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A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

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"History will not tell us what to do, but will at least start us on the road to action of a different and more self-aware kind, action that is moral in a way it can't be if we have no points of reference beyond what we have come to take for granted." (Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, quoted in "A People's History of Christianity")

Earlier this week, I was talking with a small group of educators -- women representing various religious and cultural backgrounds -- and I told them that one of the most powerful things we can do to light up our neighbors' lives is: "Teach people how to make a friend across a boundary they don't expect to cross."

The most important thing I can tell you about Diana Butler Bass' new book, "A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story," is that you'll leave her book having made dozens of new friends across the chasms of history -- friends who will light your spiritual pathway in directions you may not have expected.

The title of Bass' new book pays homage to the influential historian Howard Zinn. His famous 1980 book, "A People's History of the United States," recovered the stories of many Americans -- and groups of Americans -- whose stories were marginalized in traditional histories. Bass is a historian and educator herself and knows how to produce a 14-week course that jogs undergraduates quickly through 2,000 years of Christian history.
This new book is not that kind of work.

Rather, this new book is more of a manifesto about rediscovering and reclaiming spiritual gems long overlooked in Christian history. Or, as Diana herself puts it: "Exploring the past, we begin to understand our actions anew; we discover new spiritual possibilities for our lives."

You -- as you read this Amazon review on the Internet right now -- already are a part of this same community of inquiry that Diana is trying to encourage in her new book. This is a book specifically about Christian history, although the interfaith significance of the book is obvious in correcting many misconceptions about the world's single largest and most powerful faith.

But don't miss the catalytic energy between these covers. Millions of people already are reclaiming the treasures in their religious history. They're discovering, for example, that Protestants may have been too quick to abandon ancient practices like fasting and fixed-hour prayer. They're learning that figures like Methodism's founder John Wesley actually had strong and prophetic messages about the importance of the natural world around us. They're discovering often-overlooked moments of religious heroism -- like those Muslims who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

In this book, Diana is providing rich provisions for our journey. Her book also is a terrific choice for small-group discussion and study.

This latest book by Diana Butler Bass continues a string of Spirit filled books that help challenge modern Christians to return to the Way taught by Christ and followed by Christians of earlier time periods. I was excited to read this book because Butler Bass's two previous books, "The Practicing Congregation" and "Christianity for the Rest of Us" were extremely useful in my own church as we attempted to develop first a Single Adult ministry and then Young Adult ministry that focused on growing and nuturing disciples of Jesus Christ through encouraging them to take up traditional spiritual disciplines utilized by Christian Spirituality from the earliest centuries of the Church but that have been seemingly lost over the last 300 years.

This book does not disappoint. If you have never read about Christian history or if you engage it as a hobby, such as I do, Diana Butler Bass takes you on an exciting tour of Christian history while continuing to emphasize the spiritual practices and disciplines utilized by followers of the Way at the various time periods. Additionally, Butler Bass also paints an enlightening picture of the ethical lens employed in the various epochs of Christian history through which Christians in their historical context viewed their interaction with their neighbor as they also sought to engage and deepen their relationships with God. Interestingly, as I start seminary this Fall her book is on the required reading list for my first semester of church history!

Using the tools of spiritual disciplines and ethical frameworks, Butler Bass in a most easy to read way successfully unpacks five historical periods, each full of unique challenges and obstacles, in which individual followers pursued an ever deepening relationship with the Divine. While unpacking these eras, she highlights the lessons which Christians today can learn and apply from many different Christian pioneers. Some of the individuals she highlights may be familiar to most church goers, such as Augustine, St. Benedict of Nursia, St. Fracis of Assi, or Hildegard of Bingen. Others are less familiar but shine Light into the problems faced by current followers of Christ, such as St. Martin-of-the-Field and Abelard and Heloise. She also redeems some of the figures in Christian history that I had a rather negative view of, such as Irenaeus of Lyons. ("The glory of God is a human being fully alive.") As she moves into the more complicated and fractured world from the Reformation until Contemporary times, Butler Bass does a remarkable job holding together and highlighting the ever growing tension between faith and reason, practice and relationship that faces the currently splintered Church, in which each denomination or sect holds its proprietary view of Christianity as sacrosanct while hurling hate-filled bombs of judgment at their brothers and sisters within Christianity that do not agree with their narrow point of view on issues of theology, worship, and/or practice. However, given the thesis she presents and the limits of time, Butler Bass is not able to address all issues arising in Christianity in the 20th Century. Personally, I did not think this a weakeness of the book but a strength as it allowed her to focus on her thesis of exploring the evolution of spiritual disciplines and Christian ethics through the Modern and Contemporary periods.

If you want a book that does not challenge you to think more broadly about what it means to be a modern Christian; if you do not want to confront how the example of Jesus or his Great Commission can be lived out in today's multi-cultural, multi-polar world with various voices of propaganda trying to speak as the voice of God by learning from the examples of those who came before--with some of whom you may not agree --then this book is not for you. You would be more comfortable with a book that merely pats you on the head and holds out some hope that the Rapture is near. However if you take seriously Jesus' command following the story of the Good Samaritan to "go and do likewise" and what that means or how that might look in an evolving Church in an rapidly changing time, then you will be glad you invested the time to read this book! I look forward to reading more from this great thinker and challenger of the Church as she continues to remind us to be intentional in our journey to strive to have the same mind in us that was in Christ.

Grace and peace in the Risen Lord,
Chris Reed
Beaumont, Texas

Gifted historian Diana Butler Bass has a knack for bringing back into focus ignored or forgotten parts of the story of Christianity. Just over two years ago, she gave us Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith, the story of much-ignored mainline Protestant congregations that were defying stereotypes and thriving by combining traditional worship practices with social engagement.

In her latest book, she gives us an accessible and much-needed reminder of the dynamic--and often contested--nature of lived Christianity as expressed both in the lives of its people and its institutions. In our times, when churches are wrestling with a variety of issues that challenge the orthodoxies of the past, the reminder that the traditions we take for granted today represent the outcomes of struggles from the past is invaluable. This modest but powerful insight, brought home through lively examples, has the potential to humanize current debates. It moves the question from, "What was the winning argument from the past?" to "What does faithfulness for our time require?" While seminary courses delve into the material covered here, Bass makes it accessible. The importance of these insights and the accessibility of this book make it a major contribution.

Dr. Robert P. Jones
President, Public Religion Research (www.publicreligion.org)
Author, Progressive & Religious: How Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist Leaders are Moving Beyond the Culture Wars and Transforming American Public Life

Wonderfully, I was able to hear Diana Butler Bass speak about The People's History of Christianity at the Washington Island Forum as she was in the final stages of writing this helpful new book. Down to earth, full of her own people's history of the church, the book reads like a conversation piece rather than the usual tome which veils the rich and complex stories of Christianity's history. At the time, I was hoping to move from a survey class on the Bible to a survey of church history. This book, so very accessible to non-professional readers, provides a framework for what to most seems a muddy and sullied tale.

Butler Bass turns this history into a treasure chest of memory by challenging the normative narrative of history which she short-hands as "Christ, Constantine, Calvin and Christian America," into the generative story of flawed, but predominantly faithful people. Through early church, medieval, Reformation, modern and post-modern periods, she follows a thread of people who love God and their neighbors, often doing so in amazingly remarkable ways. Finding plenty of examples of ordinary church people who live with a full-hearted devotion to God and often heroic ethical actions to benefit both neighbors and even enemies, her book provides church people with a way to retrieve exemplary practices from this communion of the saints, that can reenergize mainline Protestant congregations who flounder in part because they have no memory of who they are and who they are called to be.

The thirteen chapter book is a great resource for a small group or an adult Sunday School class. Echoing what Augustine heard at the moment of his conversion, church people would do well to "pick it up and read." -- Rev. David Milam, Pastor, St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Purcellville, VA

Diana Butler Bass does a fine job of writing a history of Christianity in the vein of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Instead of focusing on what Butler Bass calls "Big-C Christianity: Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, and Christian America," she unfolds the history of the faith through the stories of the little people and the grassroots movements. This provides for a fascinating and extremely refreshing understanding of our past and an illumination of the effects it has had upon our present and possibly our future.

This is the other side of Christian history, or as Paul Harvey might have said, the rest of the story. There are great lessons and cautionary tales herein concerning what it means to radically follow Jesus Christ, especially in the face of opposition from the powers that be, both pagan and hierarchical. Butler Bass provides a cool drink of water for many of us who have found that power, prosperity and aggression are not necessarily signs of God's grace and favor, in other words, those who oppose the current captivity of the church by American Cultural Religion and the exportation of that demonic malformation to the rest of our planet.

A People's History is a salve for the hurting. Well written, innovative, redemptive, open and honest; the story of God's people rather than the hierarchy's Towers of Babel. I particularly appreciate how Butler Bass tells our story from the perspective of Jesus, ethics and devotion rather than from the perspective of power, dogma and conquest.

"More than anything else," says Butler Bass, "Christianity is a love song." That is so evident in her lyrical look at the story. Our story. The story of the "Generative Christians" who live a faith that births new possibilities of God's love into the world; transformative rather than hierarchical, formative instead of triumphant, gracious rather than merely victorious. This is a book that has found a permanent place on my bookshelf from whence it shall be often retrieved. I highly recommend it to everyone, and particularly to those who follow Christ. The story is still being unfolded!

Dianne Butler Bass has taken a different approach to church history by focusing on great acts of individual Christians and the church throughout its history. The focus includes minorities and especially women. The style is reader friendly and the presentation is sincere. There are many stories in this book, but the one that encouraged me the most wasone in which, the Christians though persecuted by Rome, still came in and cared for the sick and dying during an outbreak of the plague. It was during the reign of Diocletian and the Romans had fled and left the sick and dying and fled Rome in order escape the plague. The Christians, without regard for their own lives came in and loved and cared for those who had been persecuting and killing them. There are many great stories in this book. It is worth the purchase and the time to read this book.

A smooth and deceptively easy read. This is the first book by Butler Bass I've read. I'm now encouraged to read more of her books. Not everyone who is an accomplished scholar is a good writer, or vice versa. Butler Bass is both.

Written with a nod to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, this book gives voice to many lesser known Sisters, Brothers and movements within Christianity over the last 2000 years. It assumes you're already familiar with the more well known personalities, isms and schisms dominating most histories of Christianity.

Which makes me wonder how my own faith and stormy relationship with the church might have gone if I'd been exposed to an account of Christian history like this one BEFORE I became familiar with the more familiar history of Christianity? Behind the crusades, witch burnings, executions, violence, isms and schisms and all (DESPITE these things) Butler Bass's account weaves together many examples of how the Love, Truth, Mercy and Justice of Christ have been active in and among us all along.

Often underground (as Jesus was), often under duress (as Jesus was), so many people have genuinely dedicated their lives to following Jesus, to seeking His Kingdom first, to speaking and walking out His dangerous and revolutionary Truth and Love. At times it's only been a remnant, but God always keeps a remnant of vessels for His Love and Truth alive and well. This book will introduce you to some of them you probably weren't aware of.

I can hear some of my more conservative Christian friends adding Butler Bass to their list of folks who are indulging in fashionable church-bashing. But she's not. To use a churchy word, I would describe this account of Christian history as edifying. Challenging of some aspects Christian history? Absolutely. But then, a life dedicated to following Jesus IS challenging!

But this history is mostly encouraging and hopeful. Woven through the lives of the people in this book, you can see Jesus alive and active through it all...right up to our current era of hyper-politicized religion and churches here in America. Throughout the resounding cymbals and clanging gongs of every chapter of Christian history, Love and Truth simply will not go away. They will find a crack in every container we use to suppress them with, and they will quietly rise through all the unholy agendas we pile on top of them...to shake the lies and hatred off of them and shine...

...and that is very good news!

Grace and Peace,

Mark

Bass' book should be required reading for all clergy and laity who want a clear and concise understanding of the
church's history. It lays out also the need for understanding the emerging Christianity necessary for the Christian
church to survive in the days ahead.

What I enjoyed about this book was the way the author broke down church history into segments of time periods and then wrote about the important elements of influence during those time periods. I especially appreciated learning about the common people and lesser known movements that made great influence on Church History that are often left out of the academic books on Church History. As a pastor this book revived my interest in Church History and encouraged me to explore some aspects of Church History that have been negated in recent years that may be helpful or bring helpful insights into the practice of the faith today. Thank you for a thought provoking book and one that encourages each of us to take our place in history.

The original reason that I requested this book was its obvious allusion to Zinn; however, much to my initial dismay, I found the book was nothing like that.
My expectation was that this book would be a detailed narrative of the history of "Christianity" as it has unfolded throughout the millennia told from the perspective of those that were victimized by "Christian" history, much like Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" documented the lives and experiences of those who suffered through America's "manifest destiny." I often feel like sometimes that component of the church's collective history is down-played or ignored or considered part of the "manifest destiny" of the church by those within the church or it is the only thing associated with Christian history by those who see (sometimes justifiably) not a lot of good in "Christian" history when they look at the past two millennia. To that extent, I was initially disappointed.
However, what I found was that this book is written about groups of people similarly overlooked, ignored or castigated. They faced similar persecutions by members of their own creed, were discriminated against due to ethnic differences or were martyred annihilated for their spiritual differences. They have been left out by those both who have strong-armed Christianity today and by those outside of the faith in their hold. Their stories must be told in order to gain a more perfect understanding of the History of Christianity.
(I am not suggesting that some of the atrocities perpetuated by "Christian" leaders throughout the ages against their own kind carry nearly the same gravitas nor am I suggesting that those atrocities that were executed internal to the faith have the same global and trans-era ramifications. It is clear that those external expressions of religious contempt and persecution by those under the moniker of Christianity to those outside have negatively altered the state of the world and the world's perception of Christians and, thus, Christ.)
If, at any point in your life, you have found some irregularities in the branding of Christianity today and what you have observed of the life of Christ and have known on some intrinsic spiritual level, this book is for you. This book is a reflection of and on communities that have enacted the spiritual life of Christ to the world by way of charity, love, hospitality, goodness and care for the poor. They have lived in small and large towns, monasteries and cathedrals. And, while the wounds inflicted by Christians throughout the ages have left scars on this planet and its people, the works and lives of the subjects in this book provide the healing and comfort necessary to introduce a sick world to the goodness, grace, mercy, peace and reconciliation of God.
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