Introduction: Religion and Method

As we worked on this special issue, friends, colleagues, and readers questioned our rationale for devoting an issue of Early American Literature to "methods for the study of religion." To pick up any issue of Early American Literature, they pointed out, would be to discover multiple essays on religion. And further, the "religious turn" in literary studies—taking place since the late 1990s but reimagined in more urgent terms following 9/11—has made a discipline-wide fashion of what had long been one of the most bread-and-butter concerns of our field. Early Americanists, our interlocutors reminded us, have an abiding interest in religion that has not significantly intensified with this topic's current vogue (while neither has this vogue made much use of our field's long and distinguished scholarly legacy). This special issue, we were warned, risked pouring old wine into new, merely fashionable bottles.

We agree. We submit this special issue therefore as part of an ongoing conversation (in the field, and also in the pages of Early American Literature) on the place of "religion" in early Americanist scholarship. Yet the particular emphasis of this issue—and hence its originality and, hopefully, its utility—falls not on "religion," but on "method." Despite a long-standing interest in the topic of "religion," early American literary studies has made remarkably few metatopical investigations into what "religion" means, how its meaning changes, the criteria by which it can be identified, and how scholarship constructs rather than simply describes it. These kinds of questions, and the kinds of methodological problems they beg, are what this issue engages. Our aim is to upset the field's tendency to presume religion as a staple topic rather than investigate it as a critical problem. Though topically concerned with religion, the essays collected here advance and challenge so many otherwise excellent essays that have appeared in the pages of Early American Literature in that they approach "religion" as a problematic category and they make use of interdisciplinary methods to comprehend this critical problem.

Taken collectively, these essays stage a conversation between theoretical approaches for the study of religion emerging in anthropology, political philosophy, and religious studies (including rethinking the secularization thesis and its implications for global modernity, public sphere theory, and historiography) and ongoing investigative topics honed by early American literary studies (such as the Atlantic world, racial formation, comparative colonialisms, print practices, and literary cultures). By conjoining these approaches and topics through a renewed focus on methodology, the essays in this special issue begin to answer the call by leading scholars in the last number of years for a fieldwide reexamination of the conceptual relationships among "literature," "history," and "religion."¹ While our contributors do an excellent job of naming the stakes of that reexamination, the following pages preface these essays by suggesting some routes toward definitional clarity about what we mean when we discuss "religion."

The Meaning of "Religion"

No Puritan minister, it turns out, would have called himself a religious man. Determining, at more than three centuries' remove, whether or not he was one creates a methodological problem around what the term religious means. In an important definitional essay, religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith reports that the modern use of the word religion appeared around the sixteenth century—a term of anthropology rather than theology—while the adjective, religious, emerged in relation to an Enlightenment provincialization of divine truth, and the plural, religions, followed from a nineteenth-century acceleration of global cultural contact and attendant media technologies for reporting and circulating knowledge. Complementing Smith's analysis, historians of religion including Peter Harrison and Tomoko Masuzawa have documented the intellectual process during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by which a range of philosophies and systems of belief became classified as "religions," with the consequence, as Masuzawa's subtitle has it, that "European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism." Indirectly but surely, these accounts draw attention to the fact that the words religion, religions, and religious rarely appear in the primary text archives of early America— for to name as...