, for example, of the World War I poet Wilfred Owen, with his memorable excoriation of the Latin tag, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” We also learn about Cicely Saunders, the founder of the late 20th-century hospice movement in Britain that caters to those dying of cancer. And we even stumble on a reference to Lolita, the sexually precocious 12-year-old of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of 1955. It is as though Macaulay is related to life in all its fullness.

Readers with Christian proclivities will also appreciate the religious metaphors that abound. The Great Exhibition of 1851 struck “pseudoreligious awe” in its attenders; the secretary of state of William III was “the unmoved mover of the slaughter”; the “theology of classical economics” reigned in Macaulay’s day. The analogies stimulate as they are meant to do. The occasional homiletic phrase, however, can jar. “Our self-glorification feeds on and feeds our self-isolation.” Does it, we are inclined to ask? “Tragedy, however, still bedevils all power that rests on violence or the threat of violence.” Does it, we ask more insistently? Does not the state itself ultimately rest on the threat of violence?

And that leads to the heart of the case made out here. It is less history than indictment. Macaulay stands charged with being corrupted by power—not so much his own power, even though he sat in parliament and was twice a government minister, as the power wielded by Victorian Britain. Macaulay pandered to his country’s taste for self-aggrandizement when it was unequivocally the most powerful nation on earth. Most crucially, he sanctioned genocide: “it is in truth more merciful,” wrote Macaulay in an essay of 1838, “to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of centuries.” Sullivan returns to this judgment again and again, clearly deeply troubled by it. He is outraged that Macaulay has benefited over the intervening period from silence about his “imperial ethic of extermination.” Sullivan will not remain silent.

This stance is very much what Acton might have adopted. Acton famously remarked that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” [2] Sullivan, who alludes to a version of the dictum at one point without naming Acton, holds it to be true. He also maintains Acton’s principle that the historian must make rigorous moral judgments. For Acton, persecution was an unpardonable crime. In the same way, Sullivan believes that mass murder must be condemned as an execrable evil.

One of Acton’s successors as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, the Methodist Herbert Butterfield, was less sure that the historian is sufficiently qualified to condemn others for their moral failings. While forms of behavior may be entirely wrong, Butterfield believed, pinning the blame on another human being may be perilous. We do not know what allowance has to be made for conditions in the past. A Butterfieldian analysis of Macaulay’s position might take issue with any recommendation of genocide, and yet note in extenuation the extent to which Macaulay was the victim of utilitarian misconceptions (and of a desire for rhetorical flourish). The resulting judgment on Macaulay might be less severe.

In any case, Sullivan turns his book into a pursuit of his quarry for almost every imaginable misdeed. Macaulay, we are told, was egocentric, emotionally deficient, and guilty of incestuous love for his sisters. And the charges are supplemented by suggestions of guilt by association. Macaulay is made to express “the English public mind” on extirpation and so he is treated as the source of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinist view of the struggle for survival between the races, even though Sullivan recognizes that Macaulay was free of the idea that race determined capacity. Likewise Joseph Chamberlain’s aggressive imperialism at the end of the century is fathered on Macaulay without any attempt to show any connection between them. The ideas of the two men may have been similar, but was Macaulay responsible for Chamberlain’s obnoxious jingoism? If not, why mention it? The historian is even branded with the tendentious remark of Samuel Johnson that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” The only suggested link between Johnson and Macaulay is that both were “naturally indolent authors.” The historian emerges in the reader’s mind as a racist, avaricious advocate of the unscrupulous policies that led to the Boer War. That picture goes beyond the bounds of fairness.

The unfairness extends to strained interpretations of Macaulay’s words. In the historian’s earliest public speech of 1824, he spoke of England’s “peculiar glory, not that she has ruled so widely, not that she has conquered so splendidly, but that she has ruled only to bless, and conquered only to spare.” The author makes a caustic comment: “Repeating ‘ruled’ and ‘conquered’ was more important than repeating ‘only.’ ” That evaluation appears highly unlikely. The very rhythm of the words suggests otherwise. But Macaulay must always be depicted in the darkest hues.

The explanation of Macaulay’s failings also embodies unfairness. His abandonment of Christian faith is attributed to the upbringing he received from his father, Zachary, one of the pillars of the evangelical philanthropic circle later called the Clapham Sect. The father “imposed” “a stern evangelical Anglicanism.” He “imposed” classical learning on “his reluctant heir.” He “imposed” on his firstborn “an austere version of Scottishness” (what is that?). The result was not just an aversion to religious enthusiasm but also an emotional deprivation which marked young Tom for life. That was the reason for his inability to sympathize with suffering humanity. The whole of the book is summed up in a single sentence: “His stunted emotional consciousness caused him to live barely attentive to and mostly unconcerned about the people and places in front of him, while his masterful intelligence empowered him to interpret and help shape the English public mind during his nation’s century.”

What is perhaps most serious is that the explanation proffered, in turn, for Zachary Macaulay’s draconian discipline is primarily his religion. The evangelicalism of the family home is made to bear much (though not all) the blame for the attitudes of Tom’s father. The members of the Clapham Sect wanted to “impose” their morality on the public, and so Zachary was merely doing in the home what he and his circle were attempting in society at large. The religion of this body of saints, Sullivan suggests, was itself stunting for Tom: “Clapham left him with limited ears and literal eyes.” His capacity for appreciating music or art, Sullivan means to convey, was restricted by his spiritual antecedents. But John Ruskin, with whose reactions to Venice Macaulay’s are unfavorably compared, was equally the product of an evangelical home, and his eyes for artistic achievement were probably sharper than those of any other figure of the century. The blanket attribution of philistinism to the evangelicals will not do.

Again, Sullivan is willing to concede that evangelicals generated “pious works and childlike fun” but not “wit and irony.” That is very doubtful. William Wilberforce, the central figure in the Clapham group, was known for the amusem*nt he provided for sophisticated society. And Sullivan misrepresents evangelicalism when he remarks that it anchored Christian faith in “the domain of imagination,” not in the hard thinking that produced adequate theology. That was not true of the evangelicals of Zachary Macaulay’s generation. Deeply swayed by the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, they made reason their lodestar in religion. They generated serious theology: again, Wilberforce, though a layman, is a good example, since he wrestled with questions of theodicy in the journal that Zachary edited. The presentation of evangelicalism in the book verges on a caricature.

So this biography has merits and flaws. It appreciates Macaulay as a writer, shows distinct acumen about his classical taste, and generally displays great learning. But it is unfair to its subject, to his father, and to his father’s religion. On his deathbed in 1859, Macaulay dispatched a £25 gift to a poor clergyman. That is not the deed of a man incapable of compassion. Macaulay may have shared in the corruption that Acton attributed to any who exercise power, but he was not as black as he is painted here. He was not base, contemptible, and odious.

David Bebbington is professor of history at the University of Stirling and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author most recently of Baptists Through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (Baylor Univ. Press).

1. Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone, April 1885, in Herbert Paul, ed., Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone (London: George Allen, 1904), p. 210.

2. Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1904), Vol. 1, p. 372.

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This is a different sort of history book. But that should not be surprising, given its author. Ussama Makdisi, son of memoirist Jean Said Makdisi, nephew of Edward Said, and author of The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, is fast making a name for himself as a meticulous and well-rounded scholar who refuses to restrict himself to a single historical narrative when tackling his subject. In Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East, Makdisi makes use of material from a variety of sources to provide as full a picture as possible of a series of extraordinary 19th-century encounters in the Levant.

Indeed, before plunging into the story of 19th-century American Protestant missionaries in what is today Lebanon, Makdisi provides extensive background information on their Puritan forebears in 17th- and 18th-century America. He also compares and contrasts the Puritans during that era with the Maronites of Lebanon. This sets the stage for the eventual conflict between American Protestant missionaries and the Maronite Catholic Church. In the main, Artillery of Heaven is about the As’ad al-Shidyaq affair (a case of conversion to Protestantism and its brutal consequences, to which we’ll return in a moment) and the ideas of Butrus al-Bustani (another convert, with a very different trajectory), two outcomes of that fateful clash, and as such the book brings to life the religious tumult and violence of 19th-century Lebanon. Though not without occasional oversights, it is a penetrating examination of a tragic and seminal episode in the history of American Protestant missionary activity in the Ottoman Empire, and of the far-reaching socio-political lessons a remarkable man drew from this and other instances of religious violence in his tormented land.

Refreshingly, Makdisi steers clear of ideological renditions of history; he does not reject the missionaries’ view in order to adopt its reflexive Arab nationalist or Islamic counterpart. Indeed, he makes clear that “[t]he answer to one form of historiographic myopia is not, or at least not only, to write from a so-called native perspective, to switch vantage points, to valorize local resistance, or to retreat into orthodoxy.” American missionaries in the Middle East, Makdisi emphasizes, cannot properly be considered cultural imperialists; unlike their predecessors in America or their British and French counterparts, they were not part of a larger imperial political project. And he adds the trenchant observation that “decolonization, rather than giving voice to natives, simply took it away from the missionaries.”

Makdisi locates American proselytism in the Levant within a long tradition of American Protestant missionary activity that initially targeted American Indians and subsequently spread to other countries. In so doing, he brings to light the ideological underpinnings of those zealous men who arrived in the Levant beginning in 1820 intending to convert the native population. Among the most important beliefs animating the early missionaries, educated at Andover Theological Seminary and sent to the Levant by the Congregationalist-dominated American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), were “the flying of time” (by which was meant the imminence of the end of days), an almost complete rejection of the virtues of coexistence between Protestants and others (including other Christians), and a related insistence that converts dissociate themselves entirely from their native culture. “They came not as crude military crusaders,” Makdisi writes, articulating the missionaries’ lofty sense of self, “but as the redeemed ‘artillery of heaven,’ men who were determined to reclaim biblical lands from the god of this world who had long since enslaved the ancient Eastern Christian churches.”

Naturally, all this made the early missionaries’ work in the Levant—restricted by Ottoman imperial decree to non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, but later tightened even further following complaints by local Christian religious authorities—very difficult. The missionaries’ most formidable foe would be the Maronite Church and its patriarch Yusuf Hubaysh, especially after the latter got wind of the conversion of a native son, As’ad Shidyaq. (Aware of how loaded certain ethno-linguistic designations have become, especially in the maelstrom of competing nationalisms in the Middle East, Makdisi points out that “[a]lthough the American missionaries from the outset identified him as an ‘Arab,’ As’ad Shidyaq was not properly speaking an Arab in any nationalist or racialist sense.”)

The Maronites, an Eastern Catholic sect whose members had come to be concentrated in Mount Lebanon, had their own rigidly ideological view of their role and mission in history, much of it revolving around a “myth of perpetual fidelity to the Roman Catholic orthodoxy.” The almost inevitable clash took a turn for the worse when, in 1826, the patriarch decided to imprison and torture Shidyaq, who refused to renounce his new Protestant faith. Shidyaq, born in 1798, would die in captivity circa 1830.

There are a couple of troubling aspects to Makdisi’s analysis of the missionary enterprise. Unfortunately, missionary attitudes occupy him unduly—so much so, that he undermines his own criticism of those missionaries ignorant of Islam and the culture of Levantine Arabs. For example, Jonas King, who by Makdisi’s own admission mastered Arabic and became “immersed in local customs and manners, in dress, and in habit,” nevertheless draws the author’s ire for his supercilious attitude to local culture. This raises the disturbing possibility that, however important Makdisi considers hard knowledge of Levantine Arab culture and Islam, he attaches even greater importance to affinity for them.

Separately, Makdisi seems to think that because pre-19th-century conflict in Mount Lebanon—by his own account violent and incessant—was not sectarian in nature, the subsequent coalescence of a Druze-Maronite rivalry represents a major social deterioration. (The Druze are an offshoot of Ismaili Shiite Islam.) And yet of that Druze-Maronite conflict and anti-Christian violence in Mount Lebanon and beyond, his assessment involves a measure of prevarication. Grappling with the indiscriminate slaughter of Maronite and other Christian civilians by Druze combatants in the Druze-Maronite war of 1860, all Makdisi can come up with is a feeble reiteration of a Druze-friendly missionary couple’s question as to what the reaction of indignant Western Christians would have been had the Maronites massacred the Druze. But the point is that the Maronites did not massacre the Druze—even though they might well have done so had they had the chance—and that the Druze committed inexcusable slaughter on a wide scale. Of the subsequent but largely unrelated massacre by Muslim mobs of one-quarter of the Christian population of Damascus, the author fails to register the uncomfortable fact that Muslim resentment of non-Muslims had been simmering since the 1856 Hatt-i Hümayun (Imperial Edict)—very briefly discussed elsewhere by Makdisi—in which the Ottoman sultan proclaimed, among other things, the equality of all his subjects regardless of religious affiliation.

Yet Makdisi excels when examining the Shidyaq affair. In particular, he shows how the framing of Shidyaq’s story by American biographers changed markedly after the Druze-Maronite war of 1860. The initial narrative of Shidyaq’s travails had taken shape even before his reported death in 1830. He was touted by missionaries who knew him, as well as the ABCFM that sent them to the Levant, as a martyr at the hands of a corrupt and unchristian Maronite patriarch, who represented Roman Catholic deceit and—to a lesser extent—Oriental decadence. For all their feelings of cultural superiority, the missionaries fashioned a narrative that focused on evangelism and personal redemption through conversion, situating the Shidyaq affair “within an established hagiographic tradition that dictated formulaic roles for Catholic persecutor and Protestant martyr.”

But following the war of 1860 and the massacres in Damascus, the exemplary story of Shidyaq, which had already begun to alter in the telling, assumed an almost completely different thrust. From an evangelical tale of saving souls it became that of a mission civilisatrice—with nationalist and even racist overtones—in which enlightened American men and women delivered the Orient from ignorance, fanaticism, and violence. Makdisi attributes this sense of triumphalism to the aftermath of the war, which saw a chastened Ottoman Empire shrink before robust Western intervention, even as it tried to allay its critics by punishing Druze in Mount Lebanon and Muslims in Damascus

The author instructively contrasts the missionaries during this period with their predecessors. For one thing, millennialism no longer colored their outlook. But also, they had come to view Islam differently. In his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), one of the works inspiring the early crop of missionaries, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather boasted of John Eliot, who had conducted missionary work among American Indians in the 17th century: “Our Eliot was no Mahometan.” The reference was to the Islamic societal ideal, wherein those non-Muslim communities classified as “people of the book” are tolerated in exchange for their recognition of Muslim supremacy and their acceptance of various social disadvantages. The earliest American missionaries to the Levant, who arrived in 1820, shared Mather’s disdain for “mingled” societies. A few decades later, however, American missionaries—appalled at Druze massacres of Maronites in Mount Lebanon and Muslim massacres of Christians in Damascus—were lamenting the intolerance of Islam and Muslims, whom they claimed could not peacefully coexist with others.

Fascinatingly, Makdisi shows how the missionaries during this period also began to idealize America. Their predecessors were pained by certain of the many still-fresh excesses whites had committed against Indians back home, but this newer crop of missionaries rarely recalled those events. More shockingly, they seemed oblivious to the contemporary ills of America, including continued discrimination against Indians, enslavement of blacks, and—from 1861 until 1865—an exceptionally violent civil war. For them, violence and oppression were the exclusive preserve of the Islamic Orient. The story of As’ad Shidyaq became less about Christian evangelism than about a civilizing mission, and less about Maronite Catholic than Muslim fanaticism.

Yet there is an ironic twist to this transformation, one which Makdisi fails to note, probably due to his ever-present concern with offensive missionary attitudes. He shows how, following the war of 1860, increased Western interest in Beirut and Mount Lebanon, together with a renewed sense of purpose among American missionaries, led to the establishment of American cultural and educational institutions (the Syrian Protestant College—renamed the American University of Beirut in 1920—opened in 1866). But he remains so focused on the missionaries’ ethno-nationalist biases—which spawned the creation of a two-tiered Protestant community of Americans and locals, a system institutionalized in the Syrian Protestant College—that he misses the salient fact that these later missionaries, in contrast to their less bigoted predecessors, contributed tangible benefits to the community in which they lived. Unlike the early missionaries, who endeavored only to win souls, these newer missionaries opened schools that taught secular subjects and foreign languages, even if the emphasis remained on religion, and scientific theories—such as those of Darwin—were shunned. Significantly, their belief in the backwardness of the region and its people found a ready echo among many Christians and Muslims in Lebanon and beyond, who felt spurred to establish their own schools and educate members of their sects in modern subjects.

The final part of the book, in which Makdisi turns to a man who gained much from American missions in the Levant but also transcended them, is the finest. While Makdisi’s earlier juxtaposition of very different American Protestant and Lebanese Maronite accounts of history, and his conception of American missionary activity in the Levant as a continuation of the effort to convert American Indians, contribute greatly to his study’s historicity and at times prove ingenious, arguably the most lasting impression left on readers will be the author’s insightful treatment of Butrus Bustani (1819-1883), like Shidyaq a Maronite who converted to Protestantism under the auspices of the missionaries. In Makdisi’s hands, Bustani emerges as a bona-fide intellectual with a discriminating eye, a quality which led him to cull from both his American missionary tutors and his Ottoman environment those cultural and educational features he considered worth preserving, and synthesize them into a new conception of state and citizen superseding the sectarianism that caused the bloodshed of 1860. Makdisi’s account is all the more significant because, in the highly politicized realm of Arabic-language historiography, Bustani is often portrayed as a proto-Arab or Syrian nationalist and subsumed within a larger ideological discourse.

Makdisi demonstrates how Bustani “first vindicated As’ad Shidyaq and advocated a liberal vision of coexistence as a modern way of life—akin to what is called ‘multiculturalism’ in America today.” From the missionaries, Bustani adopted the idea of freedom of conscience as well as important aspects of modern education and technology. And from his Ottoman Arab environment, he embraced an uneasy history of sectarian coexistence and a more recent imperial recognition of the equality of all subjects. Crucially, Bustani felt that he was taking his cue from Shidyaq, and in his short biography of the man, he departed from American missionary themes. “The true significance of Bustani’s [biography of Shidyaq],” explains Makdisi, “was therefore not its idealization of the Protestant martyr but the deliberate manner in which Bustani used the story of As’ad to evoke an unprecedented ecumenism, and later a new liberal pluralism as intolerable to American missionaries as it was to the Maronite Church.”

Indeed, Bustani’s ideas put him at loggerheads with most American missionaries, his erstwhile teachers. Not only did he criticize them in writing both for their condescending attitudes toward natives and their narrowly focused schools, but he established his own school, which turned out to be entirely unique, and which the missionaries attempted to undermine. In 1863, Bustani inaugurated the “National School,” which taught secular subjects and offered separate religious courses for students of different religions, but which also focused on inculcating in its charges a sense of secular (Ottoman) patriotism and playing down religious differences through an emphasis on moderation. This, explains Makdisi, in a time when “[s]elf-consciously Muslim reformers and the Maronite, Greek Catholic, and Orthodox churches could only propose modern projects that affirmed religious difference, and hence opened parochial schools to rival those of the missionaries but not, in any secular sense, to supersede them.”

Aside from a gentle but repeated implication that melding American and Arab views is admirable by mere virtue of being a bridge-building enterprise, a rather idealistic notion to which Makdisi apparently adheres over and above the sometimes fruitful intellectual outcome of such a venture, his treatment of Bustani suffers from only one partial oversight. Makdisi does not quite give Western imperial pressure on the Ottoman Empire its due, especially when it comes to the issue of Ottoman social reform. To be sure, he acknowledges the extent to which Bustani benefited from a serendipitous confluence of historical events—principally the two broad currents of Western missionary activity and Ottoman modernization—that created new cultural spaces for Ottoman subjects. Unlike Shidyaq, Bustani did not have to worry about persecution by the Maronite Church, for in 1850 Protestants were accorded official status in the Empire. And unlike earlier converts, he was not treated with suspicion by the Ottoman authorities, who honored him for his educational work, which they saw—correctly but somewhat simplistically—as promoting Ottoman patriotism. But Ottoman modernization and reform—particularly as embodied in the Tanzimat, a series of legal and other measures beginning with a decree in 1839 paving the way for full equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and leading up to the Empire’s (short-lived) transformation into a constitutional monarchy in 1876—were undertaken both at the behest of encroaching Western powers and in reaction to their encroachment.

Indeed, Western imperial pressure played a major role in prompting the Sublime Porte to emancipate recognized religious minorities and accord recognition to new minorities, such as Protestants, which had been created by Western missionaries. (The Hatt-i Hümayun of 1856, proclaiming the equality of Ottoman subjects irrespective of religious creed, was extracted from the sultan by the British and French in return for their having helped the Ottomans defeat the Russians in the Crimean war of 1853-1856.) This newfound emphasis on religious equality, in turn, created a space through which Bustani ensured that what would otherwise have remained a conversation between Christians—or, even more restrictively, members of the tiny Protestant community—became a much wider intellectual and even social project. Without Western pressure (which at times assumed the form of direct intervention), these developments would not have been possible, and Bustani, far from being honored by the Ottoman Empire, would have been at best marginalized and at worst persecuted.

Fortunately, unlike Bustani’s treatment of Shidyaq, which is original in many ways but which Makdisi acknowledges is hagiographic, Makdisi conjures a nuanced picture of his subject. He points out that Bustani adopted the missionaries’ designations of certain peoples as civilized and others as barbaric (situating the “Syrians” in between) but notes that, “for Bustani, such descriptions were literary devices to help clarify an Arab predicament, not discourses rooted in the experience and practice of racial discrimination and domination.” And he admits that Bustani espoused the missionaries’ somewhat patronizing view of women and their role, but reminds readers that Bustani’s ideas regarding women’s education were nevertheless pioneering, and predated the work of Egyptian (male Muslim) feminist Qasim Amin on the subject by half a century.

Yet far more important than these mild criticisms is Makdisi’s acknowledgment, alongside his praise, of the limitations of Bustani’s example. Makdisi holds aloft Bustani’s liberalism as worthy of emulation in a region characterized by ideological narratives prioritizing the collective over the individual and encouraging hostility toward other collectives. Crucially, however, he does not endorse Bustani’s deliberate forgetfulness when it comes to violent and ugly episodes in the recent or distant past, a strategy adopted by many a nationalist historian in the Arab world. This is arguably the most powerful message of Artillery of Heaven. A political outlook, however noble, must not be allowed to justify ignoring or distorting history.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Some memories are so horrible that, in the absence of realistic possibilities for healing, they are best shoved into what Steve Stern calls a “memory box” and consigned to oblivion. But sometimes, the contents of that memory box are too potent, too bitter, and too credible to remain confined. In one of Stern’s visceral images from his book on the Chilean transition to democracy, these festering wounds have become “memory knots” on the political body, “screaming” when touched.

In Reckoning with Pinochet, Stern explores how the Chilean memory box was repeatedly opened and shut by politicians, judges, commissions, and the public in the years after Augusto Pinochet resigned from the presidency in 1990, and how memory knots continually pushed the process past apparent impasse for a slow, cumulative achievement of global import.

Memory knots appear in three forms: anniversaries which remind us, for example, of the disappearance of a husband; specific places, like mass graves, that trigger floods of public emotion; and, most important, people whose mere presence is enough to blow open the memory box, however adamantly we have insisted on the past being forgotten. Somewhere in this mix of conflicting memories lies the question of truth. And truth is much more than the facts. In the context of the outer limits of human depravity (torture, disappearances, and sexual humiliation, for starters), truth is intimate and physical. Truth can be deadly (hence the appeal of the tightly sealed memory box), but reckoning with it is perhaps the only way forward.

In one of his finest moments after being inaugurated as Chile’s first civilian president in 17 years, Patricio Aylwin departed from his prepared speech at the state funeral of his predecessor, Salvador Allende. Allende’s legacy had been a battleground since September 11, 1973, the day of his ouster by Augusto Pinochet’s military junta, but on this day in April 1990, the new government gathered to honor him with a reburial. Chileans were effectively undoing the myth of Allende as danger to patriotic Chile, and the related myth of Pinochet as savior. The risk lay in a simplistic inversion of good and bad, and another cycle of distorted truth.

During his eulogy, Aylwin sliced through the mythmaking with an insistence on truth: he made no attempt to hide his many conflicts with Allende during the latter’s three-year roller coaster of a presidency from 1970 to 1973. Neither the murder, torture, and repression that marked the Pinochet dictatorship, nor the trickle, gradually becoming a stream, of government corruption—none of what followed should be allowed to cloud our vision of what came before the coup, Aylwin said. If forced to relive those years, he would return to the adversarial role he had assumed during Allende’s presidency.

At this point in the funeral, jeers and whistles began to be heard, and here Aylwin set aside his hat as president and assumed that of moral leader: “To those who are whistling I say … the only language in which we can understand each other is the language of truth. I am here to give a testimony of truth.”

Truth was soon to become the central issue, as Aylwin was setting up the first of two Truth Commissions to bring healing to the nation. The first commission’s job was to identify state violations of human rights, while—and this is key—the perpetrators were still in charge of the military and police. At various times during the process, Pinochet would rattle sabers at Aylwin, mobilizing the troops, marching his men into the capital, and so on. Much of the commission’s work had to be done in secret, because of the risk of sabotage: when mutilated bodies began to emerge from a previously unknown mass grave, the military plowed the site before truth could be established. It was, Stern says, a “rolling impasse,” during which tremendous progress was being made, despite the appearance of going nowhere.

With this book, Stern has completed a monumental trilogy, begun with Remembering Pinochet’s Chile (2004) and continued in Battling for Hearts and Minds (2006). He is convinced that something of global significance happened in Chile. He brings to the subject a deep dialogue with mid-20th-century Europe, along with the Jewish “memory cultures” that emerged in response to the Holocaust. But Stern insists that the Chilean story is in itself worthy of being told, and that its value is an entirely different question from that of its similarities and dissimilarities with the Holocaust. Two features of the Chilean drama stand out for him. First, the role memory played from the very beginning, such that testimony and counter-testimony infused nearly every twist and turn of the story. And second, the ways in which Chile was a watershed in the history of human rights and transnational advocacy.

This was a revolution built around memory. In 1981, for instance (treated in volume 2 of the trilogy), when Chile exploded in dissent after eight years of terrified silence, protests revolved around undermining Pinochet’s carefully crafted image of the self-sacrificing patriot, who had done his duty when his country needed him. Growing evidence of Pinochet’s bald-faced looting of the state treasury to build palaces for himself was enough to crumble his image as the nation’s humble savior.

Stern names four main competing frameworks of memory in Chile, categories that arose in sequence and competed for primacy in the public imagination. The first, already mentioned, was memory as salvation from the years of Allende. Shortly thereafter there emerged an antithesis: memory as unending rupture. This framework appealed most to victims of the regime, such as mothers of disappeared children. Over time, as human rights organizers, especially those of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile, began to make headway in pushing atrocities to the center of attention, a third framework appeared: memory as persecution and awakening. As the bitter truth became clear to Chileans, the truth that there was another side to Pinochet’s image, a fourth framework became useful to the dictator’s disheartened base: memory as a sealed box, intended for oblivion. “Shut this box quickly,” Stern imagines the warning label on the memory box saying, “before it casts a poisonous spell on your house.”

Meanwhile, another drama was taking place, this one on a global stage. Chile was becoming a catalyst in the emergence of an international human rights movement. By 1973, Chile was able to benefit from a mature lexicon and global networks of advocates. Chilean exile communities formed in many countries, who then invited their hosts to hear testimonies of fear and terror, contrasted with the junta’s image of a sparkling, peaceful Chile. In Canada, in Australia, in West and East Germany alike, Chilean exiles tapped into and contributed to legal theories of human rights, and integrated into their message an insistence on truth and testimony as central to justice. One of the Chilean story’s main accomplishments, Stern says, was the “sensitization to human rights as a core value in the public culture, irrenunciable regardless of a crisis that once served as justification for atrocity or looking away from it.”

At the same time, a stronger global tide was rising that today threatens to erode these achievements: creeping individualism in public culture, undermining the capacity for empathy. As privacy becomes a central value in public discussion, transnational advocacy becomes ever harder to achieve. The remarkable Chilean transition thus simultaneously serves as a warning: ground-breaking transformation has always required cultural transformation. It is hard, slow, “ants’ work.”

It is also moral in nature, which goes a long way to explain why the Catholic Church comes off so well here: with deep roots in the slums where repression was worst, and with an ancient culture of testimony and witness, the Catholic Church proved to be unresponsive to the junta’s seductions, and more: it provided staff and money for tireless documenting and research of atrocities, along with pastoral care for the victims.

Perhaps Stern’s greatest achievement lies in maintaining a human perspective: there are many personal testimonies throughout these pages that complement, represent, and at times contradict or qualify his judgments. To accommodate nuance and contradictions, Stern adds an “afterword” to each chapter, a short essay often taking the story in an entirely different direction, or allowing the human dimension to complicate the analysis. Drawing again on Holocaust studies, Stern warns against deriving simple lessons from radical evil.

It is in these afterwords that the true depth of his thought and the true majesty of his writing become apparent. In the end, this is a story about the deepest questions, and Stern never resorts to facile shock-tactics, never plays tricks on the reader, and always insists that something very big and deeply human is at stake. Several times during my reading, I frustrated my wife with lengthy lapses into silence during our evening walks. I was indeed elsewhere, walking alongside Steve Stern as he reckoned with evil in our generation.

Paul Grant is pursuing a PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin.

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

In this issue we feature a guest column by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, author most recently of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies (Eerdmans).

The ancient practice of lectio divina is a gentle discipline. Reading Scripture slowly, listening for the word or phrase that speaks to you, pausing to consider prayerfully what gift is being offered in those words for this moment, is a rich practice that can help maintain spiritual focus and equanimity at the center of even very busy lives. That practice can be adapted and imported into the reading of other kinds of texts. It can change the way we listen to the most ordinary conversation. It can become a habit of mind. It can help us locate what is nourishing and helpful in any words that come our way—especially in what Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said"—and it can equip us with a personal repertoire of sentences, phrases and single words that serve us as touchstones or talismans when we need them.

I have long valued Kenneth Burke's simple observation that literature is "equipment for living." We glean what we need from it as we go. In each reading of a book or poem or play we may be addressed in new ways, depending on what we need from it, even if we are not fully aware of those needs. The skill of good reading is not only to notice what we notice, but to allow ourselves to be addressed. To take it personally. To ask, even as we read secular texts, that the Holy Spirit enable us to receive whatever gift is there for our growth and our use. What we most hope for, those of us whose lives are full of reading and who teach others to read, is that we, and they, might continue as we make our way through a wilderness of printed, spoken, and electronically transmitted words, to glean what will equip us to navigate wisely and kindly—and also wittily—a world in which competing discourses can so easily confuse us in seeking truth and entice us falsely.

I am moved to share a few of my gleanings—phrases and sentences that have helped me over the years to regain perspective, or a sense of direction, to get over myself when I need to, to heal from sorrow, to laugh, to reclaim my deepest desires, to remember my deepest purposes. My husband laughed when I told him I was going to do this. Then he said, "How many pages do you have?" This is because I'm very old and my hoard of gleanings is large. My point isn't, however, to show off my personal collection, but to suggest how I have been helped by various pieces of equipment for living in the hope that you also, dear reader, will consider the richness of all you have allowed yourself to learn "by heart"—a phrase that doesn't simply mean verbatim, but rather refers to what you keep nearby and available for ongoing encouragement and direction.

I think, for instance of Henry James and his hope for Isabel Archer, that she "be a person upon whom nothing is lost." I've loved that phrase. It reminds me of a way of living to be aspired to: to be a person for whom every encounter is food for thought, reflection, prayer, or perhaps lively resistance, who notices word choices and recognizes need and gets the joke and pauses over what might easily be passed by. The hope expressed in that line is fueled by a reassurance I have found in words Robert Bolt assigns to Sir Thomas More, whose deep moral intelligence links piety to precision of thought: "God made the angels to show him splendor—as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man he made to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind!" Wit is the sharp instrument that prunes away what obscures the things that matter most.

In a similar way I am inspired by a line in Richard Wilbur's "The Eye": "Charge me to see in all bodies the beat of Spirit." It is a reminder to look beyond what we've been conditioned to consider attractive, to recognize how the Holy Ghost not only "broods over the bent world" but inhabits it, even the bent and broken parts, and provides for the humblest life forms the "force that through the green fuse drives the flower." Wilbur's prayer points me back to one of George Eliot's loveliest lines, at the end of Middlemarch, when she reminds us of what we owe "to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." I thought of that line the day my mother died, and think of it thankfully when, in churches, I cross paths with so many inconspicuous men and women who are not leaders, but faithful followers, who embody the truth that "charity … vaunteth not itself," but who, as Mary Oliver would put it, "blaze" in the light that illumines them.

I thought, too, when my mother died, and when one of my most revered teachers died not long ago, and another soon after, of the large and sobering truth we find at the end of King Lear: "Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all." Ripeness arrives subtly, not only in the fruit, but in the farmer who recognizes it. It has been my privilege to be near a few people who know they are in the process of dying or preparing for death, and who take on that last assignment with dignity and grace—some even with a kind of quiet joy. Such readiness is ripeness, indeed.

I have been helped at important times by poets who gave me words for the darkness. The Psalms and Job and Jeremiah offer a strong and important tradition of lament, outrage, bewilderment, anguish, a language for human suffering that must not be bypassed on the way to joy. But even in lesser sources I have found lines that, in enabling me to name the darkness, have helped me remember the light. The bleak last line of Randall Jarrell's poem, "90 North," for instance, which a beloved professor of mine often quoted, tells a truth about pain that needs not to be neglected: "Pain comes from the darkness / And we call it wisdom. It is pain." I believe all pain can be turned to God's good purposes, but I believe also in the importance of plumbing the depths of loss, if only because that gives us, finally, some measure of what redemption means.

There are other lines that come when I need them, to comfort, to remind, to lighten my spirits, to offer respite from bureaucratic drivel: Basil Rathbone's exclamation, for instance, when, as Sherlock Holmes, he burst into a room and looked around, "Hello! What's this?"—a line that cheerfully greets whatever appears on the day's landscape as a clue or an invitation rife with possibility. Or Auden's "look if you must, but you will have to leap," which helps me accept that we can't hedge all our bets before we make decisions. Or a line from Gloria Anzaldua that helps me imagine and empathize with those who straddle cultures or classes: "To live in the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads." Or the lively admonition of Wendell Berry's Mad Farmer that I have passed on to numerous graduating seniors, about to make their way into a marketplace replete with seductions and incentives to compromise:

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

It is a vision of generous unorthodoxy worth holding as a standard even as we put on our business suits and rush out with a mug of morning coffee.

"In the beginning was the Word." The relationship between the living Word embodied in Christ and the rich gift of words that is ours to use and care for is a mystery worth much pondering. Surely, among our most urgent and joyful responsibilities as stewards of that gift is to tell stories, to listen well, to resist the forces that flatten and inflate and beat language into alluring lies, and to stay in conversation—a word whose original meaning was to dwell in community or walk together. We need words that will surface when it is time to speak peace to violence or truth to power. To memorize poems is to prepare for those moments, and to put away for a time of need provisions that will fuel our prayers and see us through.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A Jesus We Can Follow

Equipped with a mug of coffee, I sat down to hear Professor Stackhouse’s absorbing and instructive lecture on Kenotic Christology 101. To read his review “A Christ We Can Follow” [January/February 2011] is to enroll in a seminary-level course, learning from a scholar who is orthodox but not afraid to ask needful questions or challenge pious assumptions.

His clear organization permitted me—a novice in this area—to follow the problems associated with a traditional understanding of the Incarnation and how new varieties of kenotic theology can address them. He responds to the objections with such biblical perspicacity and creedal fidelity that I was fully persuaded of his modest conclusion: “kenotic Christology deserves a serious look.” I appreciate Stackhouse’s honesty about the limits of theology and his refusal to explain away paradox.

The title of the review captures my sentiment: I can only follow a Jesus who is fully human—whether in his being or in his experience—but also fully divine. For that reason, I am inclined to agree with the kenoticists: “The doctrine of divine immutability, and its correlate, divine impassability, are simply wrong in the light of the Christ event as witnessed in Scripture …. God can change and God can suffer.” Kenotic Christology, at first blush, seems to threaten orthodoxy with its accent on the humanity of Jesus. But it actually turns out to be a protector of orthodoxy by keeping us closer to the Jesus of the Gospels and rejecting the “perfect being philosophy” that diminishes his roles as an obedient example and empathetic advocate. Well done, professor.

Christopher BensonDenver, Colorado

Emigrant Nation

David Skeel’s engaging review of Mark Choate’s study of Italian emigrants [“Emigrant Nation,” January/February] raised some excellent questions for scholars of immigrant communities to pursue, particularly around issues of religious institutions, religious life, and the role of religious commitments on the lives of immigrants. At the same time, I finished the review wanting more. I realize the piece was not meant to be a bibliography, but I do think it misses too much of the work already out there on immigrants and religion, such as key edited volumes by Stephen Warner and Judith Wittner (Gatherings in Diaspora, [Temple, 1998]) and Helen Ebaugh and Janet Chafetz (Religion and the New Immigrants [Altamira, 2000]), as well as significant monographs, such as those by Margarita Mooney (on Haitians in diaspora) and Joaquin Jay Gonzalez (on Filipino Americans). Not everything can appear in a short review, but Skeel leaves the impression that little work is available on some of these topics.

What I think was more notably missing, however, was stronger follow-up to the issue of racism in discussions of immigration in the United States. I appreciated Skeel’s highlighting the complex and shifting categories of race that came with host countries’ reception of immigrant communities. How Italians became “white” when coming to the United States (and some Italians more easily than others) was an interesting component I look forward to exploring in Choate’s book.

At the same time, Skeel hints at the parallels between the treatment of Italians in the early 20th century and current immigration from Mexico, but he does not press the issue as he could. Controversies concerning so-called illegal immigration aside, the public racism that has been engendered in contemporary public discourse over immigration requires more than a few oblique references in a review such as this. I’m not sure if Choate addressed it in his work, but a question to add to Skeel’s list of follow-up scholarship would be how the majority U.S. church responded to discrimination against Italians, and how the church is (or is not) responding to racism against immigrants today. I do thank David Skeel for raising the issues he did and giving us something to pursue, but I wished for something a lot stronger by the end.

Brian HowellAssociate Professor of AnthropologyWheaton CollegeWheaton, Illinois

I just received my latest issue of Books & Culture, jumped to the David Skeel piece, and was disappointed by the flagrant errors in his review. First of all, Carlo Levi—not Carlo Rossi—wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli. And, more important, it was the fascist government, not the socialists, who sent him into internal exile. Also Gay Talese’s book is called Honor Thy Father, not Thy Father’s Will. My question is: who was sipping the Carlo Rossi? You or Skeel?

Thomas DePietroEastchester, New York

John Wilson replies:

Thanks much for the corrections. An editor’s job is to keep mistakes from making their way into print. Error, alas, is persistent. (One of the reasons I so much enjoy the TLS and the LRB is that they feature such lively Letters sections, in which sharp-eyed readers with well-stocked minds—readers like you, in short—point out errors in issue after issue. Of course, it’s not so much fun when the errors are one’s own.) At least we were able make these corrections for the web version.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Construction

I made for grief a leaden bowl
and drank it, every drop.
And though I thought I’d downed it all
the hurting didn’t stop.

I made of hope a golden sieve
to drain my world of pain.
Though I was sure I’d bled it dry
the void filled up again.

I made of words a silver fork
and stabbed love in the heart,
and when I found the sweetness gone
I chewed it into art.

Collection, Recollection

Can the arrow forget the bow-string and
the bow—their pent-up passion
to let fly? The sudden snap and twang,
the relief of release?

The fledgling, having just
chipped herself free in the nest,
how does she practice
the wide threat of space?

A clear lens, the drop of rain
carries in its orb an image of the sky
from which it fell—a piece of cloud—and
with it a recollection of thunder.

And the predestined satchel
of tomorrow, will it not be packed
with the finely-orchestrated
chaos of today?

—Luci Shaw

Glib Confucian, Garrulous Llullist

I have felt it in my heart
I have done it in my pants
I have thought it through in daylight
I have asked it to a dance
I’ve committed it in writing
I have grasped it in the dark
I have gone without companions
Through the ramble, in the park
I have shown it in a movie
And denied it to my face
Made an altar of the mirror
Taken pride in my disgrace
I have touched it up in photos
I have taken it on tour
I’ve walked it twice around the block
To help it feel secure
I have told my dreams about it
To near strangers in the street
I have stroked it under covers
I have fed it to the cat
I have smothered it with curses
And inflated it with smacks
I’ve done everything but name it
As it slithers through the cracks
I could go on forever
But I don’t believe I will
Though it occupies the emptiness
And does expand to fill

Fabulous, but Not Out Loud

When Amiri Baraka / Leroi Jones
Was busted on a weapons charge
In the late 1960s, writers
Held a demonstration shouting:
Lyres Speak the Truth.
Allen Ginsberg led the chanters;
The trial was in all the papers:
Leroi Jones was jailed.

In the 1980s,
New York Mayor Edward Koch (that rhymes
With botch, not co*ke) promoting
One of his bestsellers, spoke
At the New York PEN Club
About himself and politics
And making war on drugs.

Ginsberg,
Rising from the audience,
Asked the mayor in one breath if he
“Supported the conspiracy
Between drug companies
And vampire landlord warlord lobbies
That make ordinary
Citizens criminals, criminals rich
Though government authority
Does not extend to ecstasy and
Mister Mayor will the prisoners
Of conscience ever be set free?”

Koch chanted down the poet:
“OM! Allen, OM! OM! OM! OM!”
(Pronounced to rhyme with bomb, not comb.)
A humorist once told me: “I love poets,
They are great to steal from.”

—Laurance Wieder

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The British historian William Reginald (Reg) Ward, who died on October 2 of last year, accomplished more in his retirement than most scholars accomplish in their entire careers. We shared in a special session at the American Society of Church History in Washington, D.C., in January 2008, honoring him as one of the most distinguished religious historians of the past half century. It was one of his last appearances at an academic conference, and at 82 years of age he was still in good form. Ward’s responses to the panelists displayed his characteristically droll sense of humor, his pleasure in defending controversial positions, his vast erudition and delight in the arcane, and, always, his unparalleled command of early modern European history. It was a great occasion.

That was a meeting of specialists, though, and it may be a little while yet before the insights of Ward’s scholarship make their way into the textbooks. His scholarship is dense, and his writing does not suffer fools gladly. (Mark once offered Bruce $10,000 to translate Reg from English into English.) Above all, what readers of Books & Culture will want to know is that Reg Ward decisively changed the way historians understand the origins of evangelicalism. No longer can the history of modern evangelicalism be told as an Anglo-American story, beginning with, say, John Wesley’s strangely warmed heart in London in 1738, or the phenomenon of revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, under Jonathan Edwards, a few years earlier. There is an Anglo-German axis that is every bit as important as the Anglo-American; once those Central European roots of evangelical religion are understood, the entire tradition takes on a fresh appearance.

It is difficult to find strong enough adjectives of commendation for the body of work in which W. R. Ward developed this fresh, creative, and deeply researched rendering of evangelical history. Essays from the 1970s and 1980s, many of which were gathered in his 1993 collection Faith and Faction, anticipated the key arguments. They were then given full airing in three magisterial books: The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992); Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648-1789 (1999); and Early Evangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1789 (2006). Ward’s pan-European reconstruction of early evangelical history also informs, to a less obvious degree, the massively learned and often deliciously humorous annotations that he provided for seven volumes of the new critical edition of John Wesley’s Works.[1] The books and editions we’ve just mentioned (along with others) were all published in less than two decades, and all after Ward had “retired” from his longtime post in the history department at the University of Durham.

Never from within the Anglo-American community of historians working on the modern history of Christianity has there been such an encompassing challenge to received historiography, nor such a well-documented appeal to reorient evangelical history away from the narrow precincts of the North Atlantic to the broad plains of Central Europe. The challenge that Ward’s scholarship mounted for the rest of us very ordinary historians was extraordinary. Ward’s achievement provided what not even German scholars have attempted, which is a general interpretation of the history of evangelicalism from within the standpoint of German history and German historical scholarship.

The Central European roots of evangelical religion have changed perceptions of evangelical origins in at least five ways. First, by situating evangelical history against the backdrop of 17th-century European political history, Ward demonstrated that distinctly evangelical beliefs and practices emerged in response to political pressure from powerful states, such as those in the Habsburg empire, or powerful state-churches, both Protestant and Catholic. What he summarized as “the almost universal history of revival as resistance to assimilation” led Ward to Central European beginnings for such essential evangelical themes as the opposition of “true Christianity” to formulaic, systematic, or imposed orthodoxies; and to small-group enclaves as the necessary nurturing medium in which “true Christianity” could flourish. By showing how the political power of nation-states and state-churches played a defining role in the earliest evangelical movements, he showed all scholars the often covert political protests found in almost all evangelical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, and probably later as well.

Second, Ward insisted on the foundational significance of 17th-century events and circ*mstances for evangelical history. By so doing he made a convincing case that accounts of Anglo-American evangelicalism are necessarily stunted if they do not include figures like Johann Arndt, Jakob Böhme, and Pierre Poiret (who are almost never mentioned) as well as those like Philip Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke (who occasionally appear as mere anticipations of what came later).

By insisting on the importance of 17th-century politics and 17th-century European religious history for all later evangelical history, Ward, thirdly, also showed how necessary it is to connect events in the 18th century back to the era of the Reformation and Catholic Reformation. Reformers like Spener returned to Luther for inspiration; in him Spener and like-minded Pietists discovered precedents that would come to mark all evangelicals. Even more, Ward showed that complex lines of influence continued to link mystically minded Catholics and pietistically inclined Protestants straight through the 17th and 18th centuries, and that those links can be best explained by common patterns of reaction to the orthodox state-church establishments that defined European religion after the Reformation.

Fourth, Ward insisted that reforming, revivalistic, anti-statist, and small-group Protestantism was always and everywhere a pan-European phenomenon governed minimally, if at all, by national and linguistic boundaries. If the later development of national historiographies and the sad myopia of historians working only with materials in their mother tongues have obscured those thick international connections, Ward insisted that history as it actually developed deserves precedence over history as it has come artificially to be perceived. In his vision, there should be many books in French treating the Puritans because of how widely Puritan devotional literature was read by French- and German-speaking believers in the 17th century and because of how much English-speaking evangelicals were encouraged by Madame Guyon and Francois Fénelon. Studies today of German-English-American evangelical connections, in Ward’s perspective, only return to what for Wesley, Theodore Frelinghuysen, and even Jonathan Edwards was their standard spiritual purview. The challenge to monoglot history here is sharp. While American historians were debating whether the whole notion of the Great Awakening might be an “interpretive fiction” or “invention” created largely by 19th-century historians, Ward responded with a characteristically dense account of evangelical religion across the whole North Atlantic region that made this conversation look provincial.

Finally, Ward’s revised history of early evangelicalism includes an account of the evangelical mind. He argued that in its origins, evangelical piety was typically hostile toward Aristotelian scholasticism, especially when such intellectual system building was used to buttress power, privilege, and territory among the Lutheran or Reformed orthodox, leaving the man and woman in the pew literally without a prayer. This anti-Aristotelianism, which worked its way into the intellectual character of evangelicalism as it emerged after the wars of religion in the 17th century, meant that evangelicals often also had an affinity for mysticism and were attracted to vitalist or typological understandings of nature. Early European evangelicalism, like other more esoteric movements in the period, explained the relationship of nature to human nature in Paracelsian terms of macrocosm and microcosm. At places like the Pietist University of Halle there were efforts to do serious scientific research within this intellectual outlook. It was difficult, however, for evangelicals to sustain a coherent intellectual framework for interpreting nature and history, and the 18th century’s new mechanical philosophy would leave the world disenchanted. What Jonathan Edwards had tried to do through history and typology, Wüttemberger Pietists had tried to do through a “unitary science of reality” based on the old principle of “life.” In the end, both were fighting rearguard actions against the rise of materialist science. The result was that by the end of the 18th century, evangelicalism was a fragmented movement, and its piety, once embedded in a more comprehensive worldview, would now express itself in more limited terms within a modern intellectual framework.

In at least these five ways, Ward changed the historiography of early evangelicalism. He turned the globe back a quarter turn toward Europe and turned the calendar back a century toward the post-Reformation era. Single-handedly, his herculean scholarship reconstituted 18th-century Anglo-American evangelical history in terms of 17th-century Central European history. This is one of the great contributions in all of modern historical scholarship.

Bruce saw Reg once more in June 2009 in Manchester. At 84 years of age and with cancer, Reg had taken the train up from his home at Petersfield near Portsmouth on the south coast to attend a lecture. They got to spend a couple of hours together on a sunny bench, him with his rosy cheeks, leaning on his cane, talking by turns about the 18th century and eminent German atheists. As always, it seemed that he had read everything. Among those of us who knew him, he shall be remembered fondly for his spirited, contrarian opinions, expressed always with a twinkle in his eye, and for his kind and generous manner on occasions like that—as well as for the way he spent his retirement re-writing the whole history of early evangelicalism.

1. Journals and Diaries, ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, vols. 18-24 of The Works of John Wesley (Abingdon, 1988-2003).

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Bruce Hindmarsh is James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If President Obama and the U.S. Department of Justice no longer want to defend the Defense of Marriage Act from challenges by gay rights activists, who will?

Leading conservative law firms say they’re eager to defend the 1996 law that defines marriage as between a man and a woman, but that may not be so easy.

Could a conservative firm like Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based group that often opposes the administration, be the stand-in for the U.S. attorney general before a judge hearing DOMA challenges?

“That’s what we’re pursuing,” said Mathew Staver, founder of the firm and dean of Liberty University School of Law. “Somebody has to step in and do the job when the attorney general and the president will abandon theirs.”

Liberty Counsel had filed friend-of-the-court briefs in two DOMA court cases and is now strategizing with members of Congress to intervene on their behalf to defend the law that bans federal

recognition of same-sex marriages.

“It’s early in the process,” said Staver, whose firm has litigated dozens of cases related to marriage – including DOMA – and represented Congress, state legislators and private organizations on other issues.

“We’re still doing a lot of preliminary discussion.”

Staver and other conservative lawyers have harshly criticized the announcement Wednesday (Feb. 23) by Attorney General Eric Holder that Obama had determined that DOMA is unconstitutional when applied to same-sex couples married legally under state law.

Last month, the Alliance Defense Fund submitted a brief on behalf of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, in response to a Massachusetts challenge of DOMA being heard in a federal appeals court. Now it could be turning its attention to the cases in Connecticut and New York that prompted the administration’s new decision.

“I have no doubt that the Alliance Defense Fund and other organizations will involve themselves in these cases,” said Austin R. Nimocks, senior legal counsel for the Arizona-based firm. “The question is what is going to be the nature of the role. If somebody with (legal) standing to intervene in these cases wants ADF to represent them, we will certainly explore that with them.”

California’s Proposition 8 – which ended same-sex marriages in the state but was later ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge – offers some clues to the road ahead.

The ADF is representing the group ProtectMarriage.com to defend the 2008 voter referendum after the state’s governor and attorney general opted not to defend it; the California Supreme Court is weighing whether the group has legal standing to step in as the case heads to a federal

appeals court.

The American Center for Law and Justice, a law firm founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, also is mulling its role in the fight over DOMA.

Jordan Sekulow, a lawyer and policy director with the Washington-based firm, said attorneys are in private discussions with members of Congress and could represent some by filing amicus briefs or more directly representing them in court.

“It’s possible that because of the politically charged nature of this that it’s more likely for organizations who have taken a stand on this issue to lead the defense,” he said.

His firm has represented dozens of members of Congress in recent cases, from opposing Obama’s health care plan in Virginia and Florida to supporting the National Day of Prayer and disputed crosses erected in California.

But do these groups have a chance if they try to pick up where Justice Department lawyers left off?

John Witte, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, said conservative activists simply don’t have the firepower or the “unrivaled” political power of administration lawyers.

“There’s just no substitute for having the federal government’s attorney general and Office of Legal Counsel involved in these cases,” he said.

“Maintaining DOMA once the administration steps away … is going to be much harder.”