God Sans Country
Steven Keillor's This Rebellious House
Andrew S. Moore
July 1, 1998
This Rebellious House: American History & the Truth of Christianity by Steven J. Keillor (InterVarsity Press, 1996), 368 pp.
When an elderly gentleman in my church learned that I am a doctoral candidate in American history, he said, "Good. We need Christians to go back and correct how those people have rewritten our history." "Those people" are presumably those scholars who, in the past three decades, have displaced the whiggish history my friend learned growing up. In that interpretation, Puritans founded America with pious intentions, followed by Founding Fathers who built a nation on similarly godly principles. Many of "those people" have performed solid scholarship, but my friend is not alone in assuming they need correction. In This Rebellious House, Steven J. Keillor attempts to demonstrate how often Americans have fallen far short of any Christian ideal; in doing so, he wants to presents "a truer view of U.S. history … [that] offers a metanarrative that is truer to the facts than are revisionists' metanarratives." Keillor is primarily concerned about scholars who have used American history to dismiss the truth claims of the Christian faith. But a more appropriate audience would be those Christians, such as my friend, who view American history from a distorted vantage point.
Keillor gives ample evidence of the ways that Americans have allowed cultural prerogatives to trump the dictates of genuine faith. Rather than preaching the gospel, the colonial church mostly provided divine sanction for a hierarchical and patriarchal social order. And in the nineteenth century, thinly disguised male individualism and, later, the market revolution drove expansion, leading to rebellion against clerical moral and spiritual authority. ...
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