Margaret Bendroth, “The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestantism and the Power of the Past” (2015) – An oddly fascinating book about a determinedly staid organization, “The Last Puritans” traces how the Congregationalist church managed the transition from being the orthodox state church of Massachusetts to one of the most liberal — critics would argue pallid and shapeless — denominations out there today. The key pivot in the story according to Bendroth was the adoption of the Pilgrim/Puritan past (with a good deal of handwaving the differences between the two away).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Congregationalists were profoundly unprepared for the competitive marketplace in Protestant denominations. Two centuries as an officially state-supported church will do that. According to Bendroth, most of the Congregationalist churches in New England didn’t even think of themselves in those terms- they were just the church, or the First Church, everyone else had to give themselves a label. This didn’t fly all that well out west, where competition from Methodists, Presbyterians, and assorted evangelicals was fierce.

The Congregationalists came to identify themselves with the Puritans at around the same time the US, along with Europe, was discovering history as a field like we know it today, as the nineteenth century started to wane. This gave them a sense of shared identity that allowed them to have a kind of “brand identity,” while also consolidating the denomination enough to allow for changes (like becoming somewhat more bureaucratic instead of each individual church running its own show). This didn’t catapult the Congregationalist to dominance, but did allow them a niche- a thoughtful, non-sectarian, middle-class, town-based Protestantism.

There’s the past, as in origins, and history, as in processes of change. The Puritans provided both to the Congregationalists at different times. They could stand as an ancestral claim to virtues (back then, believe it or not, they tried to claim the Puritans as symbols of tolerance) and a temporal priority. But they also provided a sense of a project enfolding in time, one that wouldn’t always stay the same. Bendroth traces how the Congregationalists negotiated with the past to adapt such non-Puritan beliefs as the perfectability of society and Protestant ecumenicalism, on the idea that it was their task to carry on the example of being a beacon of ideal Protestant practice, etc. Alas, the Puritans understood themselves to be standing at the end times, not as an origin point to be worshipped filiopietistically or to be adapted and built past. But they weren’t around to speak their piece anymore. That’s what happens to anyone, I suppose, whose project outlived them.

Anyway, a fair amount of this book is taken up with depictions of dry theological dispute but Bendroth does her best to keep it concise. Without sugarcoating the inconsistencies involved, she also stands up some for mainline Protestantism, those once-dominant but now increasingly sclerotic Protestant groupings that didn’t go evangelical/fundamentalist. I remember as a Catholic boy in late-twentieth century Massachusetts knowing about three kinds of Protestant: the holy rollers, the rich WASPs, and whoever was going to those nice white steeple churches near every town green- I never knew who they were supposed to be. Bendroth argues that rather than a decline, the Congregationalists’ story can be understood as a fulfillment- not a complete or an easy one, but as developments self-consistent with four centuries of church history. Along with being a story about a denomination and about the popular uses of history, this is a reminder of the tectonic historical forces that shape even something as seemingly simple and benign as the nice UCC folks who show up at peace rallies. ****’

Carlo Ginzburg, “The Night Battles” (1966) (translated from the Italian by Ann and John Tedeschi) – Carlo Ginzburg was something of a visionary, which can be both a strength and a liability for a historian. Ginzburg reliably shot well past of the attested historical record in his books. There’s little evidence for his overarching theses, presented here and in undergrad-historiography favorite “The Cheese and the Worms,” about early-modern popular thought. His major claim in “The Night Battles,” that major strains of early modern witchcraft are the continuation of ancient Central European paganism, has been torn apart by the vast majority of other practitioners in the field.

But Ginzburg remains a compelling figure nevertheless. He was the great pioneer of “microhistory,” taking the social history turn of the mid-twentieth century into the nitty-gritty of early modern Italian life and convincing the Vatican to release the records of the Inquisition. These records provided grist for Ginzburg’s mill; every oddball who thought he talked to God, or figured out that the universe was actually like a wormy cheese, or who did good magic to fight the evil magic of witches at night, wound up in front of the Inquisitors at some point, it seems. In this case he follows appearances of the “benandante,” roughly the “well-farers,” a group of men and women in and near Friuli, Italy, who claimed that they engaged in nocturnal battles with witches to guard their crops. These took the form of astral projection and fighting with various vegetables (shades of the second Super Mario!). The Inquisition was looking for Lutherans to root out, or at least straightforward diabolic witches- they didn’t know what to make of the benandante.

Similar beliefs turn up in Germany and Switzerland, or similar-ish. That’s the rub- how many incidents do there need to be before you see a trend? And if you see this trend, to what do you attribute it? Ginzburg takes a small number of cases of similar (but far from identical) claims made by a few Italians and Germans as evidence for the continuation of a Central European pagan tradition. Certainly, this stuff does sound like fertility ritual. But there’s not a ton of evidence that it was organized practice handed down the generations, certainly not centuries. It seems a lot simpler to think that these were visions or self-made rituals. But the paganism thesis is certainly evocative, enough that it’s made its way into pop-cultural understandings of European paganism. And how many of Ginzburg’s critics can claim to have had that kind of influence? ****

Richard Slotkin, “Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America” (1992) – :extremely Jim Morrison voice: “This is the end…” a good seventeen-hundred pages later and we’re at the end of Slotkin’s trilogy on frontier mythology. Bringing it into the twentieth century, I’m surprised he doesn’t refer to the Doors, he refers to so many other things… maybe he did and I don’t remember…

This book talks about a lot of westerns. A loooooot of westerns. It’s encyclopedic! Which doesn’t always make for the best read, truth be told. It makes some interesting points about counterinsurgency and frontier mythology, like how both sides of counterinsurgency — the notionally constructive “hearts and minds” angle and the bloody genocidal side — are prefigured in various kinds of western myths. Probably should’ve thrown that into my dissertation! Ah well.

Like the other installments in the series, this is thesis-heavy. It puts a lot of chips on the opposition between a “progressive” (think Teddy Roosevelt- a manically exterminationist idea of progress) and a “populist” vision of the frontier, playing itself out in dime novels, movies, and politics. I don’t think this is wrong but I do think he’s overly-schematic with it. Moreover, he’s too sanguine about the goodness of populist visions of the west- pretty much any vision of western settlement involves disinheriting the Native Americans, so… anyway, I fell behind with reviews so it’s been a while since I’ve read this one. I remember it having some interesting asides, but being really long. ****