Historians' Metaphysical Beliefs and the Writing of Confessional Histories

Although it is widely assumed in the academy that confessional religious beliefs at least narrow the range of one’s prospective audience, and in some cases distort historians’ understanding of the past, it is not widely appreciated that a great deal of religious history is written no less confessionally, only on the basis of naturalist/atheistic rather than religious metaphysical commitments. The use of social scientific and/or cultural theories of religion that implicitly adopt not merely the natural sciences’ methodological postulate of metaphysical naturalism, but also any implicit assertion that metaphysical naturalism is true, yields a secular confessional history. Insofar as many religious claims have not been (and many cannot be) falsified, and religious people believe them and lead their lives by them, it is incumbent on historians who seek to understand such people not to employ theories of religion that distort their beliefs, by using theories that assume that no religion can be what its practitioners claim that it is. The latter position is neither theoretically nor metaphysically neutral, but rather the imposition of personal naturalist/atheistic metaphysical beliefs parallel to personal religious beliefs. Insofar as it seeks to understand past people on their terms rather than to impose historians own convictions, whether religious or secular, on them, religious history should be written from a self-conscious position of metaphysical neutrality, writing as though positions that cannot be falsified on the basis of science, history, or other disciplines might in fact be true.