Saying Goodbye To a Master: A Tribute to Donald Dayton (1942-2020)
I met Don Dayton as a first year PhD student at Drew University, drawn to a course on holiness he was helping teach with Peter Ochs and Dale Irwin. Though not technically the professor of record for that course, Don managed to make his presence known in the classroom, and the dynamic interaction on the subject of holiness between him and Peter and Dale was a wonder.
What was most intriguing about Don…apart from his fashion sense…and grooming regimen…and the way he had of making an entrance…was how he thought. Don took delight in breaking down categories that were assumed by most voices in the academy about whatever topic was at hand. His mind just seemed to function in a different way. He made connections about people and movements in ways that other people simply could not.
Don was an egalitarian when it came to collecting and appreciating both history and ideas. Letters behind one’s name and degrees from the minority of elite schools were, from Don’s perspective, as likely to produce stifling homogeneity as real insight. Don knew creativity and historical significance could be found where the academy was loath to look.
He loved uncovering suppressed history – all the things in our Christian pasts that we don’t mention for the sake of maintaining respectability in the present. He seemed to know every outrageous antic, every scandal, every closet, of every Christian leader for the last 200 years…or more. And he would drop these anecdotes into conversation, in excruciating detail, with relatively little concern for what was too much information. There are things about my forefathers and mothers in the faith that I will never be able to scrub from my consciousness.
He collected ideas like he collected books. His library included everything from Karl Barth to liberation theologians to Amy Semple McPherson, from Pietists to snake handlers to James Dean, even some genres one struggles to describe. In any city Don found himself in, he spent at least one evening visiting used bookstores, collecting books on theology and history, especially rare exotic volumes that ended up in the store from some holiness or Pentecostal preacher.
Don’s mind was iconically represented by the “organization” of his office and car. Everything was in there. Stuff you couldn’t believe was in there, was in there. In his brain, as in his car or office, you never knew what two things might end up next to each other, what connections could be drawn by what seemed to be serendipity. What stories and theologies were actually connected?
When Don began working at Drew, I took a course from him in evangelical historiography that examined the implicit assumptions in the work of 12-13 separate scholars of “evangelicalism.” What were their a priori, largely unexamined assumptions about this aspect of American religious history? Is “evangelicalism” even useful nomenclature? This was Don’s baby. His life’s work was challenging the dominant narrative that assumed Puritan normativity for American popular religion.
In that class we read one of the works of his then sparring partner, George Marsden’s book on the history of Fuller Seminary, alongside Don’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. I had read Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture at Swarthmore College. It was what first turned me on to Christian intellectual history. Marsden was the reason I attended Duke Divinity School in the early 1990s. I took his courses and knew his work well. In this class, though, I first heard Don’s passionate plea for a re-reading of the history of whatever “evangelicalism” is, not as it had become, but as it actually was. I was intrigued by Don’s critique. And I was largely convinced.
Don’s contribution to historiography, history, and theology was remarkable. I don’t need to say much about Discovering or Rediscovering an Evangelical Heritage. The impact those have had on the global discussion of what constitutes evangelicalism, and really what constitutes Protestantism, cannot be overstated. Don’s Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, connecting Pentecostal and Renewalist movements to the developments in holiness and Methodist circles in the 18th and 19th centuries, has become part of the essential canon of texts to understand that most prolific and global species of Protestantism.
I want to close with some personal observations. Eventually Don became my doctor father. Admittedly, Don was not the most attentive to procedures imposed by the School of Graduate Studies. Those who knew him will not, I am sure, be surprised to hear that Don was a sixties rebel when it came to conformity to social norms and rules. But he was an amazing conversation partner and mentor to students. If you wanted to talk history or theology, he was up for it. Nearly every afternoon Don could be found holding court in the Drew University snack bar, with whomever showed up, to discuss the ideas any of us might be wrestling with.
When I came out of Duke, I had perhaps heard of camp meetings of the holiness movement, but they were not central to the identity of Methodism. Oxford, the Eucharist, organization, that was the Methodism I knew. Don revealed to me the dynamic, exciting, messy, scandalous, disreputable, Spirit-led, charismatic, barefoot, socially challenging side of Methodism. And I can’t go back. He introduced me to the members of my family who did not know which fork to use, or when to clap during a symphony concert. But knowing them, living with them, has made my scholarship, my piety, my life, so much richer.
Thank you, Don.
Scott Kisker is Professor of the History of Christianity at United Theological Seminary.