Laura Ingalls Wilder – Page 5 – The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder

A Prairie Girl’s Faith

At the beginning of 2018, I mentioned at the end of my post on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires that I might be posting less often this semester because I hoped to be writing the first chapter of my book. When I looked at the blog and saw that the last entry was uploaded on February 23, I realized that the first part of that statement was true. Unfortunately, the second part is not – I have been swamped by grading and administrative work here at Trinity Christian College this semester. It’s good work, but it’s not work on the book.

However, lately I was able to read Stephen Hines’s A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I learned last summer that this book was coming out, and it made me nervous. This was right when I was hoping to get a book contract from Eerdmans. Would his project steal my thunder? Would Hines say everything I had to say? I believed at the time that I would approach the subject of Wilder’s faith in a much different way than Hines would, but I was not sure. As it turns out, I did not need to be anxious. A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not the book that I would write or that I hope to write.

Stephen Hines has described himself as a “literary prospector” who looks for unpublished works by famous writers that are not under copyright and therefore can be collected and republished. Hines has been editing books of Wilder’s writing since the early 1990s. Most of these book have reprinted collections of Wilder’s articles in the Missouri Ruralist. The most complete of these books is Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist, from 2007. He also published Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1997. I have written blog posts on both of these books.

A Prairie Girl’s Faith is not a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is not a scholarly examination of the nature of Wilder’s faith either. It is more a collection of Hines’s reflections and observations about aspects of Wilders’ life and writings. Most of these reflections have to do with Wilder’s faith, though he also engages the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and their literary collaboration on the Little House books. Since I hope to write a scholarly biography that examines the nature of Wilder’s faith, I was relieved to discover this. This also means that I should judge the book that Hines wrote, not the book that he didn’t write.

On these terms, the book includes some good insights. Hines has read the Little House books many times. He details how he first found them as a child in rural Kansas and also how he read them aloud to his wife in the kitchen during their early marriage. He knows the Little House books inside and out. He has also read Wilder’s recently published memoir Pioneer Girl and other important works about Wilder and Rose by William Anderson, John Miller, Pamela Smith Hill, William Holtz, and Dale Cockrell. He engages the many ways that the Little House books mention faith, especially descriptions of Sunday School, church worship services, and hymns sung by the Ingalls family. Hines’s extensive familiarity with Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles is also clear throughout the book.

Several chapters treat Wilder’s childhood, as described in the Little House books. Several chapters engage the relationship between Laura and Rose and the writing of the books. There is a chapter on the hymns referenced in the Little House books. And there is a chapter of recipes from Caroline Ingalls and other women from De Smet taken from a cookbook published in 1915.

The book also provides some background information about the Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and De Smet, South Dakota. An Appendix on De Smet reproduces some articles from the De Smet News and the Kingsbury County News about churches in De Smet. I had never seen these articles before, so they were very helpful.

Hines correctly notes that the central values of Laura and Rose were not the same, and he understands that Rose’s collaboration in the publishing of the Little House books may have shaped how those works depict Christianity. He writes in one chapter,

In fact, it is possible that Rose may have tried to downplay her mother’s faith in the Little House books. For example, in Laura’s original Pioneer Girl manuscript she spoke several times about asking for forgiveness for wrongdoing. But this act of contrition did not show up as many times in the Little House series. However, admittedly, that subtle difference may provide scant actual proof. (62)

As I have written in other blog posts, I believe that Rose did shape the depictions of Christianity in the Little House books. However, the evidence I use is the comparison of Laura’s original manuscripts of Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek and the final published works. So I think that there is more evidence (I prefer using “evidence” to “proof”) for these changes than Hines does. But I think his observation is insightful, especially since he is just comparing Pioneer Girl to the Little House books.

The concluding chapter is titled “What Laura Means to Us.” Hines’s summary reads, “I like to think we can still learn lessons from Laura’s accumulated experience and reflection, among which is tolerance for other’s failings, courage to start all over again after disaster strikes, and a belief that God holds the future in his hands and intends no ill will for his children.” (158) I agree that these are lessons that one can learn from the Little House books, and I appreciate this clear and pithy assessment of some aspects of their abiding value.

Unfortunately, at times the book presents accounts from the Little House books as if they are literal descriptions of what happened during Wilder’s childhood, the same as accounts from Pioneer Girl. But it seems clear to me that the descriptions and narratives in the Little House books were formed and shaped in a multitude of ways for a number of different reasons. Some of the shaping is for narrative purposes. Some of the shaping has to do with audience. Some of the shaping, I believe, was done by Rose and not by Laura. So I would find Pioneer Girl to be a much more reliable source than the Little House books for how Laura experienced faith.

I also find it striking that the book does not mention Laura’s most clear description of an experience of God’s presence. As a child in Walnut Grove, she describes “One night while saying my prayers, as I always did before going to bed, this feeling of homesickness and worry was worse than usual, but gradually I had a feeling of a hovering, encompassing Presence of a Power, comforting and sustaining and thought in surprise ‘This is what men call God!’” (Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, ed. by Pamela Smith Hill, [Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2014], 137) Hines mentioned this account in the introduction of Saving Graces. I was shocked that it is not included in this volume.

Finally, the book often presents Christianity as “Christian values” or the “values of hearth and home.” For instance, when arguing that Laura should be credited with supplying the central themes of the books, not Rose, Hines asserts “And whatever else they are, Laura’s books are a story about building a home in the wilderness; they are not about raw nature itself, however raw that nature can be. No, the Christian family values of the books are overwhelming. The sacredness of home and hearth are everywhere present.” (69) Admittedly, in other parts of the book Hines does assert that Laura did have a personal relationship with God through Christ. In my work on Wilder, I hope to press more consistently beyond vaguer notions of values Wilder’s relationship to the gospel of sin and salvation in Christ.

Still, I’m grateful to Hines for raising some of the issues I hope to address in my book, and for pointing me in some new directions in terms of sources. Thanks for reading.

(Quotes are from Stephen W. Hines, A Prairie Girl’s Faith: The Spiritual Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder [New York: Waterbrook, 2018].)

Links:

Doing fewer blog posts this semester

Trinity Christian College

Book contract from Eerdmans

Hines as Literary Prospector; also here

Post on Saving Graces: The Inspirational Writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder

Post on Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist

Post on Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

Post on Rose’s shaping of the depiction of Christianity in the Little House books

The Last Puritans

During the last several weeks, I have been able to read historian Margaret Bendroth’s The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past. Bendroth is the director of the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston. I have heard her speak at events sponsored by the Conference on Faith and History. She is a careful historian and an eloquent speaker. The Last Puritans is a history of Congregational Churches in the U. S. A. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I wanted to read it because Laura Ingalls Wilder attended Congregational Churches in Walnut Grove, Minnesota and De Smet, South Dakota. Her parents, Charles and Caroline Ingalls, were also lifelong members of Congregational Churches.

I am a member and a Ruling Elder in a small Presbyterian denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC). The OPC is a confessional church, holding to the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms as doctrinal statements that accurately explain what the Bible says on most questions of faith and life. I also see myself as an Evangelical, sharing characteristics with many other contemporary Christians who believe that the Bible is God’s inspired word, that Jesus Christ is God come to earth to die for the sins of His people, and that Christians’ responsibility in the world is to preach the gospel and lead a life in accordance with God’s word. As a result, I admit that it is difficult for me to understand the approach of most liberal, mainline Protestant churches, including the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the United Church of Christ (UCC). Since 1957, the UCC is one of the successor denominations to the Congregational Church associations described in Bendroth’s book; the UCC is the subject of its last chapter. It seems to me that these churches downplay Biblical doctrines and historic confessions in order to pursue progressive social causes. I see them as rejecting the historic Christian faith. This means that it can be difficult for me to appreciate the decisions made by the leaders and members of those churches in the past, and it can be hard for me to understand the Christianity experienced by people in those churches today. Bendroth’s book is a help in this area.

The Last Puritans describes the leaders and members of American Congregational Churches during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as being extremely interested in their history. Congregationalists trace their roots to the Pilgrims and Puritans who migrated to New England during the early 1600s. However, the way that they remembered their Pilgrim ancestors changed over time. By the 1800s, they mainly remembered the independent, liberty-loving side of the Pilgrims, and their establishment of churches where local autonomy was fiercely defended. Nineteenth Century Congregationalists also told stories about the Pilgrims and Puritans that emphasized their toleration of other Christians. The result was that for many, their vision of their history led to downplaying of doctrinal distinctives, including the Calvinism that animated their Pilgrim and Puritan forebears. At the turn of the twentieth century, Congregationalists also began to historicize their ancestors, viewing them not as kindred spirits but as strikingly different. Twentieth century churchgoers emphasized the spirit of their forebears while rejecting many of their beliefs. This led them to support union with other churches and an embrace of the Social Gospel and Progressivism.

Bendroth concludes that while Congregationalists came to doubt many stories in the Bible were factually true, they decided to remain in the church anyway. “Protestant Liberalism is… about people who learned to live with ambiguities, who chose to believe without demanding certainties.” (194) She gives examples from both church leaders and ordinary church members who exemplify this willingness to let go of the factual nature of the Bible but remain in the church. This would not be the choice that I would make, but I think that I understand a little better why they made it.

Does this understanding of the history of Congregationalism contribute to a better understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilder? Perhaps. Perhaps Wilder’s upbringing in Congregational Churches shaped her understanding of what church should be. Assuming that a Methodist Church in the border south was more Evangelical than a Congregational Church in the upper Midwest, perhaps that is why she never joined the Methodist Church in Mansfield, Missouri, even though she attended there for over sixty years. There also may be some connections between Congregationalists’ memory of the Pilgrims’ love of liberty and Wilder’s devotion to liberty, as well as that of her father and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. I’m going to continue to ruminate on this as I start writing soon.

Thanks for reading.

(Quote is from The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015].)

Links:

The Last Puritans

Congregational Library and Archives

The Conference on Faith and History

Pioneer Girl Perspectives Review

Well, last Friday I was mentioned that I might not blog as much this semester, and here I am posting a week later. . .

Last year I wrote a review of Pioneer Girl Perspectives, a book of essays from the South Dakota State Historical Society (SDSHS), for The Annals of Iowa, a historical journal published by the Iowa State Historical Society. The Annals gave permission to the Pioneer Girl Project of the SDSHS to reproduce that review on their website: https://pioneergirlproject.org/2018/01/25/a-worthy-companion-review-of-pioneer-girl-perspectives/

It’s slightly briefer than my blog post on the book. Thought you might be interested. Best wishes.

Prairie Fires

Happy 2018. I hope that everyone’s year has begun well.

This week I finished Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had started in the middle of December, but Christmas intervened. It is an excellent book. Fraser has read just about everything there is to read by and about Wilder, and she provides an interpretation of all of it. She has read Wilder’s published works, all the extant manuscripts of the Little House books, and pretty much all of the books that have been written about Wilder. She also appears to have read all of Rose Wilder Lane’s materials as well, which is quite a feat—Lane often kept a detailed diary, and she typed reams of letters to friends, published dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines, and wrote a number of books. Eighty of the Prairie Fires’s six hundred pages are footnotes. It is clearly the most up to date and exhaustively researched biography of Wilder published.

But the book strives to do more than just chronicle the lives and works of Laura and Rose. It sets those lives in the contexts of American national history. Fraser provides detailed descriptions of the Dakota War of 1862, the Homestead Act, and the settlement of the upper Midwest by white Americans. She argues that these events both shaped and were reflected in Wilder’s life and works. The book also considers how World War I, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II impacted Wilder’s writing of the Little House books (they were published between 1932 and 1943). John Miller’s book Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder does some of this contextualization, but Fraser’s work is more comprehensive.

In a nutshell, Fraser’s interpretation of the settlement of the upper Midwest and Great Plains is that thousands of families created an environmental catastrophe. The land and climate in many places could not sustain small farmers, but they attempted to make a go of it anyway, spurred on by advertising and scientific ideas (like “rain follows the plow”) that led to marginal existence and misery for many. Many were forced to take jobs in town or rely on the support of others, including church, the local community, and the state and federal government. But government leaders often withheld support, and those who took it were often ashamed. The Ingalls and Wilder families were two of those families.

Fraser also attempts to understand how both Laura and Rose thought. She both allows their own words to speak for themselves and provides her own views of their actions. Laura is depicted as a woman hardened by misfortune but determined to provide for her family. She loved nature and everything in it, and she who ultimately created a literary masterpiece for children. Her detailed descriptions, her understanding of her own life and the characters she interacted with, and her love for her father all make the Little House books juvenile classics. By hard work she secured her family’s economic security.

The book’s depiction of Rose is much less positive. Throughout she is described as mixing the truth and fiction: in her articles for “yellow” newspapers during the 1910s and 1920s, in her fictional “biographies” of great men, in her work with her mother’s life story, and in her personal correspondence. She was never able to manage money, and she suffered from depression and perhaps deeper mental illness. By the end of her life she had let her libertarian ideology take over her understanding of reality. Fraser gives Lane credit for editing and improving the Little House books, making them possible to publish and memorable, but Wilder’s writing is seen as driving the books’ popularity and staying power.

Overall, Prairie Fires is a super book. Fraser’s writing is simple but powerful. She evokes the past well and sets Wilder and Lane in that past for us to consider. Its scope is encyclopedic. I am happy that it appeared while I am beginning to write my book so that I can use it in that effort.

As far as Wilder’s faith is concerned, the book focuses most on religion in the early chapters where Charles Ingalls’s ancestors are described. They were Puritans; one had come to Massachusetts Bay with John Endecott in 1629, one was executed during the witch craze in Salem in 1692 (Martha Ingalls Allen Carrier), and one wrote poetry that was published locally in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Of the latter, Samuel Ingalls, the self-described “unlearned poet,” the book says that he “was a Puritan and may have been a Congregationalist.” (32) I am not sure that Fraser understands the relationship between Puritans and Congregationalists. In terms of church governance, all Puritans were Congregationalists. By the late 1700s, I believe that the term Congregationalist was used for most of the the churches in New England founded by the Puritans of the 1600s. I have a book on Congregationalism by Margaret Bendroth (The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past, [University of North Carolina, 2015]) that I hope will help me get everything straight.

Beyond that, there is not a lot of attention to Laura and Rose’s faith in the body of the book. This is probably partially because Wilder says little about her Christian beliefs in her writings. In addition, Laura and Rose’s religious outlook is not really primary to Fraser’s understanding of the two women. She considers their economic situation, their physical health, and their relationships with each other in much more detail (and again, they have the benefit of greater documentation, especially in Rose’s writings). Interestingly, Fraser returns to Puritanism at the end of the book to help explain why Laura firmly believed that individuals and families could make it without government assistance, even though her parents’ family and her own family were not able to:

Wilder wrote that her mother was fond of a saying: “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.” If anything was bred in her family’s Congregationalist bones, it was their exemplary devotion to self-sufficiency… Puritan identity was based on redemption through mastery of self, and the rigid application of principles including frugality, diligence, and, above all, independence. (455)

I’m pretty sure that Seventeenth Century Puritans and Eighteenth Century Congregationalists would not have agreed with this description. They believed in redemption on the basis of the work of Jesus Christ alone. They taught that those who repent and trust in Christ for salvation must also work to discipline their bodies by cultivating these virtues. But those virtues were not the basis of their salvation.

I relate these disagreements with Fraser’s interpretations not because I think that they mar the book as a whole. Indeed, I think that Fraser understands Laura better than many other writers. Prairie Fires is a monument to years of work in the archives, thousands of hours of thinking about how best to understand the sources, and writing ability that I know that I can’t match. I am glad that I am not setting out to write a book of this scope. In the book that I am setting out to write, however, I hope to provide a better understanding of this one aspect of Laura’s life—her faith—and to explain what it might tell us about the history of American Christianity. In some ways, I think that all scholars are comforted when they find that they disagree in some way with other authors, because disagreements show that there is still something that can be added to the conversation.

I may not be writing very much for the blog this spring. It is my hope to write a chapter of the book, and I think that staying off of the blog may assist me in doing this. (See Cal Newport’s book Deep Work for an explanation of why I believe that this may be the case.) I am also teaching two sections of Western Civilization, which means I have 75 students’ papers to grade when they start coming in at the end of next week. I will see if I am able to give reports perhaps once a month.

Thanks again for reading.

(Quotations are from Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017].)

Link: Prairie Fires

Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life

Time is running out on 2018. I only have time for one more blog post this year.

I read a fun book in the last several weeks: Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life, a young adult novel by Shelley Tougas. It’s about a twelve-year-old whose family moves to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, because her mother wants to write a book and thinks that getting close to Laura Ingalls’s spirit will help. It has some good lessons about friends, about family, and about growing up. Tougas certainly understands the feel of the Little House books. She is also able to describe clearly the complexity of both American history and family dynamics. If you have time over Christmas break, I found it a quick and enjoyable read.

I have also received my copy of Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser’s biography of Wilder, and I’m about two hundred pages in. It is certainly encyclopedic. More later when I finish.

I hope that everyone has a blessed Christmas and a good start to 2018. Thanks for reading.

Links:

Laura Ingalls is Ruining My Life

Prairie Fires

Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her

I’m back from Iowa. I had a great time at the 25^th Anniversary Celebration for the Iowa Women’s Archives last weekend. While I am not a feminist nor a women’s historian, my talk about Laura Gibson Smith and her memoir Almost Pioneers was well received by the feminist women’s historians who made up most of those assembled for the celebration.

This week I was able to read Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her by Dan L. White. White lives with his family on a farm in the Ozarks near where Laura and Almanzo lived from 1894 to their deaths in 1949 and 1957. White has written a series of books on the Wilders and the Little House books, including:

Big Bible Lessons From Laura Ingalls’ Little Books
Devotionals With Laura: Laura Ingalls’ Favorite Bible Selections, What they Meant in Her Life, What they Might Mean in Yours
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Most Inspiring Writings
Laura’s Love Story: The Lifetime Love of Laura and Almanzo Wilder
The Long, Hard Winter of 1880-1881: What was it Really Like?
The Real Laura Ingalls: Who was Real, What was Real on her Prairie TV Show

White has also put out four volumes of Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles with his own introductions and comments (much like Stephen Hines’s many books). All of White’s books were originally published by a small press in Hartville, Missouri, named Ashley Preston Publishing. I believe this must be White’s own operation. They are now all available–with several other books he wrote about Christian living and family finances–as Kindle books on Amazon.com. Since they engage Christianity, I may have to check out the first three books on this list for my project.

Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her is an fascinating collection of materials. Six of the chapters are transcripts from interviews White conducted with Ozark residents who knew Laura and Almanzo when they were living: Nava Austin, Erman and Peggy Dennis, Emogene Fuge, Neta Seal, Anna Gutschke, and Carl Hartley. Other chapters give White’s opinions on some of the premier topics in Wilder scholarship, including Wilder’s political views, the relationship between Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane and the contributions of each to the Little House books, and why the books have become so beloved. Most chapters include extensive quotes from Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist articles; some include lengthy quotes from White’s other books.

White argues that since he lives in the Ozarks and is not a scholar or historian, he can give a perspective on the Wilders that is missing from other books about their lives:

Generally the people who write about Laura and the Little House books are not Ozarkers. They have chosen to be someplace else where life is fast and crowded and bustling. They usually don’t want the simple Ozark life of a homestead and chickens and horses and cows and goats.

Therefore, when these writers pontificate about Laura, they write from quite a different view than she had. When you read writings about Laura, you are reading just as much about the writer as you are about Laura. (22-23)

This hit home somewhat. I live one half block from the city of Chicago. I work at a college that has around 1200 students, which is about the current population of Mansfield, Missouri. But I did notice that this description might also be applied to White’s writing. When one reads the portions he has written, one does learn quite a bit about White’s life. One learns that he raised his family on a nearly self-sufficient farm in the Ozarks, that he and his wife homeschooled their children, that and all of them enjoyed the Little House books immensely. Strikingly, the end of the book includes a comparison between the Rocky Ridge farmhouse, which sits empty every night and has occupants only when a tour guide leads a group of tourists through it, to his own farmhouse, where a happy couple continues to live snugly.

White’s chapter on Laura and Almanzo’s political views does include an extended consideration of Laura’s faith. First, White argues that perhaps it was their shared commitment to limited government that kept them from joining the Methodist Church in Mansfield. “Congregationalists believed in small church government, not big. Surely Laura would have formally joined the Mansfield Methodist or Presbyterian Church had there not been something holding her back. That something may well have been that they were overgoverned for her tastes.” (76) I think that this is unlikely, but it is an interesting perspective. He also asserts that Laura and Almanzo can be seen as “typical conservative Christians,” which seems anachronistic to me. A different chapter does note Laura’s knowledge of the Bible and suggests that is why the books are happy despite the hardships the family faced.

It is the interviews with neighbors who knew Laura and Almanzo which are especially helpful. The portrait that emerges of Almanzo is a witty, funny, fun person to be around, even though his one foot was crippled and he walked with a cane. Laura comes across as a prim, proper, and refined old lady in velvet, always wearing a hat, even when it was no longer in style. They clearly loved one another very much. There are touching stories of Almanzo’s death from Neta Seal and Laura’s death from Carl Hartley. Seal’s interview also notes Laura’s deep knowledge of the Bible.

In some ways, this book is not the right time period for me to be reading right now. I am making plans to begin writing my biography’s first chapter, which is about Laura’s ancestors and early childhood. This book is about Laura and Almanzo’s life when they were in their sixties through eighties. But I needed to read the book so it could be returned to the library, so this week I got it done.

Thanks for reading.

Quotes are from Dan L. White, Laura Ingalls’ Friends Remember Her: Memories from Laura’s Ozark Home (Hartville, Mo.: Ashley Preston Publishing, 2013).

Links:

Iowa Women’s Archives 25^th Anniversary Celebration

Dan White’s books at Amazon

Religion and American Culture

During the last several weeks I had the opportunity to read Religion and American Culture by George M. Marsden. This will be the third time that I’ve read the book. I read it while I was in graduate school, and then I read it again in cooperation with my department at Trinity Christian College during the summer of 2005. I have found it incredibly insightful every time that I have read it.

Along with Mark Noll, Marsden is a historian of American Christianity and has led the late twentieth century revival of interest in the history of American religion. This is a textbook drawn from secondary sources and his own research, especially in the development of Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism during the 1900s. However, instead just being a history of American Religion or American Christianity, Marsden’s book tries to answer two questions: 1) What does American religion tell us about American culture? and 2) What does American culture tell us about American religion? If there is a thesis to the book, I think that it is that the United States is both incredibly religious and incredibly secular at the same time. Marsden finds this an incredibly powerful way of engaging the influence that religion has had on American culture and vice versa. He also finds that this reality has caused American history to be different from the history of modern Europe, and that it has created a multitude of ironies in American history itself.

I appreciate Marsden’s emphasis on the dual character of American culture itself, not just Americans. It is easier to admit that some Americans have been more Christian than others. For instance, some Europeans came to America during the 1600s for economic reasons, such as to get land and grow cash crops, while others came for religious reasons, for religious freedom or to set up an ideal Christian community. But Marsden argues that American culture is simultaneously very religious and very secular at just about every point in American history. Some examples:

The Constitution is based on a Christian understanding of human nature – that people are sinful and need government, but that since sinners will be the ones governing that government should have built-in limitations. Federalist 51 discusses this at length. But the Constitution itself does not mention God at all, unless one counts the date at the end which includes “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven.”
The development of European transatlantic slavery between the 1400s and 1700s was driven by economic considerations. The emancipation of slaves in northern states after the American Revolution was eased by the fact that their economies were not built on slavery the way that southern states’ economies were. But many Europeans and Americans used Christian arguments for the perpetuation of slavery. Southern culture before the Civil War was deeply Christian and deeply tied to slavery. Abolitionists also used Christian arguments for the elimination of slavery.
During the industrialization of the late 1800s, business leaders created and greatly expanded corporations. American jurisprudence treated corporations as persons before the law. But those corporations acted at times in ways that their Christian founders and directors would have found morally unacceptable for an individual.
American participation in both World War I and World War II had widespread support from Christians for moral reasons. But during World War II, the United States participated in the firebombing of both German and Japanese population centers, killing tens of thousands of civilian men, women, and children, and then dropped atomic weapons on two Japanese cities.
Finally, during the late twentieth century, religious Americans faced a reality where “many Americans are strongly committed to traditional or semitraditional religious and moral values; yet in an era of the vast expansion of government control and regulation, the necessities of public neutrality toward religion seem increasingly to limit areas where distinctive religious views can be freely exercised… Probably the key issue is whether governmental neutrality toward religion will be essentially hostile to all religion by attempting to exclude as much of it as possible from the public sphere, or whether the neutrality will take the form of truly encouraging religious pluralism whenever that is compatible with equity.” (276) Even though Marsden wrote this in 1990, I think that it is incredibly appropriate for today.

I think that Marsden’s formulation – that American culture is simultaneously very Christian and very secular – could be a possible way of viewing aspects of the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder. As I wrote in my entries on the Little House books almost two years ago (whoa), the profile of Christianity in the Little House books seems low for a person who was a lifelong church attender. It may help to explain why religious worship is not mentioned in Little House books until Chapter 21 of On the Banks of Plum Creek, the third book of the chronicle of the Ingalls family life. I have wondered if it is because Laura or Rose were thinking about what their audience might want or whether it was how they viewed the world. As readers of this blog know, I’m still working through all of this.

Thanks for listening.

(The page number reference is from George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture [San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990].)

Links:

Religion and American Culture

Amazon’s George Marsden Page

American Protestantism

Classes here at Trinity Christian College are in full swing. But I did get to read a short book this week: American Protestantism by Winthrop Hudson. The book is one of three topical books in the series “The Chicago History of American Civilization,” edited by Daniel Boorstin and published by the University of Chicago Press during the 1950s and 1960s. The other two topical books are American Catholicism and American Judaism. American Protestantism was published in 1961.

Hudson’s book is divided into three parts. The first is devoted to Protestantism in the British American Colonies and during the American Revolution. The second covers “Protestant America” from 1787 to 1914. The last is on “Post-Protestant America,” from 1914 to when the book was published. Hudson’s argument is similar to Mark Noll’s—that society and culture in the United States were dominated by Protestantism during the early nineteenth century, but Protestantism fell from that place of dominance during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The twentieth century has seen greater diversity and pluralism among Christian groups and religious groups overall.

I believe that I learned two important ideas from American Protestantism. The first is a detailed definition of “denominationalism” given in the first chapter. Hudson argues that the many divisions in Protestantism did not develop into sects where each does not believe that any of the others have the truth. Instead, they became denominations, where most believe that while there may be significant differences between different bodies, there are true Christians in other churches. He outlines the principles of denominationalism as follows: 1) people have differences in opinion; 2) they are not matters of indifference; 3) they can lead to fruitful discussions; 4) multiple churches can exist; 5) separation does not necessarily mean schism. (40-43) Hudson traces these impulses especially to the Westminster Assembly of the mid-1600s, which produced the documents that serve as the secondary standards of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which I am a part of. Throughout his treatment of the idea, Hudson refers to Jeremiah Burroughs, a Puritan and Congregationalist who was a member of the Assembly. Hudson concludes:

When it is remembered that, although Christians may be divided at many points, they are nonetheless united in Christ, it then becomes possible, Burroughes [sic] insisted, for them to work together for the common ends of “godliness.” What is required of the Christian is to “join with all our might in all we know, and with peaceable, quiet, humble spirits seek to know more, and in the meantime carry ourselves humbly and peaceably toward those we differ from, and Christ will not charge us at the Great Day for retarding his cause.” (44)

This is a great argument for humility or modesty in the presence of difference, a virtue that I believe would greatly improve public discourse in the United States today. It also connects in helpful ways to the concept of “confident pluralism” developed by John Inazu, a Law Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who will be speaking here at Trinity today. I do believe that there is a tension in some Protestants’ conception of denominationalism. I have known some Protestants who do believe that they have the only truth. While some would disavow that belief, their actions tend in that direction. But I think this is a human tendency, not just a problem for Protestants or Christians.

The other idea that I got from Hudson is the argument that because Protestantism dominated American culture and society for a while, it became influenced by American culture and society. This helps me understand why some Protestant churches have embraced American values and abandoned traditional Christian doctrines. Some call this cultural Christianity.

How useful might these ideas be for understanding the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder? They are both pretty large ideas, probably too large for a family or a person to exemplify. One way to understand Laura is as fairly wedded to a particular denomination, since she never joined the Methodist church in Mansfield even though attended services there for over sixty years. On the other hand, I’m not completely and totally sure if we have evidence that she actually ever joined the Congregational churches she attended in Minnesota or South Dakota either. One might also argue that the Christianity portrayed in the Little House books might show the influence of American culture and values. On the other hand, at times it is difficult to separate the religious ideas of Laura and those of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane in the book’s depictions of the church. My plan is to keep mulling over questions like these. Lord-willing I’ll be able to make progress on them once I get back to research on the Ingalls and Wilder families.

Thanks for reading.

(Page number references are from Winthrop S. Hudson, American Protestantism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961].)

Links:

Trinity Christian College

American Protestantism

My blog post on Mark Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Westminster Standards

Jeremiah Burroughs

David Brooks on Modesty

John Inazu and Confident Pluralism

Trinity Christian College’s Worldview Series

A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

Welcome to September. I just finished my first full week of classes and am looking forward to the long weekend.

I also just finished reading Mark A. Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. It is a textbook for courses in American Church History, published by Eerdmans Publishers in 1992. It traces an enormous number of churches, Christian leaders, and social movements that have shaped Christianity in the United Sates. Noll includes the history of Christianity in Canada so that he can compare the shape that Christianity has taken in the two countries.

Noll was for many years a history professor at Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school in the western suburbs of Chicago. Wheaton is both a highly-regarded academic institution and a place where Evangelical Christianity is respected and believed. At the end of his career, Noll taught at Notre Dame. He retired from the University at the end of this year. I met him at a conference several years ago and have heard him speak several times. I should also note that he is one of the co-editors of the Eerdmans series that I am writing for, the Library of Religious Biography.

Since I am a devout Christian, I have long been interested in the history of the Christian Church. However, during graduate school, I decided to specialize in the history of the American West rather than American Church history. I am pretty sure that I read Noll’s book when I was writing my dissertation, because one chapter addressed the depictions of the rural church in Midwestern farm newspapers. But if I did, I can’t find my notes. Reading it now has strengthened my understanding of American church history in multiple ways, several of which clearly contribute to my project on the faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

First, the book provides a concise and helpful definition and description of Puritanism as it was manifested in New England during the 1600s. Noll describes Puritans as believing that 1) God alone saves, 2) the Bible is the authority for faith and practice, 3) society is a unified whole, so church and civil government work together, and 4) God works through covenants. He concludes that Puritan teachings were “constant for over 150 years: individuals are sinners who need divine salvation; God has provided that salvation by grace, from his mercy alone; saved sinners now have the right and privilege to serve God by following his law.” (46) Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ancestors came to Massachusetts as part of the Puritan migration during the 1630s, and the Congregational Churches she was involved with in the upper Midwest were descended from Puritanism. So Noll’s definitions and descriptions provide welcome context.

Second, Noll characterizes the early nineteenth century as an age where Evangelical Protestant Christianity dominated American culture, society, and politics. Revivals in the early 1800s (the Second Great Awakening) caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to become Christians or to become more serious Christians. Reform movements such as abolition, temperance, and the women’s movement were national in scope. During the Civil War, leaders in both the North and South saw their causes as fully supported by the Bible. However, during the period between 1865 and 1920, a great transition occurred in American church history. Challenges from new intellectual movements, immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization led to a loss of Evangelical Protestant dominance. The Christian church since roughly the 1920s has existed in both a pluralistic and a secularizing context. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s long life (from 1867 to 1957) witnessed these upheavals.

Finally, Noll’s book provides several interesting specific observations about Christian Churches in the American West both before and after the Civil War. Noll describes how during the early nineteenth century, “earnest clergymen, Sunday School workers, and organizers of voluntary agencies (many of them women) cooperated with the settlers to impart the institutions and practices of Christian civilization” to new areas of the west. (223) Later, he provides a more melancholy meditation on life in rural areas:

Whatever their formal religious beliefs, ordinary Americans seemed to retain a generally sober, even Calvinistic, view of humanity, concerned much more with human limitations than with human potential. Ordinary people, in a life made difficult by unexpected death, families separated by vast distances, and the unpredictability of weather and crops, tended toward personal resignation. They were earnest, wary of pretension, and above all pessimistic about human nature. They were less concerned with controlling other people for their own ends than with controlling themselves and their immediate environments. Common people had a vital interest in order and a deep-seated fear of disorder. They dealt with these inner needs, it seems, with efforts to control the self, respond to God’s particular call for salvation, and accept the more general designs of Providence. Most common people worried about controlling themselves in the face of personal guilt, anxieties due to the vicissitudes of love and marriage, the uncertainties of birth, the unknown possibilities of the West, and the ever-present reality of death. These are generalizations that did not apply to many antebellum Americans, but for many others—perhaps even a majority—this vision of life shaped the daily round. (229)

Certain parts of this description seem to fit the mindset of Laura and the Ingalls family well. They certainly confronted their share of family separation, crop unpredictability, and anxieties about life passages. A tone of resignation or stoicism can be seen particularly in The First Four Years, but also in some of her correspondence, and at times in the Little House books themselves.

Finally, the book notes that churches in the West in the late nineteenth century confronted realities that made it impossible for Protestant churches to have the central role they did in the east or in earlier decades. Churches faced religious pluralism from the start, had no government support, and dealt with communities made up of many men without families and with little education. Noll argues that “These conditions… ensured that the role of the churches remained auxiliary rather than central to the new societies.” (328) He concludes:

The Civil War, in other words, marked a fresh opportunity for opening the West to settlement and for introducing Christianity. But conditions in the region combined with the instant pluralism of postbellum faiths to shape a context in which religion never meant the same thing, or perhaps as much, as its most earnest adherents had hoped when they contemplated the chance to fill the West with churches as well as settlers. (328)

These descriptions are applied to the years when Laura was growing up in Minnesota and South Dakota. I’m not sure how well they describe the situation in those states, being closer to the settled Midwest and further from regions characterized by mining booms and busts. But it is a place to start. During the next few months, I plan to read several more academic surveys of American Religious history.

So far this semester I have been successful in leaving my office on Thursday mornings to read and think and write. My wife and I have been reading Cal Newport’s book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and it has greatly helped my thinking about how to carve out time for important tasks. I highly recommend it.

I hope that everyone has a great Labor Day break. Thanks for reading.

(Page number references are from Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992].)

End of Summer

Thanks very much to everyone who reached out to me (via email, in person, via Facebook) after I announced two weeks ago that I had received a book contract. You all are the best.

Today all first year students will be moving into the dorms here at Trinity Christian College. There have been some students on campus for the last week or two, including fall athletes, student leaders, and some others. It’s been great to see more students around; they bring life back to a college campus. All the new freshman will be here by this evening. Returning resident students and new transfers arrive by the middle of next week to complete the student body. My daughter moves back to Trinity (she’s a sophomore) this Sunday. Regular courses begin next Wednesday. My three sons start school (two in high school and one in homeschool eighth grade) next Thursday morning. All of this means that the summer is just about over.

It’s been a productive summer:

– I finished my book review of Christine Woodside’s Libertarians on the Prairie for Fides et Historia (the journal of the Conference on Faith and History) in April. (I guess this wasn’t really summer, but I hadn’t mentioned it’s completion on the blog before.)

– I finalized my book proposal and sent it off to Eerdmans in May.

– I presented a paper at the Midwest History Conference in Grand Rapids in June.

– I spoke at LauraPalooza in July.

– I received a book contract from Eerdmans and signed it in July.

– Last week I completed a book review of Pioneer Girl Perspectives for The Annals of Iowa.

– This morning I wrote three and a half pages of a possible introduction to the book.

I hope to keep reading for the book project once school starts at least once a week. I got a list of books to read from Mark Noll, one of the editors of the Eerdmans series I’m writing for, about American religious history. I also hope to do more thinking and writing. I will try to keep up the blog as much as I can.

Thanks for following. Best wishes to all who has someone in their home who returns to school during the next several weeks.

Links:

Trinity Christian College

Fides et Historia and the Conference on Faith and History

My Libertarians on the Prairie blog post

My LauraPalooza post

My book contract post

My Pioneer Girl Perspectives post

The Annals of Iowa