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

CHAPTER ONE: The Dog That Didn't Bark: The Study of Religions in America to circa 1820

1 chapter one TheDogThatDidn’tBark TheStudyof ReligionsinAmericatocirca1820 No one would recoil in shock if, while scrolling through a university ’s Web site, she found a department of religious studies. The religion department routinely steps up to the plate in the batting order of the humanities today. The academic study of religion first appeared in American higher education during the same formative period as the other modern humanistic disciplines; that is, the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 Religious studies got into the game a little later than history and literature but about the same time as art history and anthropology. (Cultural and social anthropology today usually get grouped with the social sciences. Intellectual ancestry and methods link these forms of anthropology more properly with the humanities.2 ) In origin the discipline of religious studies shared common roots and aims with the other humanities, and I suppose it still does. We argue a lot nowadays about just what the humanities do. But, whatever they do, no one is surprised to find religious studies doing it, too. We should be. If you look earlier than the modern era to find inquirers in the West who took seriously the supernatural beliefs and rituals of other cultures, you have to go very far back—all the way back to polytheistic antiquity. The classic (so to speak) case is Herodotus’s History, or Histories, written around 430 b.c.e. Herodotus tiptoed gingerly around Persian and Egyptian divinities chapter one 2 (gods are best not toyed with), but he took them on their own terms, as he understood these, and managed to say quite a bit. Later, as Roman control gradually expanded across the Mediterranean world, the conquerors added a number of foreign deities to their own pantheon. Yet when Christian monotheism came to rule the West, from the fourth century c.e., polytheistic curiosity about other peoples’ gods gave way to Christian hostility to them. ‘Pagans,’ ‘infidels,’ and ‘heathens’ became targets for conversion or eradication rather than for curiosity and inquiry.3 This about-face made a lot of sense. Polytheists accepted that their native deities were not the only mighty gods. Even in the earlier books of the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh competed with other Semitic deities. The ancient Israelites eventually turned into monotheists, who believed that only one god really existed. But for a polytheist, adding a new temple to those where you already worshipped could not hurt, might help. Strangers’ gods at least bore looking into. The sore thumbs in the pagan Roman Empire were the Jews and later the Christians, who refused to adore any god but their own. Once Christian monotheists attained power over the state, they of course behaved much less flexibly than their polytheistic predecessors. ForChristians,onlyoneGodexisted,andHegotveryupsetwhen His people dallied with impostors. So insisted the first commandment , and for over a millennium the first commandment defined the place of other gods in Christian Europe, latterly in Christian America as well. “I am the Lord thy God. . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”4 (The first commandment bound Jews as well as Christians, but in Christendom Jews were persecuted, not persecutors .) Non-Christian gods were false gods, and they got treated as false gods deserved. Christian scholars who took a more benign interest in non-Christian religions during the Middle Ages, such as Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century and Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth, stand out as real oddities, although neither came close to The Dog That Didn’t Bark 3 putting other religions on a par with Christianity. The wonder is that this bitter enmity eventually dissolved, and dissolved so completely that study of the various religions of the world now inhabits our college curricula. How did this happen? As in other academic disciplines, scholars in religious studies have written its history, explaining its origins .5 (Outside of higher education, tolerance crept in less dramatically but unmistakably.6 ) The tale usually starts at the end of the Middle Ages, with the expansion of Europe into Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Christians had long classified other peoples’ faiths by contrasting Christian truth to Jewish perfidy and Muslim fraud. Europeans in the Age of Discovery sailed beyond this familiar triad. Explorers struggled to make sense of the strange beliefs and rites they encountered among peoples of newfound lands. Their striving spurred investigations of these novel versions of the supernatural, inquiries generally both...