newman_2003_turner

--(3) Frank Turner's intended secular academic readers seem to fall into two groups. First is an older cadre once trained to believe (and still believing) that history writing must be narrowly and exclusively focused on one single crisply defined slice of the past, e.g., economics or politics or culture or religion but never all or several different slivers at once. The second group is apparently younger, bolder, more innovative and believes two things: there was more religion busily making a difference in 19th Century England's ostensibly "secular" public life than these same historians were taught in graduate school and there are newer purely secular techniques or insights which up-to-date historians should draw on to illuminate the19th Century as a rounded whole.

Dr Turner offers a composite sketch of some of his peers, at least the American ones. They appear in his 1993 CONTESTING CULTURAL AUTHORITY: ESSAYS IN VICTORIAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE, (henceforth CCA) Chapter I, “The Religious and the Secular in Victorian Britain.”

Many of today’s American historians of 19th Century England were raised in families practicing or at least professing Christianity as taught by main-stream Protestant churches (CCA, 8f). As undergraduates they dutifully read Socrates, Hume, Mill etc., and one day found themselves both secularized and positivized. Writing their history dissertations at major research universities in the 1960s and 1970s, Turner’s peers accepted that real history writing is totally this-worldly, highly specialized and tunnel-visioned. Such historians dare not build a career writing about both popular and high culture. They had also been taught that 19th Century England exemplified one great, undeniable law: that history is about the inevitable liberation of the human race from straitjackets of religion and superstition into the boundless intellectual liberties of private judgment tempered by secularism and positivism

These rising scholars, at least unconsciously, found in the breathless Victorian march away from religion a mirror of their own personal retreats from main stream Protestantism. Thus their profession also helped them grasp their personal identity (CCA. 8f). They were not, therefore, likely to indulge in some other style of history writing from that which had liberated them personally from conceptions that religions might teach objective truth.

Yale University assigned Frank M. Turner, a newly minted PhD, to teach a course in Victorian political and cultural history. And suddenly he saw that previously inculcated narrowness of focus in research distorted historical reality. Professor Turner found that he could not teach politics in rigid isolation from religon or display high culture utterly distinct from low culture. Nor dare any honest historian downplay religion as a powerful, creative enduring force in British Society (CCA.,10, 14 ). Turner came to assert that not only thinkers but also their ideas exist in contexts: political, cultural, religious and intellectual contexts. And even if an idea, say, Darwinism, wins out, its opponents rarely disappear from the landscape (CCA, 11) Nor did a thinker who fell away from evangelical Christianity necessarily fall into total scepticism. Often he remained at least generically "spiritual."

Frank Turner then revised and expanded his secular method and his approach to Victorian intellectual history. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN: THE CHALLENGE TO EVANGELICAL RELIGION showcases Turner's new broad-gauged positivistic method applied to one "eminent Victorian."