The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

66â Religious history

Historical scholarship on Judaism and on religion outside the West pointed something of a way forward, because the bifurcation between ‘church’ and ‘secular’ history that occurred in the Christian historiographical world in the earlier twentieth century was alien to most other religious traditions and cultures. While the absence of distinctions between the history of Jews as an ethnic group and the history of Judaism as a religious tradition brings its own conceptual difficulties, it means that works such as Salo Wittmeyer Baron’s monumental Social and Religious History of the Jews (Baron 1952–83) were in some respects forerunners of the wider trend to integrate the history of religion with ‘secular’ developments (Myers 1997). W. Montgomery Watt in his studies of Muhammad published in the early 1950s also found it essential to integrate the investigation of religion and ideology with ‘the economic, social and political background’ (Watt 1953: xi).

From the 1970s the trends apparent in the religious history of Christian societies were being paralleled elsewhere. In analysing nineteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhism, Kitsiri Malalgoda combined sociological training with historical methodology (Malalgoda 1976). In his study of early Islam, Fred Donner took religious inspiration very seriously while also providing a richly detailed analysis of the political and military factors that contributed to the rapid expansion of Muslim power in the decades after Muhammad’s death. Islam, Donner concluded, ‘provided the ideological underpinnings for this remarkable breakthrough in social organization’ (Donner 1981:9).

Barbara Metcalf’s study of Islamic revival in India under British rule in the later nineteenth century offered a penetrating analysis of the interplay of religious and political factors in a very different historical context, of considerable importance for understanding the dynamics of subsequent Muslim resurgence in the West in the South Asian diaspora of the twentieth century (Metcalf 1982). Hitherto there have only been isolated attempts to write systematic religious histories of Asian societies, but James Huntley Grayson’s study of Korea, first published in 1989, was a distinguished achievement. It covers a wide chronological span and weaves together analysis of the major world religions – Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam and Christianity – that have had a presence in the peninsular with an assessment of the enduring influence of Korean traditional religion (Grayson 2002). James Thrower undertook a similar assignment for Central Asia, in a book that focused particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth century religious transitions associated with Russian imperialism, Soviet oppression, and the eventual reconstruction of Islam in the region following the fall of the Soviet Union (Thrower 2004).

Hindu religious history has developed in particularly close association with the wider history of India. This linkage has at times been problematic insofar as it has led to subordination to ideological agendas deriving from colonialism and postcolonialism on the one hand and Indian nationalism on the other (White 2006: 122–30). On the other hand some of the publications of the influential Subaltern Studies school, which highlights the study of previously neglected groups such as women and the poor, have pointed the way towards a more evenhanded integration of religious and social history. Romila Thapar’s authoritative survey of early Indian history gives extensive attention to religion (Thapar 2003). Thapar has also developed a penetrating critique of ideologically committed readings of the Indian religious past (Thapar 2005), an approach paralleled for the modern era in the work of Sumit Sarkar (Sarkar 2002). Sikh religious history has also engendered significant tensions between ideologues and serious scholars (McLeod 2007: 7–8) but important contributions have nevertheless been made (for example McLeod 2007; Oberoi 1994).

Religious historyâ 67â

In Western religious history, however, even in the 1980s religious traditions other than Christianity and Judaism tended to be very much an afterthought. Thus in their three volume work of well over a thousand pages on modern French religion, Cholvy and Hilaire assigned them merely a part of one chapter of twenty-nine pages on ‘Migration’ after ten pages on Christian migration, and six on Jews (Cholvy and Hilaire 1985–8: III, 401–29). Only in the final chapter of a two-volume collection of essays, Religion in Victorian Britain, produced by the Open University, was ‘The impact of other religions’ discussed (although earlier chapters gave substantial coverage to Judaism and secularism) (Parsons 1988). A festschrift for Martin Marty, published in 1993 and entitled New Dimensions in American Religious History did not find much room for ‘new dimensions’ that were not primarily Christian ones (Dolan and Wind 1993).

Nevertheless other currents of enquiry were already flowing, and were given increased impetus in the 1990s by events such as the Rushdie affair of 1989 that raised the profile of minority religious communities in the West. Moreover as these communities matured there was a growing recognition that they had a religious history of their own stretching back several generations and sometimes considerably further. Thus a pioneering study published in 1984 and reissued in 1997 provided evidence of enduring commitment to Islam among some African slaves forcibly brought to North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Austin 1997). In a number of books and edited volumes in the late 1980s and 1990s Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad mapped out the history of Muslims in America (for example Haddad 1991). Thomas Tweed’s account of American encounters with Buddhism, first published in 1992, took the story back well into the nineteenth century, even though he concluded that conditions were then not conducive to Buddhism taking root in the United States (Tweed 2000). For Richard Seager, the watershed came with the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, which signalled ‘the end of the era of Protestant triumphalism in America and the beginnings of a new twentieth century world of religious pluralism’ (Seager 1995: x). When in 1993 and 1994 the Open University produced a companion collection of essays on religion in Britain since 1945, traditions other than Christianity received extensive coverage (Parsons 1993–4). A supplementary volume on Victorian religion, published in 1997, contained a substantial chapter by Gwilym Beckerlegge tracing the nineteenth-century roots of their presence in Britain (Beckerlegge 1997). Also in 1997, in a review essay, it was possible for Tweed to characterize the history of Asian religions in the United States as now an ‘emerging subfield’ (in Conser and Twiss 1997: 189–207). A further notable advance came in 2001 with Peter Van der Veer’s study of religious and cultural interactions between Britain and India, which demonstrated the potential for scholarship to move away from the paradigms of Christian mission history to explore religious encounters in a more evenhanded fashion (Van der Veer 2001).

Literature in the field expanded rapidly in the 1990s and early 2000s, especially in relation to Buddhism and Islam. Islam has been shown to have had a long history in the Americas, not only among African Americans (Gomez 2005), but also attracting white converts, such as Alexander Russell Webb, who ran a Muslim Mission in Manhattan in the 1890s (AbhAllah 2006). A British counterpart to Webb, William Henry Quilliam, led the Liverpool Muslim Institute during the same decade (Beckerlegge 1997: 243–65).

In 2004 Humayun Ansari published a detailed scholarly history of British Islam (Ansari 2004), and although other traditions and national contexts have yet to receive such systematic treatment, the necessary foundations for such achievements are being laid (for example by Kay 2004, Kurien 2007).

68â Religious history

The impact of such historical recognition of religious diversity remained patchy even in the early years of the twenty-first century. For example even a book as innovative in other respects as Callum Brown’s Death of Christian Britain (Brown 2001) remained anchored to the premise that secularity was the only viable alternative to Christianity in the later twentieth century, with other religions notably absent from the analysis. At one level the growing historical attention given to non-Christian traditions can thus be seen as an important rebalancing of the weight of scholarship, but it also potentially has more profound implications for how religious history is researched and studied (cf Tweed 1997, Leonard et al. 2005). Given the contemporary and near-contemporary nature of much of the material under review, it naturally fosters a yet closer interdisciplinary engagement between historians, scholars of religion and social scientists. There is also the prospect of a future religious history in which the internal history of any tradition receives less attention than connecting themes, such as the multi-layered and sometimes contested religious associations of particular localities, for example Ayodyha, Glastonbury, Jerusalem and Uluru. Religious identities, and the nature of religion itself, are likely to be perceived as malleable and changing rather than as fixed points of reference. Study of the various forms of encounter between religious traditions will probably loom large, with contemporary experience, both of conflict and of coexistence, stimulating re-examination of much earlier periods (Fletcher 2003; Wolffe 2004). The challenge for future scholars will be to keep such exciting newer lines of enquiry in creative tension with continuing endeavours to understand the internal history of particular religious traditions, while interpreting past patterns of belief and practice in a manner that respects their integrity and avoids anachronism.

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Suggested reading

This section highlights items surveying the methodology and development of religious history: for examples of the genre in practice see the references.

Brooke, C. et al. (1985), ‘What is Religious History?’, History Today, 35 (August 1985): 43–52. Cameron, E. (2005), Interpreting Christian History: The Challenge of the Churches’ Past, Oxford: Blackwell.

72â Religious history

Conser, W.H. and Twiss, S.B. (1997), Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Studies in Traditions and Cultures, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Cox, J., Howard, T.A., Kselman, T and Williamson, G.S. (2006), ‘Modern European Historiography Forum’ (survey articles on Britain, France and Germany), Church History, 75: 120–62.

Kent, J. (1987), The Unacceptable Face: The Modern Church in the Eyes of the Historian, London: SCM. Shaw, D.G. et al. (2006), Theme issue on history and religion, History and Theory, 45:4 (December 2006).

Part I

Key approaches to the study of religions

Chapter 5

Theories of religion

Robert A . Segal

Theories of religion go all the way back to the Presocratics. Modern theories come almost entirely from the modern disciplines of the social sciences: anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, and economics. Pre-social scientific theories came largely from philosophy and were speculative rather than empirical in nature. What John Beattie writes of modern anthropological theories of culture as a whole holds for theories of religion, and for theories from the other social sciences as well:

Thus it was the reports of eighteenthand nineteenth-century missionaries and travellers in Africa, North America, the Pacific and elsewhere that provided the raw material upon which the first anthropological works, written in the second half of the last century, were based. Before then, of course, there had been plenty of conjecturing about human institutions and their origins; to say nothing of earlier times, in the eighteenth century Hume, Adam Smith and Ferguson in Britain, and Montesquieu, Condorcet and others on the Continent, had written about primitive institutions. But although their speculations were often brilliant, these thinkers were not empirical scientists; their conclusions were not based on any kind of evidence which could be tested; rather, they were deductively argued from principles which were for the most part implicit in their own cultures. They were really philosophers and historians of Europe, not anthropologists.

(Beattie 1964: 5–6)

Origin and function

A theory of religion is an answer to at least two questions: what is the origin and what is the function of religion? The term ‘origin’ is confusing because it can refer to either the historical or the recurrent beginning of religion. It can refer either to when and where religion first arose or to why religion arises whenever and wherever it arises. According to convention, nineteenth-century theories focused on the origin of religion, whereas twentieth-century theories have focused on the function of religion. But ‘origin’ here means historical origin. Nineteenth-century theories in fact sought the recurrent origin of religion at least as much as any historical one, yet no more so than twentieth-century theories have done. Conversely, nineteenth-century theories were concerned as much with the function of religion as with the origin, and no less so than twentieth-century theories have been. Furthermore, the historical origin proposed by nineteenth-century theories was not that of a single time and