Why do we care about history?

People are touchy about the topic of history these days. They get worked up about statues in public places, history education in middle and high school classrooms, and whether America was or was not founded as a Christian nation. Academic historians are famous for disparaging beloved authors like Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough for writing nothing more than “popular” history, and for them, anyone who casts himself as a historian must be able to produce a doctorate in history from an acceptable institution.

Most recently, Tucker Carlson interviewed a podcaster named Darryl Cooper on a range of topics including World War II. Carlson introduced Cooper, host of the Martyr Made Podcast, as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” It turns out that Cooper, the most important popular historian today (if we accept Carlson’s endorsement), believes that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”

Carlson’s interview with Cooper exploded with controversy. As of this writing, the interview on YouTube has close to 1 million views in a week and a half. That is an enviable statistic. To put that into perspective, leading Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo struggled to get just a little more than 150,000 views of his lecture titled “Did Robert E. Lee commit treason?” at Washington and Lee University. And that was six years ago.

Why are people so sensitive about the topic of history and historical issues? And on a related note, what purpose does history serve? Why do we read, study, argue, and care about what podcasters think about it?

In short, history is important to us because we are created in the image of God. As image-bearers, we have what historian John Lukacs called a “historical consciousness.” No other created thing has any awareness of history, much less any thought of the significance of it. We reflect on the past, and the past informs us of who we were, who we are, and what we aspire to be. The fact that we are sensitive about history demonstrates that we have profound dignity because our Creator gave us something that reflects His nature—that is, a knowledge of time and eternity.

History is also important to us because it is part of our pursuit of truth. The image of God is doubly relevant here because we as humans care about the truth as no other creature can. In studying history, we may not be able to get at the absolute truth from God’s perspective, but we know the truth is there and can know it. We bend our energies to find it in the best ways we know how.

How do we find truth in history? Often, we hear people talk about how the study of history produces virtue. That is true, but it is also true that the person coming to history must bring a measure of virtue to his project. After all, historical investigation is an exercise in truth-seeking. If we hope to arrive at truth intentionally rather than accidentally, we must possess virtues such as temperance, wisdom, courage, and justice.

Temperance teaches us to control our passions in the pursuit of truth. Wisdom requires us to draw sound and reasonable conclusions about the past and its implications. This also requires humility as we approach the world of the past, a world far different than the one we know and in which we live, breathe, and have our being. We bring courage to historical study because it takes courage to confront the realities of human sin as it manifested itself in the past. And we need the courage to avoid simple explanations about past events and personalities. History also requires that we exercise justice to the dead. We avoid cherry-picking from the past for political purposes, and we eschew the temptation to use the past in contemporary power games. Ultimately, we know that the study of the past spurs us to self-examination because we know that one day we will be dead, too.

Good historical thinking is motivated by the pursuit of truth. To pursue truth in history, we have to divest ourselves of simplistic explanations, such as “Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War.” We must resist the temptation to score political points against people embracing concepts like the “postwar consensus” because devotion to contemporary political ideologies hobbles us in our pursuit of truth.

Of course, people do try to use history to score political points and raise one’s profile on social media. The people of the past are dead anyway. They can’t object, nor can they take you to court. It’s easy to take shots at dead people, particularly dead people who had much more to lose in their circumstances than we could ever imagine. It used to go without saying that Winston Churchill in 1940 was a model of courage in the face of the darkest prospects humanity had ever faced.

Christians, more than anyone else, have a responsibility to employ the virtues in making sense of the past because we understand the nature of truth. The truth is there if we are willing to submit to it rather than twist it into the shape of our own ideology.