Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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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.