Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America

CHAPTER TWO: Comparing Religions in an Age of Uncertainty, circa 1820 to 1875

32 chapter two ComparingReligionsinanAgeof Uncertainty,circa1820to1875 By the 1820s Americans had accessible many more particulars about non-European religions; they also then discovered specifically Christian reasons to care about them, going beyond generalized Enlightenment curiosity about other cultures. Broadly speaking, an unpredictable new factor—unpredictable when Hannah Adams first published—led eventually to the creation in America of an academic discipline dedicated to studying all religions. This wild card was the self-conscious development in the United States (as elsewhere) of an increasingly liberal version of Protestant theology. This heterodox theology provided the matrix for a surge of interest in those non-European religions that shared with Christianity both a wide geographic reach and a basis in normative texts. I immediately add that hospitality toward non-European religions was far from common among American Protestants. More typical without question was James Moffat, professor of biblical criticism and literature in the Presbyterians’ Cincinnati Theological Seminary. Moffat roundly declared in 1852, “The various shades of philanthropy may be traced from nation to nation, by the corresponding degrees of Christian knowledge. From the midnight blackness of Hindooism, through Mohammedanism, and Romanism, and formal Protestantism, to the humble, intelligent and faithful follower of the Word of God, you may distinctly grade Comparing Religions, ca. 1820 to 1875 33 the ascending scale of humanity.”1 Such aversion should not surprise . Most American Protestants got their pictures of the religions of Asia from reports sent home by missionaries trying to convert the heathen, and nineteenth-century American missionaries pretty consistently damned the ‘abhorrent’ religious practices of the people they were trying to turn into Christians.2 So the few surveys of non-European religions prepared by traditional Protestants before the late nineteenth century combined a stew of dubious ‘facts’ with a whopping side dish of distaste. Consider a book titled All Religions and Religious Ceremonies, published in Hartford in 1823. Part 1 of this mishmash offered a survey of Christian groups—tolerably fair-minded and disinterested , in the spirit of Hannah Adams—cribbed from various similar British encyclopedias (including Thomas Williams’s edition of Adams). It also tried to treat Judaism objectively while sneering at Islam. Part 2 abridged the four-volume Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos (1811) by the English Baptist missionary William Ward (1766–1826). Ward uttered a few kind words about Indian legal and philological scholarship but savagely laid into Hindu “idolatry” and “superstition.” Another Hartford printer published a stand-alone abridgment of Ward’s book the following year. This suggests some popular demand for information about India and its religions. Similar in tone to Ward was the prolific Reverend Charles Goodrich’s much reprinted Pictorial and Descriptive View of All Religions (1842). Goodrich cribbed his book from an English abridgment of a major Enlightenment work, Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All Peoples of the World, 1723–43). But Goodrich ‘improved’ Picart by adding proofs of the ongoing conquest of “idolatry” in “every portion of the globe” by the “crucified Redeemer.” Meanwhile, the supposedly shrinking non-Christian religions offered Christians disgusting exhibits of chapter two 34 “human degeneracy” (guaranteed to “furnish no small entertainment ” to Goodrich’s readers). Books like these seemed calculated to feed a morbid interest in the bizarre and frightful rather than to explore non-European religions seriously.3 A strikingly different attitude first appeared in the most liberal wing of American Protestantism, Unitarianism. Some wag defined the three essential dogmas of early nineteenth-century Unitarianism as the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston. The joke hit the mark. American Unitarianism hatched under the Liberal wing of New England Congregationalism between about 1800 and 1820, and for some decades it remained concentrated in eastern Massachusetts. This location matters for our purposes because America’s new East India trade came to center in Boston. In 1807 Boston’s iconic Federalperiod architect, Charles Bulfinch, designed India Wharf to house the merchants and their cargos of hides, linseed, shellac, gunny bags, indigo, and jute. Most of the traders who populated India Wharf worshiped in Unitarian churches. For this reason, Unitarians tended to be far better acquainted with India than other Americans and far more interested in it. Indeed, the Monthly Anthology, which from 1803 to 1811 served as something like the house organ of Boston...