At a time when most American colleges and universities are looking to cut costs, few fruit hang lower than the travel expenses historically budgeted to let faculty attend academic conferences. I still get enough funds to attend one multi-day conference every two years. So it’s fortunate that my favorite professional society meets biennially.
That would be the Conference on Faith and History, which I first joined a little over fifteen years ago. I’ve gone to CFH meetings at a series of Christian colleges: Bluffton (2008), Gordon (2012), Pepperdine (2014), Regent (2016), Calvin (2018), Baylor (2022), and now Samford. Over time, I’ve had the chance to enter the organization’s leadership, serving on the CFH executive board through the COVID pandemic and then the advisory council for its journal, Fides et Historia. This year I’m program chair for the professional meeting, which puts me in line to be president-elect of the organization when it meets in 2026.
That’s a lot of time and effort to put into an institution other than the one that employs me. So why do it? What’s the point of participating in a professional society, a type of organization redolent of a bygone age when academic disciplines were professionalizing but technology hadn’t advanced to the point of letting us easily collaborate remotely. Why pay membership dues and travel to far-off locations every year or two, when funds are scarce and Zoom has been invented?
According to Paul Michelson, CFH was originally organized at Greenville College (now University) in 1967. When the first issue of Fides came out the following year, it announced the new organization’s three-fold purpose:
A. To encourage evangelical Christian scholars1 to explore the relationship of their faith to historical studies.
B. To provide a forum for the discussion of philosophies of history and to survey current scholarship and foster general research in the area of faith and history.
C. To establish more effective means of interaction between historians associated with religiously oriented and non-sectarian institutions of higher learning.
All three hint that CFH’s founding took place at the intersection of two phenomena in American higher education: first, what CFH member George Marsden later called “the disestablishment of religion” in colleges and universities that had historically been dominated by Protestant culture; and second, the emergence of networks connecting scholars who worked at smaller, still-religious colleges but felt themselves to be part of worlds larger than their denomination. Christian historians in both settings — hence (C)2 — were pursuing an “integration of faith and learning” that stood in tension with both fundamentalism and secularization.
When I first joined, (A) was by far the most important to me. I was new to Christian higher education and starting my research into Pietist versions of it, so I went out of my way to seek resources on and off Bethel’s campus that would help me to “explore the relationship of [my] faith to historical studies.” At the same time, CFH meetings and Fides issues let me listen in on (B)’s philosophical discussions and scholarly presentations, and even start to share my own contributions to those conversations. While I’ve been one of those CFH members who periodically complains that we don’t showcase enough non-religious history, I also want to acknowledge that I’ve learned religious history (enough to be dangerous) primarily at the feed of CFH colleagues.
And I’m still looking forward to hearing presentations about cutting-edge research and innovative teaching, and continuing to discuss what both activities have to do with our faith in Jesus Christ. But over time, CFH has taken on a deeper meaning for me, one that Catholic theologian Susan Bigelow Reynolds expressed well this past summer.
Writing in Commonweal, Reynolds recalled being struck by something that Notre Dame professor Mary Catherine Hilkert said in June. Given something “akin to a lifetime-achievement award” by the Catholic Theological Society of America, Hilkert in Reynolds’ paraphrase) “recalled how the CTSA, especially its early community of women in theology, quickly became a space that sustained her theological vocation.” That resonated with Reynolds, not just as a woman in an academic space long dominated by men, but because “most theologians I know speak of their work as a vocation, a divine calling. It is a response to a movement from deep within, a lifelong working-out of a question posed by the realities and conditions of life itself.”
That’s certainly how I think of being a historian, which was not so much a career choice as an unfolding response to questions that have mattered deeply to me since I was an early reader consuming books about the Middle Ages, the American Civil War, and the 20th century. But those called to history, theology, or any other academic discipline are pursuing such vocations at a time when the structures that have long supported such work are falling apart. What Reynolds describes in Catholic higher education and the discipline of theology will be familiar to many — most? — other Christian scholars:
Small, regional colleges and universities are closing at an alarming rate. Others have sought solvency by radically consolidating or sacrificing their liberal-arts departments in favor of programs that imply promises of ready employment. Departments of theology and philosophy are typically first on the chopping block. Courses once taught by tenured professors are now fielded by adjuncts, whose part-time labor secures them neither benefits nor the guarantee of sustained employment. Many more institutions have taken the attrition approach, overworking and underpaying theology faculty until, one by one, they simply have no choice but to find another way to make a living. Students pursuing doctoral studies in theology today do so amid warnings about the rapidly constricting job market. Before they ever set foot in the classroom, they are advised to hedge their hopes for a sustainable future in their chosen field.
So at a time of professional starvation, where do we find vocational sustenance? Here too, I can’t do better than to quote Reynolds, since what she says of CTSA is what I would say of CFH:
…at the end of particularly trying academic years, these gatherings have felt like retreats. Projects that have flatlined are revived. Skeletal ideas are nourished. Collaborations blossom. The past year’s burdens and indignities are properly lamented. Joys are lauded. We pray and sing, eat and drink. We listen to colleagues forced out of their jobs and build the kind of power that can only come with an open-eyed assessment of reality.
I have begun, in other words, to think of academic societies less as sites of professional development and more as vocational nourishment. To attend a gathering like this is a profound privilege, and a costly one. In today’s academic context, it is also vocationally sustaining.
That’s what I hope for the participants in CFH 2024 and that’s what I want to sustain when I take the presidency in 2026, because that’s what I’ve known of my time in our society. From CFH 2008 to the COVID-postponed gathering at Baylor, those meetings have become milestones along the journey of my historical vocation, a “lifelong working-out of a question posed by the realities and conditions of life itself” that has never been a solitary calling.
“We envisioned the CFH as a ‘minimalist’ organization,” recalled co-founder Dick Pierard, “and one that would be open to all.” So it avoided a long doctrinal statement, simply stating that membership was “open to all interested scholars” who affirmed that “the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, the Christian’s authoritative guide for faith and conduct” and that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and through his atonement is the mediator between God and man.” If those membership criteria are still in place, the membership page at our website doesn’t state them. In any event, while evangelicals have long played a leading role in the organization, Anabaptist-Mennonite, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist, and even Mormon historians have taken part in CFH in recent years.
The original organizer of what became CFH was Richard Millett of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and Pierard taught at Indiana State University. Early presidents alternated between religious and state universities: Robert Frykenberg (Wisconsin-Madison), Earle Carnes (Wheaton), Edwin Yamauchi (Miami of Ohio), Charles Miller (Calvin), Marvin Zahniser (Ohio State), Russell Bishop (Gordon), etc. Caroline Marshall, the first woman to hold that office (1991-93), taught at James Madison University.