Religion in the Making

TLDR: The history of the study of religion becomes another history of professionalism and specialization, best scripted as a struggle for respectability within the modern research university as mentioned in this paper. But such a focus is overrated as a measure of how religion as a field of study was constituted in American culture.

Abstract: That modern fields of inquiry-whether art history or optics, acoustics or musicology-have complex intellectual genealogies is axiomatic. That the constitution of such disciplinary domains have equally intricate social and cultural histories is becoming ever more evident. The emergence of religion as a distinct object of study in American culture has heretofore been located primarily within the history of divinity schools and universities, and that emphasis is readily understandable. Whether it be the considerable influence of American intellectuals on the emergence of the psychology of religion (William James, Edwin D. Starbuck, James Leuba, and James Pratt) or on the development of the philosophy of religion (James again, Josiah Royce, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey), the making of religion as an abstracted object of scientific study was an international enterprise in which American academics participated with vigor. From this perspective, the history of the study of religion becomes another history of professionalism and specialization, best scripted as a struggle for respectability within the modern research university. As Eric J. Sharpe remarked in Comparative Religion: A History, "An academic subject, it might be argued, comes of age when it first attains the dignity of a University Chair, and the comparable privileges of scholarly journals, lectureships and congresses."' In Exhibiting Religion, John P. Burris suggests that such dignity is overrated-or, at least, overrated as a measure of how religion as a field of study was constituted in American culture. He attempts to shift the story from intellectual histories of the Enlightenment and the universities to histories of popular and material culture, from David Hume and William James to "a cultural history of a field of religion in its formative stages" (p. xviii). In concentrating on Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and its auxiliaries, especially the World's Parliament of Religions, Burris places the making of religion within the context of international exhibitions stretching back to London's Crystal Palace in 1851. That focus allows him to foreground the