Our Desperate Need for Historical Narrative

Do you think of yourself as part of a story?

We are inherently story-based individuals. Which is to say, you are living a story. We all think of our lives as stories. This is why you assign meaning to the things that happen in your life. They are not just random events; you piece them together to tell a story. Even if you don’t tell this story to others, it powerfully informs you because you tell it to yourself. And who is the main character in your story? You, of course!

There is nothing wrong with this, but we need to go a step farther and recognize that our individual stories are only subplots in greater stories. You are a subplot in the story of your community, your country, your civilization, your world, and your religion.

Postmodernism has gutted the West of historical narrative. One of the tenets of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as ‘metanarrative’, a fancy word that refers to a big, overarching story. Postmodernists believe in individual stories but they don’t believe that history is going anywhere. They are skeptical of any attempt to make sense of historical events to tell a story with a plot.

But the West is desperately in need of a plot. Just as we can’t make sense of the individual events of our lives without putting them into a story, so we can’t make sense of the events of our world without putting them into a storyline. We need narrative.

We’ve replaced narrative with skepticism and moral self-hatred. Previous generations thought of America as a City on a Hill, a shining example to the world of a new way of thinking that was superior to the past. Now we think of America as an example of what is wrong with the world: late-stage capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, etc. Rather than thinking that we are part of something great, we think that we are part of something that is rotten.

How dangerous this is! Contrast the self-loathing critic with the healthy individual. One person sees only their own flaws. They are constantly bemoaning their own faults, obsessively focused on the cringy things they did years ago. Such people are miserable. Healthy individuals, on the other hand, acknowledge their faults but also put them into historical perspective. “Yes, what I did then was wrong but I’ve grown and I see my faults. I’m not doing that any more. I’ve learned from the past, and I’m a better person for it.”

The West has abandoned narrative for this moral self-hatred, and we all lose as a result. It was not always like that. We were built on individuals who believed in purpose, who felt that their efforts were part of something larger than themselves.

How do we regain this sense of story, this sense of being part of something larger than ourselves? By telling stories— telling true stories. When you lack meaning or purpose, you regain it as you tell stories and fit yourself into that story.

Do you know the story of the Battle of Tours, fought in France in 732 AD? The Frankish king Charles Martel stopped the hordes of the Umayyad Caliphate from swallowing up the entirety of Western Christendom, sparing our very civilization for another day. 

What about the story of the Reformation? Through the courageous actions of a single monk, the West was lifted out of the mists of superstition to regain the purity of truth that had been covered by a millennia of human tradition. 

We could talk, also, about the Second World War as the earth was convulsed by two very different ideas of the future: totalitarianism or democracy. 

Through all of this time, men and women have labored to learn, to study, and to understand the world around them through telescopes and microscopes, universities and scriptoriums, experiments and expeditions. We’ve collected an impressive culture of books, plays, concerts, dances, and sermons, exhibited in soaring cathedrals, magnificent palaces, spacious monasteries, and elegant town halls. We are part of a civilization that has been in the making for over two thousand years, the heirs of great scientists, great generals, great statesmen, great kingdoms, great theologians, great philosophers, and great ideas. Yet most of this is lost on postmodernists, who boil all of this down to a few simple catch phrases like ‘structural racism,’ ‘your truth,’ and ‘patriarchy.’ We are gutting people of the answers to the most important questions: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I part of?’ and ‘How did I get here?’

In order to regain this lost sense of story, we need to relearn the events of the story and how they connect. We need to read biographies and see stories in action. We need to see history as a story, not just random dates and names. We need to be engulfed and carried along by and delight in swimming in the rushing events of story.

Ultimately, this matters if we would fulfill our purpose, and if we would endure our difficulties. Without story, we will never know our purpose. Without purpose, why bother? 

What motivates us to go on another day? When hard times come, being able to arrange things into a story is what will help you to continue. “Anything can be borne when it is part of a story,” is a wise statement I recently heard. You’ve probably experienced this in your life: You can only make sense of your own suffering as you arrange it into a story about who you are and how it helped you to develop into the person that you are today. Similarly, we need this sense of story if we are going to survive as a community, a culture, a country, and a civilization.

This is brought home by the fact that God himself is a narratival being. He did not reveal himself in a series of statements and propositions about truth, but in a story. Do you ever think about that? It may seem mundane, but it is a powerful theological concept. God is telling a story, and that story encompasses all of human history. That is why there is purpose in human history. Being made in the image of God, you are also a narratival being. You can’t exist without thinking in story; it is built into the very essence of what it means to be human.

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