Why Thomas Merton Thought Skipping History Class Was a Spiritual Problem
Think about See-Judge-Act as you read this posting. Ask yourself how the method weaves this together as a seamless garment.
Look, I get it—history can feel like a dusty classroom subject. Dates, dead people, things that happened before we were born. Who cares, right?
But Thomas Merton—this Trappist monk who somehow became one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century—had a completely different take. For him, ignoring history wasn’t just lazy. It was spiritually dangerous.
History Is Where We Actually Meet God
Here’s the thing about Merton: he wasn’t your typical “Hollywood” version of a monk hiding away from the world. Sure, he lived in a monastery in Kentucky. Still, he was writing about nuclear war, racism, Vietnam, and the spiritual crisis of modern life. He believed that if you wanted to encounter God, you couldn’t just float off into some blissed-out spiritual state. You had to get your hands dirty with reality—including the messy, violent, complicated reality of the past.
He once wrote that contemplation without historical awareness is “a flight from reality.” Read New Seeds of Contemplation, and discover Merton’s understanding of Real prayer, Real contemplation, means looking straight at the truth—all of it. The wars, the racism, the times the Church blessed violence instead of stopping it. And then asking: What does faithfulness look like right now, knowing what we know?
The Mirror We’d Rather Not Look Into
Merton saw history as a brutal but necessary mirror. It shows us patterns we’d rather not see—how violence keeps repeating itself, how nations (including our own) tell themselves comforting lies, how religious people can do horrible things while convinced they’re doing God’s work.
But here’s what’s wild: the mirror also shows moments of genuine courage, love, and transformation. Saints who actually lived as Jesus meant it. People who resisted injustice when it cost them everything. For Merton, both sides of that mirror matter. History reveals “both the grandeur and tragedy of human freedom.”
He was writing during World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement—crisis after crisis. And he kept saying: Our survival depends on whether we’re willing to let go of our illusions. Whether we can face what our history actually tells us about ourselves.
Why Nations and Churches Love to Forget
Here’s something Merton understood deeply: we want to forget. Nations want to see themselves as innocent heroes. Churches want to believe they’ve always been on the right side. It’s uncomfortable to remember that:
Christians launched the Crusades
European colonialism was often justified with Bible verses
American Christianity essentially blessed (or ignored) slavery and segregation
The “good guys” in our national mythology often weren’t all that good
Merton was particularly fierce about racism. He called it “a white problem”—not because Black people don’t suffer from it (obviously they do), but because white people created it, benefit from it, and need to own that history. He knew you can’t fix a problem you won’t remember.
Forgetting history, he said, is how societies justify doing the same terrible things over and over. Collective amnesia is collective permission.
The “Crusader Mentality” We Haven’t Kicked
When Merton looked at Christian history—the real story, not the sanitized version—he saw a pattern he called the “crusader mentality.” It’s this toxic mix of religious certainty and violence, where we convince ourselves that our wars are holy, our nation is chosen, our enemies are evil.
He saw it in the medieval Crusades, obviously. But he also saw it in modern wars, in how Americans talked about communism, in how Christians blessed nuclear weapons. Same sick pattern, different century.
The early martyrs and the ancient church practices—Merton didn’t study them as museum pieces. He studied them to ask: When did we lose the plot? When did following Jesus stop meaning nonviolence and start meaning blessing empires?
History as a Contemplative Practice (Wait, What?)
This is where Merton gets really interesting. Most people think contemplation means closing your eyes and thinking about nothing. Peace, serenity, escape.
Nope. Not for Merton.
For him, contemplation meant entering deeply into reality as it actually is. And reality includes:
The wounds that haven’t healed
The people our history books forgot
The violence our grandparents participated in or benefited from
The lies we’re still telling ourselves
He believed that real contemplation requires truth, and truth requires memory. So studying history becomes a spiritual practice—a way of learning to see the world the way God sees it, which means seeing all of it.
As he put it, contemplation isn’t about floating above the mess. It’s about looking straight at war, racism, colonialism—all of it—and letting it change you from the inside out.
History as Conscience
Here’s maybe the most practical thing Merton said: being historically conscious means being “the conscience” of your own time—not its cheerleader.
When everyone’s waving flags and demanding loyalty, someone who knows history can say, “Hold on—we’ve done this before, and it ended badly.” When people want simple heroes and villains, history shows you it’s always more complicated. When your nation or your church wants to claim innocence, history hands you the receipts.
Merton wrote constantly about peace and nonviolence, and he always grounded them in memory. Remember the martyrs who refused to kill, yes—but also remember Hiroshima, remember the slave ships, remember what we’re capable of when we think God is on our side.
Memory, for him, was a tool for conversion. For making peace. So as not to repeat the same mistakes our ancestors made.
Why Forgetting Makes Us Dangerous
Merton believed the biggest obstacles to peace and justice were:
Ignorance of what actually happened
Refusing to confront historical injustice
Denying responsibility for the past’s ongoing effects
When people don’t know history, they become easy targets for fear and propaganda. They buy into scapegoating. They fall for what Merton called “the illusions of collective sin”—the way whole societies can convince themselves that evil is good, that violence is necessary, that “those people” deserve what they get.
Historical awareness is moral clarity. It’s the difference between wisdom and repetition.
So What Do We Do With This?
Merton isn’t asking us to become professional historians. He’s asking us to be honest. To read, to remember, to let the truth about the past shape how we live now.
That might mean:
Actually learning what happened to Indigenous peoples, not the Thanksgiving mythology.
Understanding how redlining and segregation created today’s wealth gap
Recognizing that “my ancestors came here legally” ignores that the laws were racist and that people, our ancestors, often bent those rules.
Seeing that every war gets sold with the same lies, listen to the nightly news.
It means being suspicious of anyone—politician, preacher, pundit—who tells you history doesn’t matter or that remembering old wounds is “divisive.”
Because for Merton, forgetting isn’t neutral. Forgetting is a choice. And it’s usually a choice that protects the powerful and abandons the vulnerable.
History isn’t just dates and dead people. It’s sacred ground—the place where we meet the truth about ourselves, about God, about what love and justice actually require.
And according to this monk from Kentucky, we skip that homework at our peril.