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American Religion and the Academy in the Early Twentieth Century: The Chicago Years of William Warren Sweet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

James L. Ash Jr
James L. Ash Jr
Affiliation:
Mr. Ash is associate professor of religion in the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.
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Extract

An enormous change in the academic study of religion has occurred in the United States during the last half-century as the center of the enterprise has moved from the church-supported college and the seminary to the secular university and the graduate school. Some of this change has been caused by the rise of state-supported higher education, some by the secularizing trend that has shaped all modern American universities, both public and private. The change clearly has resulted in a discipline (if the term may be loosely used) in which not only has the number of practicing religion scholars greatly multiplied, but the scholarship itself also has grown in academic stature, becoming less eulogistic, more critical, and more methodologically congruent with other humanities disciplines.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 450 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1981

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References

1. Lindbeck, George, “Theological Education in North America Today,” Bulletin of the Council on the Study of Religion 8 (10 1977): 87,Google Scholar summarizes a 1976 Rockefeller Foundation Study dealing in part with the recent immense expansion of the study of religion in American colleges and universities. See also Neusner, Jacob, “Religious Studies: The Next Vocation,” Bulletin of the Council on the Study of Religion 8 (12 1977): 117–120;Google ScholarSmith, David C., “Religious Studies: After the Creation,” Forum 2 (06 1980): 1–3.Google Scholar

2. Examples of University of Chicago doctoral dissertations of which Sweet supervised all or part include the following: Chase, Daryl, “The Early Shakers: An Experiment in Religious Communism” (1936);Google ScholarDeGroot, Alfred T., “The Grounds of Division among the Disciples of Christ” (1939);Google ScholarHix, Clarence E., “The Conflict between Presbyterianism and Freethought in the South” (1937);Google ScholarHolter, Don W., “The Beginnings of Protestantism in Trans-Missouri” (1934);Google ScholarKuhns, Frederick I., “The Operations of the American Home Missionary Society in the Old Northwest” (1947);Google ScholarMead, Sidney E., “Nathaniel W. Taylor (1786–1858) and the New Haven Theology: A Study in Background and Development” (1940);Google ScholarSchneider, Carl E., “Origin of the German Evangelical Church Society of the West” (1935);Google ScholarThrift, Charles T., “The Operations of the American Home Missionary Society in the South, 1826–1861” (1936);Google ScholarWalzer, William C., “Charles Grandison Finney and the Presbyterian Revivals of Central and Western New York” (1944);Google ScholarYoder, Donald H., “Church Union Efforts of the Reformed Church in the United States to 1934” (1947).Google Scholar

3. “Father of American Church History Dies,” The Christian Century 76 (21 01 1959):71.Google Scholar

4. See Storr, Richard J., Harper's University (Chicago, 1966).Google Scholar

5. Reeves, Floyd W., “Scholarly Reputation,” The University of Chicago Survey, vol. 3, The University Faculty, (Chicago, 1933), pp. 39–54.Google Scholar

6. Mathews, Shailer, The Spiritual Interpretation of History, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), p. ix.Google Scholar

7. Mathews, Shailer, The Faith of Modernism (New York, 1924);Google Scholar see Wurster, Stephen, “The Modernism of Shailer Mathews: A Study in American Religious Progressivism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1972);Google ScholarJones, Archie H., “American Protestantism and the Science of History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1954), pp. 6–40.Google Scholar

8. Jones, p. 24.

9. See Bowden, Henry W., Church History in the Age of Science (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971).Google Scholar

10. “Democracy … has been disclosed as an irrepressible tendency” (Mathews, , Spiritual Interpretation of History, p. vii).Google Scholar See also Mathews, Shailer, Patriotism and Religion (New York, 1918);Google ScholarMcLaughlin, Andrew C., “American History and American Democracy,” American Historical Review 20 (1915): 256–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Mode, Peter G., Source Book and Bibliographical Guide for American Church History (Menasha, Wis., 1921);Google Scholaridem, The Frontier Spirit in American Christianity (New York, 1923).

12. Case, Shirley Jackson, “The Historical Study of Religion,” Journal of Religion 1 (1921): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 17.

14. Case, Shirley Jackson, The Christian Philosophy of History (Chicago, 1943), p. 131.Google Scholar

15. Case to President E. D. Burton, 22 October 1923, The Presidents' Papers ca. 1925–1945, box 111, folder 1, Department of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago.

16. See Ash, James L. Jr, “The Social Construction of Historical Reality: An Intellectual Biography of William Warren Sweet” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976).Google Scholar

17. “Professor Rogers was, without any doubt in my mind my greatest teacher… He gave me the first real glimpse of what scholarship meant and he inspired me with a desire to become a scholar” (Sweet to William J. Thompson, 20 January 1931, William Warren Sweet Papers, box 2, folder 9, Department of Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago).

18. Rogers, Robert W., History of Babylonia and Assyria (New York, 1900).Google Scholar

19. History Department Classbook, 1904–1922, Columbiana Collection, Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, New York.

20. Wish, Harvey, The American Historian (New York, 1960), p. 231.Google Scholar

21. Official Transcript of William Warren Sweet, 1906–1912, Philosophy Department Records, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

22. Ames, Herman V., Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States during the First Century of its History, American Historical Association Annual Report (Washington, 1897).Google ScholarHutchinson, William T., “John Bach McMaster,” in The Marcus W. Jernegan Easays in American Historiography, ed. Hutchinson, William T. (Chicago, 1937), p. 133,Google Scholar points out McMaster's opinion that “interpretations” inevitably distorted history.

23. Sweet, William Warren, The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Civil War (Cincinnati, 1912), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

24. Randall, J. H. Jr and Haines, G. IV, “Controlling Assumptions in the Practice of American Historians,” in Theory and Practice in Historical Study: A Report to the Committee on Historiography, Bulletin 54 (New York, 1946).Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Sweet, William Warren, American Culture and Religion (Dallas, 1951), p. 76;Google Scholaridem, Methodism in American History, 2d ed. (New York, 1953), p. 402.

26. Sweet, William Warren, “Every Dog Has His Day and I've Had Mine,” Divinity School News 13 (1 08 1946): 4–5.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 6.

28. Jennings, Louis B., The Bibliography and Biography of Shirley Jackson Case (Chicago, 1949), p. 32.Google Scholar

29. For an example of the distinctive emphases of Case's department, see his festschrift: McNeill, John T., Spinka, Matthew, and Willoughby, Harold R., eds., Environmental Factors in Christian History (Chicago, 1939).Google Scholar

30. See Jones, pp. 25–26.

31. Jennings, p. 33.

32. Case to Sweet, 2 December 1932, Sweet Papers, box 1, folder 5.

33. Sweet, William Warren, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, vol. 1, The Baptists, 1783–1830 (New York, 1931), vol. 2,Google ScholarThe Presbyterians, 1783–1840 (New York, 1936), vol. 3,Google ScholarThe Congregationalists, 1783–1850 (Chicago, 1939), vol. 4.,Google ScholarThe Methodists, 1783–1840 (Chicago, 1946).Google Scholar

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35. Jameson, J. Franklin, “The American Acta Sanctorum,” American Historical Review 13 (01 1908): 286–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. School and Society 22(1 08 1925): 137.Google Scholar

37. Case, Shirley Jackson, “Introduction,” in Sweet, ed., The Baptists, p. vi.Google Scholar

38. Sweet, William Warren, Methodism in American History, (New York, 1933), p. 143.Google Scholar

39. Sweet, William Warren, The Story of Religions in America, (New York, 1930), p. 317;Google Scholar compare idem, The Rise of Methodism in the West (New York, 1920), p. 14.

40. Segal, Howard P., “A New State in Religious History?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 03 1977, p. 19,Google Scholar claims that Sweet's treatment of the frontier was “adopted unaltered from the work of famed American historian Frederic Jackson Turner.” For a statement of the Turner thesis with critical evaluation from subsequent historians, see Billington, Ray A., ed., The Turner Thesis (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

41. “The things typically American today, whether in politics or religion, have been largely the product of frontier influences” (Sweet, William Warren, “Some Significant Factors in American Church History,” Journal of Religion 7 [01 1927]: 11).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. See Sweet, William Warren, “The Churches as Moral Courts of the Frontier,” Church History 2 (03 1933): 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. The most sophisticated presentation of this viewpoint is Sweet's, Religion in the Development of American Culture (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

44. This criticism is forcefully presented by Sweet's pupil Mead, Sidney E. in “Professor Sweet's Religion and Culture in America,” Church History 22 (03 1953): 33–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Sweet, William Warren, The American Churches: An Interpretation (London, 1947), p. 49.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., p. 66.

47. Sweet, , “Some Significant Factors,” p. 15.Google Scholar

48. Sweet, , The Story of Religions in America, p. 411.Google Scholar

49. Gewehr, Wesley M., review of The Story of Religions in America by William Warren Sweet, American Historical Review 37 (01 1932): 349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Winfred E. Garrison, review of The Story of Religions in America by Sweet, William Warren, Christian Century 47 (31 12 1930): 1627.Google Scholar

51. Harvey Wish, review of Religion in the Development of American Culture by Sweet, William Warren, American Historical Review 59 (10 1953):138.Google Scholar

52. Sperry to Sweet, 3 June 1943, Sweet Papers, box 2, folder 7. Case responded to this news with the comments: “I was much interested to learn about your invitation to teach at Harvard next year. It must be that Harvard is waking up to the task of modern education. I did not suppose that it would be interested in anything so recent as American Church History” (Case to Sweet, 30 September 1943, Sweet Papers, box 1, folder 5).

53. Sperry to Sweet, 16 November 1945, Sweet Papers, box 2, folder 7.

54. Case to Sweet, 10 November 1934, Sweet Papers, box 1, folder 9.

55. William Warren Sweet, review of The Schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church by Norwood, John N., American Historical Review 29 (01 1924):351.Google Scholar

56. Sweet, , “Some Significant Factors,” p. 4.Google Scholar

57. Mead, p. 34.

58. Sweet, , “Every Dog Has His Day,” p. 6.Google Scholar

59. Wish, review of Religion in the Development of American Culture, p. 140.