Evangelical Historians

It’s intriguing that some of our best historians these days are evangelicals. George Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards is just one more in a string of widely-reviewed and well-reviewed works from Marsden. Mark Noll has made the big time. And Alan Guelzo’s biography of Abraham Lincoln was commended in The Atlantic a few months ago, with the reviewer expressing his dismay that Guelzo’s book was not considered for the George Bancroft award, suggesting that it was solely because the book was published by an evangelical publisher (Eerdmans, I think). There are still a few secular historians who do history on a large canvas (Simon Schama, for instance), but it seems that Christian historians are increasingly the only ones who believe that we can find large meanings in history.