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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Eugene Genovese, RIP -- From Marxist Hostility to Respect for Christianity

By Nancy Pearcey • September 26, 2012, 10:28 PM

Today marks the passing of Eugene Genovese, scholar and historian.  I published in First Things the following review of one of his books, noting his move from Marxist hostility to religion to a genuine respect for Christianity:

Genovese took up southern history reluctantly, after a professor challenged him to test his Marxism by taking the slaveholders as a laboratory case in “how a ruling class really rules.” His initial forays, Genovese writes, were marked by “the biases of an atheist and a historical materialist” -- to whit, that religion was “no more than a corrosive ideology at the service of ruling classes.” If at the beginning, Genovese says ruefully, “someone had told me that religion would emerge as a positive force in my book -- indeed, as the centerpiece -- I would have laughed and referred him to a psychiatrist. In the end, the evidence proved overwhelming, and I had to eat my biases.”

What was the evidence, and which biases was Genovese forced to choke down? Fundamentally, he discovered that Marxism gravely underestimates the power of religion.

Among both black and white southerners, Genovese noted, “the overpowering evidence of religious faith aroused in me a skepticism about the reigning tendency in Academia to, as it were, sociologize faith out of religion -- to deny the reality of spirituality.”

Among the slaves, Christian faith “carried an extraordinarily powerful message of liberation in this world as well as the next,” Genovese wrote. That message empowered them to create a vibrant culture under extreme adversity -- a dynamic not explainable in Marxist or any other merely sociological terms. 

As Genovese put it, “No such theory or combination of theories could suffice to explain the power of the folk religion, as manifested, for example, in the spirituals.”

In the academy today it is fashionable to charge Western religion with complicity in a host of social evils: slavery, racism, sexism, imperialism.

But Genovese will have none of that. All civilizations have been disfigured by various evils, he argued. 

What sets the Christian West apart, he said, is that it alone raised “a profound theoretical opposition to those enormities, challenging their moral foundations and raising mass movements against them.”