Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

A History of all Religions

A History of All Religions LEIGH E. SCHMIDT In Aids to Reflection, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge published in 1825 and which James Marsh made available in an American edition in 1829, the poet commented on one exercise that was especially conducive to forming ‘‘a habit of reflection.’’ ‘‘Accustom yourself to re- flect on the words you use, hear, or read, their birth, derivation and history. For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.’’ Coleridge’s spiritual aid is by now a reflexive habit that most scholars instinctively cultivate and perhaps even live by as a linguistic and genealogical imperative. As Daniel Dubuisson remarks in his postcolonial screed on The Western Construction of Religion, ‘‘All scienti fic study today ought to have as its sine qua non the critical, uncompromising study of its own language.’’1 The history of the early republic is an ideal domain for further developing this practice of reflection, especially with regard to the study of religion, its keywords, and critical terms. The period from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century is one of the most fecund in all of Euro-American history for the generation of new classifications by which to map the religious world. From a long-standing Leigh E. Schmidt, a Professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University , is the author of Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989); Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995); and Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (2000). He is currently working on a book on the making of American ‘‘spirituality.’’ 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, 1993), 10; Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, 2003), 197. 178 • LEIGH SCHMIDT four-pronged diagram of Jewish-Christian-Muslim-pagan traditions, the categories for organizing religion—especially those of the heathen world—underwent massive and decisive expansion. Between 1801 and 1862, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and Confucianism all were added to the lexicon as differentiated species of religion.2 More than that, crucial categories for re-imagining the relationship among religion , the state, and an enlightened civic society also came into being in these decades: most notably, liberalism, voluntarism, and secularism. At the same time, mysticism and spirituality were revised as terms to emphasize the riches of solitary interiority and to lay claim to a universal and essentialized form of religious experience. In other words, the scope of religious invention in the era extended well beyond the evangelical Protestant resourcefulness of retrospectively creating ‘‘the Great Awakening ’’ or gradually redefining Jonathan Edwards’s ‘‘true virtue’’ in republican and common-sense terms. The new nation was a laboratory for the pluralization of knowledge about religions and for the negotiation of shifting views on religion’s place within ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ spheres— two processes that were intimately interconnected. Further cultivating Coleridge’s reflective habit on the birth and derivation of words would be a good (not to say spiritual) exercise for historians of religion and the early republic. The historian Frank E. Manuel insisted in his classic study of the radical Enlightenment that Americans remained ‘‘ill-prepared for serious original reflection on the nature of man and his gods,’’ but citizens of the new nation hardly sat out the growing production of knowledge about the history of all religions. The most prevalent model they inherited was a didactic one that descended from seventeenth-century Anglican divines—Samuel Purchas, Alexander Ross, and William Turner among them—who compiled sources from around the globe to demonstrate inter alia the fundamental importance of orthodox religious belief, practice , and hierarchy to the smooth functioning of English society. In 1820 the first American edition of John Bellamy’s The History of All Religions appeared, having been published initially in London in 1812. Bellamy’s 2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (1963; rep., Minneapolis, 1991), 61; Jonathan Z. Smith, ‘‘Religion, Religions, Religious,’’ in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998), 276. A HISTORY OF ALL RELIGIONS • 179 compendium retained the Christian apologetic purposes of its forebears and placed the growing welter...