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

NOTES

83 NOTES chapter one. The Dog That Didn’t Bark 1. For the entrance of the humanities into American higher education , see Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University, part 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Laurence Veysey’s aging, flawed, but still cogent essay “The Plural Organized Worlds of the Humanities,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 51–106. 2. Biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology are different cases. 3. On the contrast between pagan and Christian attitudes, see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd ed. (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), 2–10. 4. In full: “I am the lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Exodus 20: 2–3, King James Version. Christian groups differ on whether the first sentence (verse 2) forms an integral part of the First Commandment, as distinct from a sort of preface to the commandments as a whole. All, I believe, include the second sentence (verse 3). 5. Recent examples, differing sharply in temperament and point of view but largely agreeing on the broad outlines of the story, are Sharpe, Comparative Religion; Hans G. Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte : Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (München: Verlag notes to chapter one 84 C.H. Beck, 1997); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Princeton University Press published an English version of Kippenberg in 2002 (trans. Barbara Harshav) under the slightly bleached title Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age. One can see this standard narrative already taking shape over a century ago in Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1905). H. Pinard de la Boullaye, S.J., L’Étude comparée des religions, 2 vols. (Paris: G. Beauchesne, 1929), unusually took a broader view of the development of the discipline in his first, historical volume. Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), is a methodological argument using historical materials rather than a history of the field. 6. Survey data from 2008 show a majority of Americans believing that a non-Christian religion can lead to eternal life. To say that, for example, a Muslim can attain eternal life is not the same as agreeing that Islam is true or even partly true. Still, the percentage of Americans who affirmed that “Mine is the one true faith” ranged from only 49 percent even among white evangelicals to a mere 11 percent among white Catholics. “Many Americans Say Other Faiths Can Lead to Eternal Life,” Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, December 18, 2008, http://pewforum.org/ docs/?DocID=380, accessed October 20, 2009. 7. The most learned study of any of these episodes is Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 8. William Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (1894; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), xliv; Francis Schmidt, “Des inepties tolérable: la raison des rites de John Spencer à W. Robertson Smith,” Archives des sciences sociales de religions 85 (1994): 132–33. 9. Jean-Luc Kieffer, Anquetil-Duperron: l’Inde en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1983). On Jones, see especially Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); notes to chapter one 85 S.N.Mukherjee,SirWilliamJones:AStudyinEighteenth-CenturyAttitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); and Rosane Rocher, “Weaving Knowledge: Sir William Jones and Indian Pandits,” in Objects of Inquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746–1794), ed. Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 54–67. On British orientalist scholarship in this period more generally, see especially Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), and idem, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006...