Mark Noll is Wrong

He may be an eminent historian of American Christianity, and a heck of a nice guy, but I still want to quibble with Mark Noll's review of the movie Gods and Generals in the double-bumper Civil War issue of Books and Culture. Not that I've seen the movie, mind you, but why should that stop a film critic?

Besides, it's not the movie I'm complaining about, it's the movie review. Noll praises the movie for at least taking Christian belief and practice seriously, and then damns it because it does not "ask what a widely shared and often intense Christian faith meant beyond the strictly private sphere." He uses as an example of this a scene in which Stonewall Jackson and his cook George Jenkins are praying:

Jackson thanks God for his sovereignty over all events and prays feelingly for absent families, including George's. George's prayer begins in much the same way, but then broadens into an appeal that God would provide liberating justice for those who labor as chattel in bondage. After the prayers are over, Jackson is silent. The film rolls on...

Now, I think that Noll is wondering why this cat can't be a dog. What he is describing is an artistic choice of a way to convey deep and powerful truths which, precisely as Noll relates it, seems to be a very powerful moment. "...Jackson is silent." Isn't it courageous of Ron Maxwell, the director, to choose silence as a way of showing the gulf of perspectives between two men who can pray for each other?

In the end, Noll's review is insufficient artistic criticism that is sold to the reader as sober historical judgment. Thus we read that:

...In much of the movie, but especially in its battles, style prevails over chaos, majesty over carnage, valor over panic (which could be overcome, but was everywhere present), mannerism over authenticity, and lies over truth. This is a shame, because the movie, the companion volume, and especially Jeff Shaara's novel make very important contributions to recovering the role of religion in the Civil War. But recovery is not enough. We need to see as well what it meant, and to see with as much realism as possible. And we need these things not only for the sake of getting the Civil War "right" but also for assimilating the meaning of warfare in our own time...

These very strong, even harsh words are prompted by Noll's dismay at the lack of screaming wounded on the Fredericksburg battlefield. To be sure, the role of realistic portrayals in art is a sort of historical judgment. But it is also an artistic judgment, and Noll neglects that consideration. He does not consider why Maxwell might not have shown Fredericksburg as, say, Spielberg did D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. And are cannonballs taking off legs and heads in The Patriot capable of endowing that movie with a unique capacity for truth-telling? Or the graphic and accurate violence of Braveheart? This is something that needs to be considered in Books and Culture; but that's not what Noll chose to do.

A markedly better historical analysis of Gods and Generals was offered in National Review Online by Mac Owens. It's as much of an example of how to do a historical analysis of a movie as Noll's is not. For Owens the historical problem with Gods and Generals is that it perpetuates the Myth of the Lost Cause. That is the title given by historians for a set of ideas that is also related to a "Myth of Collective Victory". Owens explains it thus:

According to this vision, the Civil War was a noble test of national vigor between two adversaries who believed firmly in their respective causes. The war was followed by an interlude of bitterness and wrongheaded policy during Reconstruction. The war was an heroic crisis that the United States survived and a source of pride that Americans could solve their own problems and redeem themselves in unity. In this view, the Civil War was the original "good war," a necessary sacrifice, a noble mutual experience that in the long run solidified the nation.

Of course, this is the view that prevails for the most part among Americans today. It is visible in such popular Civil War magazines as Civil War Times Illustrated and Blue and Gray. It is visible in Civil War art by such artist as Morton Kunstler and Don Troiani. Such popular history and art reflects a longing for some transplanted, heroic place in the 19th century in which the troubling issues of race and slavery are banished from the discussion.

But such a vision is myth, the purpose of which, according to Roland Barthes, is to "organize a world which is without contradiction, because it is without depth, a world...[of] blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves." But myth should never be confused with history. The Civil War was a moral drama.

This leads to an analysis of the scene of the Confederate General praying with his African-American cook that is far superior to Noll's, if what is being considered is the historical content of the analysis:

The real problem of treating Gods and Generals as history arises from its failure to separate the true and false parts of the Lost Cause interpretation, which will permit critics to dismiss is as one more instance of a dissembling effort by slaveholders who lost on the battlefield. This failure is most acute in the movie's treatment of Jackson's relationship to his black cook, "Big Jim" Lewis.

In the movie, Jackson treats Lewis almost as an equal, something that may strike some viewers as fanciful. But their relationship merely illustrates the complexity of race relations in the antebellum south. In his biography of Jackson, James Robertson points out that Lewis's status was uncertain. He may have been a freedman or he may have been a slave that Jackson hired from Lewis's master.

It should be noted that Jackson, a man of God, accepted slavery as the will of God, but he did everything in his power to ameliorate the condition of his own slaves. While God may have ordained the institution of human slavery, Jackson believed, the souls of slaves were nonetheless worthy of salvation. In his hometown of Lexington before the war, Jackson established a very successful Sunday School for blacks, both slave and free. So Jackson's treatment of Lewis is what one would expect from a man who believed that the souls of black folk were equal in the eyes of God to his own.

The ways in which people take in historical truth and historical lies need to be of paramount interest to historians if we are at all serious about what goes on beyond the walls of the Academy. There are good ways and bad ways of doing this; Mac Owens', in this case, did it better.