First, is there such a thing as"Christian History"? Do Christian historians do"history" differently because of their presuppositions about God's role in human affairs?

Second, is there an equivalence between an explicitly Christian approach to history and a"feminist", or"Marxist", or"Post-Structuralist" approach? If we accept Marxist and feminist historians -- and their ideological commitments -- within the secular academy, why do we not also accept evangelicals? Or is there some explicit difference between Marxism and Christianity that makes the former more palatable than the latter?

Third, to what degree can a Christian historian in a secular academic environment honor both his obligations to his profession and to the Great Commission? Can we use history as an evangelistic tool in a public institution without betraying our commitments to Caesar, our employer and paymaster?

Let me do things out of order and tackle the third question -- which is perhaps the most obviously" charged" of these -- first.

Among other things, I've been"googling" about, looking for more on the subject. I came across this paper from 1999 by a Robert McKenzie of the University of Washington, entitled"Christian Faith and the Study of History: A View from the Classroom". McKenzie is discouraged by the rise of"postmodern relativism" within the culture and its impact upon students' willingness to think deeply and critically about the"meaning of life". He and I seem to have similar students:

...the most common type of student I have encountered appears to possess no deeply-held convictions of any kind, much less anything approaching a consciously articulated world view, however immature. I find it relatively easy to show such students the nihilistic implications of philosophical relativism, but getting them to care is a more difficult matter. And in spite of all the talk about the"angst" felt by"generation X," I doubt that this is an entirely new phenomenon. More than a half-century ago, C. S. Lewis noted that,"for every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be guarded from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts."

This does not make the job of the Christian historian impossible, however:

The good news is that, for scholars who wish to do so, it is a simple task to structure their history courses in such a way that they touch regularly upon"Permanent Things," i.e., questions of explicitly religious significance. This need not be orchestrated artificially, furthermore, but rather develops naturally when students are encouraged to use history as well as understand it, to evaluate the past as well as describe and explain it. Indeed, I would argue that, at least for the teaching of history, it is the exclusion of religious questions that is artificial. This should not be surprising, of course, given that history as a discipline focuses so centrally on the experience of humans, including the ultimate questions that they have always confronted"about the nature and meaning of the world, and of [their] existence in it."

But in our contemporary academic culture of what I choose to call"militant secularism", the prospects are bleak:

Although it may be encouraging to note how relatively easy it is to inject religious questions into the history classroom, it is also essential to remember the larger institutional context in which those questions are raised. Therein lies the bad news. In the secular classroom, the believing historian may pose religious questions but never answer them, introduce religious perspectives but never endorse them, demonstrate the contradictions of other belief systems but never proclaim the good news of a consistent alternative...

Well might we contemplate, before closing, the sober query of Psalm 11:3:"If the foundations are destroyed, what will the righteous do?" At the very least, this is a question that every believing scholar on a secular campus must reckon with, implicitly if not explicitly.

Nine or ten years ago, when I was a pup, one of my older female colleagues asked me why I wanted to teach women's history. Given that she was on my tenure review committee, I made some weak and diplomatic answer, stressing the goal of"teaching students about important women from the past whose stories have been neglected within the dominant narrative." My reviewer shook her head, and asked me"Do you want to know why I teach women's history? I teach it to raise up young feminists!" I've never forgotten that, and I have come to adopt her position wholeheartedly (though she and I disagree mightily about some of the finer points of what constitutes feminism!)

Now that I am a"born-again evangelical" (albeit one whose politics do not match the stereotype conjured up by that image), what does that mean for my teaching of Western Civilization? I would never say that I want to"raise up young Christians!" But I can say that I do intend to do the following in my courses: structure an overall narrative -- and ask certain questions -- with the intent of leading students to what McKenzie calls the"good news of a consistent alternative" to our culture's thin diet of relativism.