Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

Latourette isn’t merely defending his subject; he’s staking a claim for intellectual jurisdiction. By framing Christianity’s history as “of concern to all who are interested in the record of man,” he turns what could sound like a sectarian archive into a general-interest key to the human story. The move is rhetorical judo: if you care about humanity, you must care about Christianity, whether or not you believe in it. That’s the specific intent - to relocate church history from the parochial shelf to the central stack of any serious account of modern life.

The subtext is a mid-20th-century historian’s confidence that big structures still explain the world. “Therefore” signals an argument already underway: Christianity isn’t just one tradition among many; it’s a civilizational engine whose institutions, moral vocabularies, reforms, conflicts, and global missions have left fingerprints on politics, education, family life, and ideas of personhood. “The contemporary human scene” is doing a lot of work here. It’s a phrase that smuggles urgency into what might otherwise be antiquarian study: the past isn’t past; it’s the wiring behind current debates.

Context matters. Latourette wrote in an era shaped by world wars, decolonization, and the acceleration of global Christianity beyond Europe. A historian in that moment could plausibly argue that to understand modern nationalism, humanitarianism, race politics, or internationalism, you must track the religious story entangled with them. The line also quietly asserts the historian’s role: not to preach, but to insist that cultural literacy includes religion, especially one that has operated as both a moral language and a geopolitical actor.