The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 4

Religious history

John Wolffe

Introduction

Religious history is both one of the oldest and also one of the most recent approaches to the study of religion. Sometime in the later first century ce the Christian writer of the Gospel of Luke announced his intention ‘to write an orderly account’ of ‘the things that have been fulfilled among us’ in order that his readers might ‘know the certainty of the things you have been taught’ (NIV 1982: Luke 1:1–4). The intention was to compile a work of history, in the general sense of describing past events, but it was a history that had an explicit religious purpose in enabling readers to ‘know … certainty’, a certainty that was implicitly assumed to be self-evident from the narrative that followed. Some nineteen centuries later when Sidney E. Ahlstrom embarked on his seminal survey, A Religious History of the American People, he claimed that his theme was ‘one of the most intensely relevant subjects on the face of the earth’, but he did not profess to offer any ‘certainty’ for religious believers. On the contrary he was at pains at the outset to point out that religious history

enjoys no rights of sanctuary, no immunity from the demands for evidence and plausibility that are made on historians generally. The historian cannot claim supernatural or divinely inspired sources of insight; nor on such grounds can he place one body of holy scripture above another.

(Ahlstrom 1972: xiv)

Ahlstrom went on to insist that religious history should also include the study of ‘secular’ religiosity and moral seriousness; that it must attend to the ‘radical diversity’ of actual religious movements and experience; and that the social context of religious activity ‘must ever be borne in mind’. These aspirations, foundational to the critical academic study of religious history as it developed in the later twentieth century, would have seemed very alien to the mindset of religiously-motivated historians at the time that the Gospel of Luke was written.

The scope of the concept of ‘religious history’ is a matter of significant confusion and debate. It is possible to discern a broad trend over time from the history with a religious purpose of the Gospel of Luke and other foundational ancient texts to the detached objective investigation of the religious dimensions of ‘the larger frame of world history’ (Ahlstrom 1972: xiv) that characterizes the contemporary academic discipline. Aspects of the older approach persist however, for example in the view of the editor of a collection of essays on

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Historians of the Christian Tradition that ‘for the sovereign God of Scripture, history is a tool for His own purposes’ and his definition of religious historians as those who deal with ‘people, ideas and events in a theologically informed fashion’ (Baumann and Klauber 1995: 3, 11). For Ahlstrom, theology is subordinate to history, with theological developments presented in a ‘historically conditioned’ context, but for Baumann and Klauber the interpretation of history remains subordinate to their underlying theological convictions.

Alongside approaches in which history and theology are primary, is what might be characterized as the religious studies approach to the past, originating in the development in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century of the concept of Religiongeschichte. This word is normally translated into English as ‘comparative religion’ or ‘history of religion(s)’. One leading British practitioner of religious history has pithily remarked that ‘The academic subject called “The History of Religions” turns out to have nothing to do with the discipline of history’ (Collinson 1999: 154). Central to the Religiongeschichte approach is the comparative study of different religious traditions, identifying commonalities and contrasts. The history of religions (in the plural) acknowledges the distinctive historic characteristics of various religious traditions, whereas implicit in the history of religion (in the singular) is a perception of religion as a universal human phenomenon in which the similarities between different traditions and cultural and geographical manifestations ultimately are more significant that the differences. Both approaches though yield results that are very different from the religious history written by scholars such as Ahlstrom and Collinson, who were trained as historians, and are concerned much more with understanding the detailed historical context of religious activity in a specific time and place, than with making comparisons across traditions, cultures and societies. A further difference of emphasis between history of religion(s) and religious history lies in the tendency of the former to give considerable attention to the origins and early history of religious traditions, whereas the latter is focused primarily on their later development. Nevertheless, as in relation to the explicitly theological history advanced by Baumann and Klauber, the issue is confused by fluid use of the term ‘religious history’. For example the English translation of Hans Kippenberg’s survey of the development of the discipline of comparative religion, Entdeckung der Religiongeschichte, was given the title Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age when ‘Discovering the History of Religions …’ would have given a more accurate representation of its content (Kippenberg 2002).

A broad understanding of religious history thus overlaps significantly with other approaches to the study of religion, with theology on the one hand, and with the comparative study of religion on the other. In this chapter, however, a narrower working definition will be adopted, in concentrating particularly on that approach to the study of religion that is essentially a branch of the discipline of History, analogous for instance to anthropology of religion as a branch of Anthropology or sociology of religion as a branch of Sociology.

Religious history is founded on the historical methodology of rigorous analysis of the printed and archival records of the past in awareness of their cultural, political and social context. Institutional and official records (such as censuses) yield fascinating insights not only into organizational developments, but also into the grassroots realities of religious practice, especially when studied in conjunction with more personal documents such as letters, diaries, and oral history recordings. As in any branch of history the outcomes of such investigation have to be interpreted, and such interpretation will more or less subtly reflect the presuppositions of the particular scholar. However the underlying aspiration to reconstruct a specific milieu in the past as fully and objectively as possible distinguishes religious history

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from the overt confessional commitments of what might be termed theological history and the broader comparative ambitions of history of religion(s). It must be stressed, however, that methodological boundaries remain fluid, and that it is more useful to think in terms of a spectrum of different approaches to the study of religion in the past than of hard and fast distinctions.

Before turning to discuss the development of religious history in its modern form from the eighteenth century onwards, and more particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, it will be useful to provide a brief survey of much more longstanding traditions of theological history.

Antecedents

The uses of theological history

The term ‘theological history’ is used here in a general comparative sense to denote historical writing in any tradition that explicitly articulates or is clearly shaped by its underlying religious ideas. An early example of the genre was the ancient Chinese Spring and Autumn Annals, reputedly the work of Confucius (c551–479 bce) and infused by Confucian morality and beliefs about the interplay of earthly events and heavenly judgements on them (Ng and Wang 2005: x). Probably broadly contemporary with Confucius were the historical books of the Hebrew Bible which recounted the chequered spiritual record of the people of Israel in their dealings with the Almighty (Halpern 1996). Half a millennium later the historical books of the Christian New Testament gave accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, his death and resurrection, and the subsequent initial development of the Christian Church. While the extent to which such texts record actual objective historical events has been much debated (for contrasting perspectives see Brettler 1995; Wright 1992), their importance in shaping the consciousness of their respective religious traditions is undeniable (Sterling 1992: 17). The historical approach of such Jewish and Christian writings, locating events within a particular chronological timeframe, contrasts with the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramāyāna. Although many believe that the events recounted in them actually took place – as was apparent when in 1992 Hindu militants demolished the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya because it was believed to be on the site of a temple built by Lord Ram – their religious power arises from a perceived timelessness that transcends chronological specificity (Frykenberg 1996: 166, 173; Kurien 2007: 170).

As the passage of time gave Christianity a past of its own, it began to acquire its own historians, most notably Eusebius of Caesarea (c260–c340), who recounted the history of the church from its beginnings to his own times in the reign of Constantine, and Bede (c673–735), who described the early history of the church in England. The histories of Eusebius and Bede were both shaped by their strong theological vision of divine providence and redemption, but they also provided much factual information that would otherwise have been lost to posterity. Meanwhile in The City of God, written between 413 and 426, Augustine of Hippo provided a seminal work of theological history, profoundly influencing subsequent Christian thought about the overall shape of the past, but saying little about the detail of specific events (Bauman and Klauber 1995: 59–116Â.)

The emergence of Islam in the seventh century ce in due course gave rise to a particularly rich tradition of historical writing. Although the Qu’rān itself is a work of prophecy not history, Muhammad transmitted to his followers a strong sense of his own place in history, a perception reinforced by the dramatic expansion of Muslim power in the decades after

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his death (Rosenthal 1968: 26, 129). Early Islamic historical writing was fragmentary in character, but al-Tabari (d. 923 ce), who lived in what is now Iraq, achieved both an impressive synthesis of earlier sources, and a theological vision of ‘the idea of the integration of all prophetic missions in history, and also the idea of the unity of the umma’s experiences’ (Duri 1983: 159). Al-Biruni (973–1048 ce) compiled his Chronology of Ancient Nations, a strikingly evenhanded gathering of information regarding the ritual calendars and religious development of Christianity, Judaism and other non-Muslim traditions of his time, as well as of Islam itself (Sachau 1879). From the eleventh century ce onwards theological concerns came increasingly to shape Islamic historiography, but there was also an enduring capacity to provide valuable factual accounts of contemporary events, as for example in Ibn Shaddād’s vivid narrative of the siege of Acre in 1191 (Rosenthal 1968: 143; Robinson 2003: 147–8).

Religious conflict, both within and between traditions, also left a strong imprint on historical writing. Some of the earliest quasi-historical narratives from early Christianity are accounts of martyrdoms, which were accorded great religious significance because of the analogy they presented with the death of Jesus himself (Musurillo 1972). Similarly, ‘the divisive history of martyrdom’ dating back to the death of al-Husayn at Karbala in 680 has dominated Shi’ite historical consciousness and operated as a major factor perpetuating separation from the majority Sunni Muslim community (Cook 2001: 58–9). Christian and Muslim accounts of the events of the Crusades perpetuated rival interpretations of their religious purpose and meaning (Gabrieli 1969; Peters 1971). The division of Western Christianity in the sixteenth century gave a major stimulus to historical writing because the legitimacy of the Protestant Reformers depended on interpreting the past to claim that they were seeking to restore the purity of apostolic times that had been corrupted by the Catholic Church. Such a perspective was presented by writers such as Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75), Lucas Osiander (1534–1604), and John Foxe (1516–87), whose Acts and Monuments… of the Church linked a Protestant reading of Christian history to accounts of the sufferings of the martyrs under Queen Mary, and a patriotic assertion of special role of the English people in the purposes of God (Cameron 2005: 122–40; Bauman and Klauber 1995: 117–38). The Roman Catholic response was led by Caesar Baronius (1538–1607) who in his Ecclesiastical Annals sought to marshal historical evidence for the continuity and validity of Catholic beliefs and practices (Cameron 2005: 141–4).

Theological history provides otherwise irrecoverable evidence of the distant past and an awareness of the place of religion in a wider historical landscape. Such texts can also be invaluable for understanding the outlooks of writers and their contemporaries: for example Foxe’s very widely read work played a major role in shaping the religious and political culture of early modern England (Haller 1963). Contrasts and fluctuations in the historical activity of religious communities are also revealing. The widespread perception that Buddhists and Hindus lacked a sense of history is belied by texts such as the Mahāvamsa, which developed in Sri Lanka from the sixth century ce onwards (Frykenberg 1996: 152–3; Maraldo 2004: 332– 3), but, outside China, levels of activity and interest in South and East Asia were low relative to the strong Christian and Islamic traditions of historical writing. There was also relatively little historical writing in diaspora Judaism between the second and fifteenth centuries ce, except when a need was felt to record the bitter experience of persecution (Myers 1997).

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The impact of the Enlightenment

The origins of later approaches to the writing of religious history are to be found in the eighteenth century. Leading historians of that period represented a wide spectrum of personal religious beliefs, from the overt scepticism of David Hume (1711–76), through the measured cynicism of Edward Gibbon (1737–94) to the committed but moderate Protestantism of Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (c 1694–1755) and William Robertson (1721–93). They were all, however, inspired by a characteristic Enlightenment aspiration to rational detachment, which although imperfectly achieved, still represented a significant break from polemical theological history.

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) is an established classic of secular historiography, but it was also a seminal work of religious history that gives due weight to the role of Christianity, but eschews Christian triumphalism and gives extensive attention to other religious traditions. Thus a penetrating analysis of the development of Christianity and its relationship to the Roman government (Chapters 15 and 16) is balanced by a sympathetic account of the attempt of the Emperor Julian to restore paganism (Chapter 23), and a critical judgement on the eventual suppression of paganism under Theodosius (Chapter 28). Gibbon gave an Enlightenment cast to the usual Protestant polemic against Roman Catholicism, by representing the subsequent ‘degeneracy’ of the Catholic Church as an assimilation of residual polytheism and pagan ‘superstition’. A later chapter (50) provides a full assessment of the ministry of Muhammad and its immediate aftermath, with judgements that are mixed but overall by no means negative (Gibbon 1998).

Mosheim sought to write ‘unpartheiischen und gründlichen’ (impartial and thorough) church history. His work was translated into English in 1765 and was widely read in the English as well as German-speaking world. He attacked historians who imposed their own value judgements on the past, but though he eschewed the traditional prejudices of his Lutheran heritage he manifested the newer prejudices of the Enlightenment in readiness to characterize religious practices he disliked as ‘irrational’, ‘superstitious’ or ‘fanatical’ (Cameron 2005: 149–52). Robertson was similarly highly critical of earlier historians. In his History of Scotland (1759) he wrote with reference to the reign of Mary Queen of Scots:

But as the same passions which inflamed parties in that age have descended to their posterity; as almost every event … has become the object of doubt or of dispute; the eager spirit of controversy soon discovered, that without some evidence more authentic and more impartial than that of such historians, none of the points in question could be decided with certainty.

(Robertson 1996a: vi)

He went on to list the original sources that he had himself consulted. For him too, however, a Protestant polemic against the pre-Reformation Church as false religion was replaced by an Enlightenment characterization of it as bigoted, superstitious and illiberal (Robertson 1996a: vol. 1, 145–57). He also retained a strong sense of underlying divine providential purpose in the unfolding of human history and the progress of Christian civilization (Robertson 1996a: vol. 1, lix). In paradoxical contrast to his sceptical friend David Hume, Robertson emphasized the political rather than religious character of the Reformation, whereas Hume in his History of England (1754–9) portrayed it as a religious movement, whose very excesses were an implicit argument against religion itself (Fearnley-Sander 1990: 331).

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Robertson also endeavoured to develop an objective understanding of non-Christian religious traditions. Thus in his History of America (1777) he observed that most of the evidence currently available regarding native American religion came from priests and missionaries, who, he suggested, ‘engrossed by the doctrines of their own religion, and habituated to its institutions, are apt to discover something which resembles those objects of their veneration in the opinions and rites of every people’ (Robertson 1996b: vol. 2, 181). In his own analysis he emphasized the non-theistic nature of pre-Columbian religion. Similarly, in his last work on India (1791), he urged his readers to suspend their own incredulity towards Hinduism, and to recognize the integrity of its adherents (Robertson 1996c: 313, 434).

Enlightenment approaches initially co-existed with theological ones. For example The History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) by Joseph and Isaac Milner was shaped by the authors’ commitment to demonstrating the historical continuity of their own Evangelical Protestant convictions (Walsh 1959). Competing and selective readings of the past played an important role in fuelling the internal conflicts of the early nineteenth-century Church of England (Nockles 2007). On the other side of the Atlantic the copious historical writings of Philip Schaff (1819–93) were shaped by his conviction that the United States had a special providential role to give birth to the Christianity of the future (Conser and Twiss 1997: xi–xii).

Even where explicit theological agendas were muted, a belief in inexorable human ‘progress’ was central to historical writing in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century. It shaped the secular scholarship of Thomas Babington Macaulay as well as the work of a significant school of ‘Liberal Anglican’ historians, which included Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868) and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81). Nevertheless Milman’s principle of ‘accommodation’, the idea that belief systems are not fixed for all time, but are shaped by and to their particular historical context, represented a significant step towards a more modern approach to religious history (Forbes 1952: 76–8). Milman applied this approach in successive works, the History of the Jews (1829), History of Christianity (1840), and History of Latin Christianity (1854), with his ability to rise above traditional prejudices evident in his balanced treatment of the Middle Ages, and his insistence that Christians should overcome historic antipathies through a better understanding of the Jews. Stanley, who became Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford University in 1856, articulated an expansive understanding of his discipline, which, he argued, should be quite as much concerned with the abolition of the slave trade as with the niceties of liturgical vestments:

Never let us think that we can understand the history of the Church apart from the history of the world, any more than we can separate the interests of the clergy from the laity, which are the interests of the Church at large.

(Stanley 1861: xxxiii)

In his subsequent Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church he gave significant attention to Muhammad, affirming the positive qualities of Muslims which he said ‘no Christian can regard without reverence’ (Stanley 1861: 334).

In the medium term, however, intellectual trends worked against Stanley’s broad ambitions for the subject. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the consolidation of History and Theology as separate academic disciplines marginalized theological history, and left even objective work on religious history in an uncomfortable no man’s land. The difficulty

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was exacerbated by a growing culture of academic specialization which made the confident generalizations of an earlier age appear suspect (Cameron 2005: 156), and by the tendency of increasingly embattled churches to look inwards rather than outwards for reassurance of their own significance. Technical scholarly standards, in respect particularly of detailed evenhanded sifting of evidence, improved, but breadth of vision contracted. Thus Norman Sykes, one of the leading British church historians of the first half of the twentieth century, was notable for penetrating analysis of the inner dynamics of eighteenth-century Anglicanism, but displayed an innocence of religious worlds beyond the Church of England, let alone beyond Christianity (Kent 1987: 7, 99–103). Similarly Peter Guilday, the ‘most significant historian of American Catholicism’ in the same period, devoted his career to the writing of biographies of bishops, for which he was at pains to get approval from their living successors (Dolan 1993: 152–3). Conversely, standard general histories, at least of periods subsequent to the Reformation, usually had little to say about religion.

The rise of the new religious history

It is a significant irony that the very year, 1963, in which, according to Callum Brown, ‘organised Christianity [began] a downward spiral to the margins of social significance’ (Brown 2001: 1), also saw the publication of a book that has had a seminal influence in stimulating a return to much more widespread intellectual interest in religious history. Edward Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class shocked the devout by its negative and in some respects gratuitously offensive interpretation of the impact of Methodism during the Industrial Revolution. However, in a not dissimilar way to the work of Gibbon and Hume two centuries earlier, it made a compelling case that religion had to be taken seriously as an historical phenomenon even by those who rejected its ontological claims. Moreover Thompson’s own Left-wing credentials ensured that other British socialist historians were encouraged to move away from the simplistic analysis of religion suggested by Marxist theory into a much more subtle appreciation of its role in social and political history. A similar process in relation to an earlier period was stimulated by Christopher Hill, another leading historian strongly associated with the Left, who elucidated the role of religion in the turbulent political and social history of the seventeenth century (for example Hill 1964; Hill 1970). The readiness of socialist historians to take religion seriously was further advanced by the changing nature of Roman Catholicism in the wake of Vatican II which shook previous stereotyped perceptions of its past (Obelkevich et al. 1987: 5–7).

Meanwhile the cultural and spiritual ferment of the 1960s contributed to a growing historical interest in forms of religious activity outside the structures and conventions of organized Christianity, evident in 1971 in the publication, to great critical acclaim, of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. In this book, Thomas, drawing on insights from social anthropology, sought to elucidate the diverse belief systems of early modern England, including astrology, magic, witchcraft, prophecy, ghosts and fairies, and their ambivalent relationships to organized Christianity. His approach has been emulated in significant comparable studies of other societies and periods (notably Butler 1990, Connolly 1982, Devlin 1987, Hutton 1996, Obelkevich 1976).

In the United States too the 1960s and 1970s saw the beginnings of new directions in religious history, symbolized above all by the publication of Ahlstrom’s massive and still unsuperseded survey in 1972. The intellectual dynamics of the process were somewhat different from those in Britain, with a lack of influential figures in ‘secular’ history such as

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Hill and Thompson, who became centrally interested in religion. Rather, the rise of the ‘new social history’ in America initially seemed to be an irrelevance to established practitioners of religious history who framed their subject in terms of intellectual history and theology rather than social history (Stout and Taylor 1997: 17). Nevertheless the subject was developing fresh dynamism. A central representative figure has been Martin Marty (b. 1928), professor of modern Christian history at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1998. Like A. P. Stanley a century before, Marty has perceived an expansive role for his discipline, characterizing himself not as a church historian but as a historian of American religion (Bauman and Klauber 1995: 581). In his prolific writings on American religious history, culminating in a three-volume study of the twentieth century (Marty 1986–1995), his central preoccupation has been with the diversity and pluralism of the nation’s religious life:

… in the face of the most jumbled and competitive mélange of religiosities the world has ever known, my project almost naturally came to focus around the philosophical theme of the one and the many.

(quoted Dolan and Wind 1993: p. ix)

Although Marty’s personal influence has been substantial it should not be exaggerated (Stout and Taylor 1997: 23), but by the 1980s a similar agenda came to dominate American religious history. The copious publications of the decade showed both a convergence between social and religious history and a fascination with ‘outsiders’ rather than mainstream Christian denominations (Marty 1993).

Alongside Britain and the United States, the country with the most active intellectual community of religious historians is France, something of a paradox in view of the country’s rapid dechristianization, and its traditions of secular education (Hilaire: 2004: 3). Whereas in America interest in religious history might be explained as a byproduct of contemporary religious resurgence, in France as to a lesser extent in Britain, scholarly fascination with religion in the past has increased even as the influence of Christianity has declined in the present. Its appeal seems to lie in the ability of researchers to move well beyond the preoccupations of unfashionable institutions and clerical elites, to consider the religious life of ordinary people. In the introduction to their three-volume Histoire Religieuse de la France Contemporaine (1985–8), covering the period since 1880, Gerard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire defined their subject as

Religious history and not the history of the adherents of a single church. We aim to take account of many dimensions of religious activity: beliefs, practices, understandings and impulses, whether orthodox or not, whether faith known or faith lived, whether unbelief or a way of believing differently.

(Cholvy and Hilaire 1985–8: I, 6, translated)

Cholvy and Hilaire’s statement of their ambitions provides a good summary of the scope of the new religious history. It is impossible in this short survey to reference, let alone discuss, even a cross-section of the rich flowering of publications that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, but the survey articles listed in the bibliography will provide a starting-point for readers who want to explore the literature further. It will be useful, however, to list some of its salient characteristics. First, religion is treated primarily in a social and cultural context rather than a theological and intellectual one. Micro-studies of particular localities are a common

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approach, but they move away from the traditional genre of narrative church histories to explore communities in the round. It follows, second, that methodology owes more to the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology, than it does to theology. Third, there is an aspiration to reconstruct the religious worlds and experiences of ‘ordinary’ people, rather than present official ecclesiastical perspectives. Thus, fourth, although the broad frame of reference has been Christian, the nature of ‘Christianity’ is often redefined and reinterpreted and considerable space given to forms of belief that are anything but ‘orthodox’. Finally, there is an endeavour to illuminate the religious histories of hitherto-neglected groups, notably women, black people, ‘pagans’ and native Americans. A representative sample of influential practitioners, in addition to those already mentioned, might include Catherine Albanese (Native American religion); Jay Dolan (American Catholicism); Eamon Duffy (sixteenthcentury English Catholicism); Catherine Hall (gender, class and religion); Nathan Hatch (popular Christianity in the early American republic); David Hempton (Methodism in Britain, Ireland and America); Ronald Hutton (British paganism and popular ritual); Hugh McLeod (religion and society in modern Britain and continental Europe), Alfred Raboteau (African American religion) and Michel Vovelle (dechristianization in France).

The advance of the new religious history was rather slower in other English-speaking countries and in continental Europe outside France. South Africa’s intellectual isolation during the apartheid era was conducive to the persistence of a traditional Protestant whitedominated church history, although since 1993 there has been cross-fertilization with earlier pioneering endeavors to give due weight to the religious history of black people. This has enabled a more balanced and richer synthesis (Elphick and Davenport 1997). In Australia, although the 1980s and 1990s saw numerous publications of a conventional denominational history kind, only a handful of scholars began to produce the kind of religious history now widespread in the northern hemisphere (Carey et al. 2001). Nevertheless, by the turn of the millennium, the Australian-based Journal of Religious History was showing itself receptive to more innovative approaches.

Similarly it was not until the 1990s that religious history began to gain ground in Germany and, significantly, a key pioneering book was the work of an Englishman, David Blackbourn (Blackbourn 1993; Williamson 2006: 139). Since then, however, substantial advances have been made, notably in the work of Lucien Hölscher, Thomas Nipperdey, and Hartmut Lehmann. A particular preoccupation of German religious history has been with exploring the political implications of the country’s distinctive religious composition, with a Protestant majority, a large Catholic minority (35 percent of the total population in 1900), and (until the Holocaust) a small but particularly high profile Jewish minority. To what extent did religion, religious division (or conversely the rejection of religion) contribute to the tensions that gave birth to Nazism and the Holocaust? (Williamson 2006).

In the Netherlands the Research Centre Religion and Society at the University of Amsterdam has played a valuable role in stimulating interactions between historians and social scientists (for example see Van der Veer 1996), but here as in Scandinavia the dominant approach has continued to be the study of church history in theological faculties. The situation in these historically predominantly Protestant countries is mirrored in Spain, where mainstream historians have remained reluctant to engage with religion, while ecclesiastical historians have been preoccupied with the internal dynamics of the Catholic Church (Pellistrandi 2004: ix–xi). The fall of the Soviet Union opened the door to new approaches to the study of Russian religious history, but the quality of work has hitherto been mixed (Husband 2007).

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Recent decades have, however, seen significant transitions in the way historians write about Christianity in the non-Western world. A longstanding tradition of history written from the perspective of Western missionaries reached its culmination in 1964 with a survey by Bishop Stephen Neill (Neill 1964). In the 1960s and 1970s more secularly minded scholars developed a much more critical counter-narrative of the missionary as cultural imperialist villain rather than Christian evangelistic hero. Both approaches, however, were unsubtle in their understanding of relationships between missions and empire which were assumed, whether for better or worse, to be closely bound up with each other. They also lacked appreciation of the dynamics of non-Western societies and cultures, apt to be perceived as passive beneficiaries or victims of missionary attention, rather than as active agents in their own religious and cultural development (Peterson and Allman 1999: 1–2). More recent books, notably by Brian Stanley (1990) and Andrew Porter (2004), have portrayed missionaries as in a much more ambivalent relationship to empire, sometimes working in concert with imperialistic forces, but maintaining their own religious agendas, and sometimes through their sympathy with indigenous peoples working against the advance of empire, or even sowing some of the seeds of its subsequent disintegration. In the meantime, engagement with the social sciences has contributed to a much more nuanced understanding of African, Asian and Latin American Christianities in their indigenous contexts rather than merely as a narrative of European and North American evangelization. In relation to Africa a seminal work was a study of nineteenth-century missionaries among the Tswana people by the anthropologists, John and Jean Comaroff (1991), while for Latin America, a book by the sociologist, David Martin (1990), has had a similarly extensive influence.

Such approaches are reflected in surveys of African Christianity by Elizabeth Isichei (1995), of India by Robert Frykenberg (2008), and in a collection of essays arising from the Currents in World Christianity project (Lewis 2004). There has also been an explicit endeavour by African historians ‘to tell the story of African Christianity, not Christianity in Africa, as an African story, by intentionally privileging the patterns of African agency’ (Kalu 2005).

Towards a history of religious diversity

Despite the richness and vitality of the new religious history its obvious limitation, from a Religious Studies perspective, was the retention of primarily Christian frames of reference even when Christian confessional commitments and institutional preoccupations receded. Such a criticism must be moderated by the acknowledgement that historical scholarship relating to North America and Western Europe naturally reflected the religious makeup of those societies in the period studied. Except in the far distant and the very recent past, their organized religious composition was a predominantly Christian one, with Jews and Native Americans representing the only significant longstanding visible minorities. If a historical narrative of Christian predominance in periods before the later twentieth century is to be questioned, the most plausible basis for doing so lies not in according exaggerated importance to small minorities from other religions, but in questioning the extent to which Christianization was ever complete in the face of the arguable long-term persistence of indigenous pre-Christian and pagan belief systems (Stark 2001). On the other hand representatives of other religious traditions in the West were sometimes noteworthy links to very different worlds, or significant forerunners of later developments, so their almost complete historical invisibility needed to be redressed.