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PORTENTS OF A DISCIPLINE: THE STUDY OF RELIGION BEFORE RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2014
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Academic disciplines, including departments of history, emerged slowly and unevenly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Professional societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA) at its founding in 1884, were generally tiny organizations, a few would-be specialists collecting together to stake a claim on a distinct scholarly identity. Fields of study were necessarily fluid—interdisciplinary because they remained, to a large degree, predisciplinary. As fields went, the study of religion appeared especially amorphous; it was spread out across philology, history, classics, folklore, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and oriental studies. Adding to the complexity more than simplifying it was the persisting claim that the study of religion belonged specifically (if not exclusively) to theology and hence to seminaries and divinity schools. Elizabeth A. Clark's Founding the Fathers illuminates the importance of Protestant theological institutions in shaping the study of religion in nineteenth-century America, suggesting, in particular, how well-trained church historians pointed the way toward disciplinary consolidation and specialization. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay's Science of Religion, by contrast, explores the leading British intellectuals responsible for extending the study of religion across a broad swath of the new human sciences. Together these two books offer an excellent opportunity to reflect on what religion looked like as a learned object of inquiry before religious studies fully crystallized as an academic discipline in the middle third of the twentieth century. Clark opens the introduction to her book with an epigraph from Hayden White: “The question is, What is involved in the transformation of a field of studies into a discipline?” (1). What indeed?
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References
1 For a complementary history of American church history, including the ASCH's relationship with the AHA, see Bowden, Henry Warner, Church History in the Age of Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 1876–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1971), esp. 239–45Google Scholar.
2 For this basic interpretive divide on the secularization of American higher education see Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Wilson, John F., “Introduction,” in Roberts, Jon H. and Turner, James, The Sacred and Secular University (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar, 3–16. For a particularly robust version of the de-Christianization argument see Hollinger, David, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar.
3 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1982), 433Google Scholar.
4 See Jordan, Louis Henry, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh, 1905)Google Scholar. Jordan noted at 143 that “it has often been alleged that scholarship in the United States lent practically no aid towards the inauguration of the Science of Comparative Religion.” Jordan disputed that claim, though not vigorously. He pointed to a range of New England amateurs from Hannah Adams to Lydia Maria Child to Samuel Johnson as perhaps the best answer the country had to that charge, but these were not the professorial “masters” whom Jordan was intent on exalting in his study. James Turner takes a similar tack in a recent, slimly compact set of three lectures on the field's American history; he looks to the same cluster of Unitarians for disciplinary harbingers, but their efforts nonetheless usually look “slipshod” to him in view of what comes later. See Turner, James, Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America (Athens, GA, 2011), 54Google Scholar. For a still standard survey of the discipline's history see Sharpe, Eric J., Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edn (London, 1986)Google Scholar. While Sharpe sees the American contribution as modest, he does accord it particular significance in the emergent psychology of religion—G. Stanley Hall, William James, Edwin Starbuck, James Leuba, and company. For the late nineteenth-century leadership of the Dutch universities see Molendijk, Arie L., The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden, 2005)Google Scholar; and, for a valuable set of essays crossing multiple national bounds see Molendijk, Arie L. and Pels, Peter, eds., Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion (Leiden, 1998)Google Scholar.
5 See Marsden, Soul of the American University, 334–7; Hart, D. G., The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Baltimore, 1999), esp. 75–87Google Scholar; Cherry, Conrad, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington, 1995)Google Scholar; and Shepard, Robert S., God's People in the Ivory Tower: Religion in the Early American University (Brooklyn, 1991)Google Scholar.
6 I have stressed the role of such amateurs in “Cosmopolitan Piety: Sympathy, Comparative Religions, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism,” in Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, Schmidt, Leigh E., and Valeri, Mark, eds., Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America (Baltimore, 2006), 199–221Google Scholar; “On Sympathy, Suspicion, and Studying Religion: Historical Reflections on a Doubled Inheritance,” in Orsi, Robert A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge, 2011), 17–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New York, 2010), 33–87. That emphasis, in turn, owes a debt to Smith, Bonnie G., The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar.