Book Review: The Light and the Glory

(From way back in the archives...this review appeared first on Associated Content.)

A Fair Trade Book



(This is the original edition, reviewed below. There are a children's edition and a revised-and-expanded edition, which may be better...I hope so.)

Title: The Light and the Glory

Author: Peter Marshall (junior)

Date: 1977

Publisher: Fleming H. Revell / Baker Book House

ISBN: 0-8007-5054-3

Length: 384 pages including copious notes and index

Quote: "Peter Marshall...had grown up in rebellion against the spiritual legacy of two famous Christian parents: the late Chaplain of the Senate, also named Peter, and his author wife Catherine. He had given up this rebellion in 1961."

He became a minister, but not a writer. Professional writer David Manuel, as well as Catherine Marshall, her second husband Leonard LeSourd, their editor Norman Vincent Peale, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ, and Tim LaHaye of Left Behind, all contributed something to the publication of The Light and the Glory. So the question to be asked is not so much whether this is a useful history supplement for Christian schools, but why it's not become as well known as Guideposts magazine, or Christy, or The Power of Positive Thinking. 

The Light and the Glory is, in many ways, an excellent book. Marshall and Manuel wrote clear, readable prose. Their research was extensive, with quotes from many books that should be easy to find, but were in fact difficult. (They had, for example, found a readable English translation of Las Casas' account of Columbus' voyages and the early Spanish colonies.) Their bibliography is a great resource for those who want to study any aspect of colonial and revolutionary North American history.

What Marshall and Manuel set out to accomplish in this book was to study how the first American writers' spirituality interacted with their social and political life. They called readers' attention to parts of the historical record that, at the time, tended to receive only passing attention in history classes...and, today, are likely to be overlooked altogether.

Their most conspicuous success may be the impartiality with which they confront what must have been alien kinds of spirituality. Las Casas, the Spanish Catholic priest, was physically distant from the Inquisition, but neither unaware of it nor brave enough to denounce it. The Jamestown colonists eagerly accepted the support of churchmen who described them almost as missionaries to potential sponsors back in England; in practice some of the colonists were hardly even believers, all of them were clueless, and John Smith seems never to have meditated on the commandment "Thou shalt not bear false witness." The Plymouth colonists had learned some crucial facts from the Jamestown colonists and others, but today even Anglo-Israelites, Seventh-Day Adventists, or any Amish people who tried to read their writing, would agree that they were bigots and fanatics. Other historians can ignore these aspects of the record by focussing on the military or economic history of these periods. Marshall and Manuel have to compare what these nominal Christians wrote with what they accomplished, and evaluate them as representatives of Christianity in a country that had never heard of Christianity. The task could not have been easy. On the whole, Marshall and Manuel handle it well.

I think they could have handled it better, if they had studied even longer...if, for example, they had studied the history of Virginia in between Jamestown and George Washington. I think the book has failed to last as long as it should have lasted because, despite their meticulous research, Marshall and Manuel made three major mistakes of omission.

1. They went perhaps too far in denouncing the failures of Jamestown--swallowing Willison's hostilely confrontational Behold Virginia whole, without studying enough of the books it was written to correct--and failed to evaluate the faith of other early Virginians, such as the Scotch-Irish, Huguenots, and Anabaptists. The result is what readers in Virginia could have mistaken for an unfavorable account of the state where a religious history book ought to have sold best.

2. They made no careful study of the Native Americans, either as the evangelical Christians some of them have become, or as people who had their own moral standards by which to judge Christian missionaries. They perpetuated the error of representing "Indians" as a weird, irrational force of nature rather than as people. (Not to mention the error of confusing Native Americans with Indians.)

It is true that Native Americans were not uniformly "Noble Savages"...but Marshall and Manuel seem to think that Powhatan was the only decent human being on the entire continent, which is also incorrect. Like other ethnic groups, Native America had its brilliant leaders and its village idiots. Some Native Americans were racist bigots, and some were insane; among certain tribes whose puberty rituals involved inducing "visions" by ingesting poisonous plants, the incidence of insanity must have been high.

It's also true that some Native Americans shared the Western European belief that creatively cruel forms of punishment would discourage crime. When they were friendly they tested new acquaintances in what we might call extreme sports. When they judged new acquaintances to be dishonest and untrustworthy, they intended that everyone who heard about the encounter would have nightmares. It seems likely that the Iroquois judged the penitential prayers of people like Isaac Jogues to be evidence of hypocrisy and false religion, and tortured "missionaries" like him for that reason. Even the weaker Algonquins tended to be harsh and judgmental about people who failed to share surplus food with their neighbors immediately...even more harsh than the English were about people who gobbled up all their food at once and then went hungry until they found more food.

By failing to study the Native Americans in depth, Marshall and Manuel fell into yet another error when they considered the spiritual shortcomings of the Plymouth colonists.

3. They take the Puritan authors too literally. Perhaps the easiest thing to remember about the Puritan authors is the way they interpreted everything as a judgment from God...not a "judgment" from nature about their breaking nature's laws by eating unclean food or letting too many gutters drain into a stream, but a judgment from God about their religious practice.

This led some of the Puritans into an absurd fear of "privacy and independence," which Marshall and Manuel actually perpetuated. On page 215 Marshall sermonized that "the dream [of living as a lone pioneer] is a nightmare...because God...intended man...to live as a body, to help and support one another. And God does His work of nurturing Christians primarily through other Christians."

Preachers have always scolded people for not going to church, but if God was indeed passing judgment on Puritans who wanted to own large farms rather than living in the towns where they could walk to church every week, it seems odd that God passed no such judgment on other Christian "loners" like Thomas Walker, Daniel Boone, John Colter, John Muir, or Emily Dickinson. Nor does the Bible suggest that people need weekly meetings to practice true religion; in fact the Bible tells us that people like Moses and Elijah were called out of religious communities in order to spend time alone with God, pruning the popular errors out of their thinking...and Jesus preached to groups, but prayed alone.

Of course, many people who neglect religious services do so for wrong reasons. This was especially easy to diagnose in the records of the Puritans, early Quakers, Anabaptists, and other strict groups of the colonial period. Zealous churchgoers made personal rules into matters of contention for the whole church or congregation.

People who disagreed with trivial rules quarrelled at church, or fell away from the community in an attempt to avoid quarrels at church. People who found it easy to conform to the silliest rules, whose dyspepsia and bad teeth kept them from being tempted to smile too easily, who couldn't grow flowers that offended by being too colorful, were making virtues of their shortcomings while their actual spiritual lives withered. People who had never read the book of Job were identifying other people's misfortunes as punishments for their sins, while their own misfortunes were tests of their faith...rather than recognizing the common physical causes of hardships like diseases caused by polluted water, or the horrifying symptoms the Puritans ascribed to "witchcraft."

Marshall and Manuel seem actually to accept the claim that these symptoms had a supernatural cause. Other authors presuppose that the cause must have been psychological. Reading the primary documents of this dark point in New England history, I find it hard to doubt that the cause was physical. The bacteria these people had brought from Europe, the contaminated food and water they consumed, and the unfamiliar native plants with which they experimented as food and medicine, could easily have combined to produce the pain, spasms, and convulsions from which everyone agreed the victims were suffering.

If Marshall and Manuel had happened to be better informed about the history of Jamestown, they would have noticed a resemblance between the "sickness" some Jamestown colonists suffered after eating one species of Datura as "spinach," and the "possession" of which some Puritans complained...after living among people who used Datura extracts as medicine. While only one plant in this genus is the true "Jamestown Weed" or jimsonweed, all of them are poisonous, and several produce painful hallucinogenic effects.

It's easy to ridicule twentieth-century authors who seem to take seventeenth-century beliefs more literally than most of us now do. Unfortunately, it's also true that Marshall and Manuel managed to do an immense amount of historical research while still overlooking some pertinent facts.

Despite its shortcomings, The Light and the Glory is recommended to anyone interested in reading either the quotes from primary documents Marshall and Manuel provide in the book, or the bibliography of primary documents from which they worked.

I now wish I'd read the revised edition, which is probably a better book for students...anyway, the first edition is not terribly cheap or obscure, and can be purchased here for $5 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment. Two books of this size, plus maybe one or two more really thin books, will fit into one $5 package, and since Bing reports that Marshall is still living in retirement, for each book of his you add to the package we'll send $1 to him or the charity of his choice (which I'm guessing would be his church--he became an Anglican priest).