Africa, and West Asia seem to have remained somewhat removed from this
development, but there were notable exceptions, such as Israel. Scholarship in
Eastern Europe went in a different direction.
In a climate such as ours, in which the approach to intellectual history is
so heavily endebted to Michel Foucault, it is inevitable that we look to politics
to explain these changes. Political factors do seem to carry explanatory power,
in part because of the large role governments play in funding and administering
universities and research institutes worldwide. For example, under the aegis
of Communism scholars were often expected to attack religion, at least in those
parts of their writings that state authorities might actually read. As He Guanghu
notes, under Mao a critical approach to religions meant ‘absolute negation,
severe attack, complete suppression, and an utter clearing away’. Institutional
organization followed suit. For example, the government of the German
Democratic Republic (East Germany) attempted to transform the Institute for
the Study of Religion at Leipzig into an Institute for the Study and Promotion
of Atheism (Rudolph 1992: 337–339).
In the ‘free world’ scholars took a much different attitude. After all, at the
height of the Cold War the United States both proclaimed itself to be a nation
‘under God’ (1954) and funded research in the study of religions (McCutcheon
2004). Michael Stausberg has highlighted the degree to which conservative
political loyalties characterized many, although not all, post-World War II
Western European scholars of religions. He Guanghu points out that scholar-
ship favorable to religion—indeed, that tried to appropriate the benefits of
religion—emerged in China with the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976
and then grew tremendously. Scholars in South Korea seem to have steered a
course that in many respects closely mirrored developments within the United
States. Within a European community living side-by-side with an appreciable
number of Muslim ‘migrants’ and ‘guest-workers’, Islam became an object of
increased attention, as it did in the United States after September 11, 2001.
When Romania hosted the European Association for the Study of Religion in
Bucharest in September 2006, a political edge was unmistakable. Writing in
the official conference booklet, the Minister of Foreign Affairs welcomed
participants with the thought that, after so many years of Communist
repression, it was now ‘payback time’ (Ungureanu 2006).
It is certainly tempting to attribute the widespread blossoming of the study
of religion that took place during the 1950s and 1960s to a rejection of anti-
religious Communism by pro-religious—or at least anti-anti-religious—
Capitalists. But that is probably not a full explanation. The blossoming also
occurred in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia,
where the most important political events were not connected with the Cold
War but with de-colonization. When the European colonial tapestry began to
unravel with Indian and Pakistani independence on August 15, 1947, that event
ushered in a time of great expectations for the newly established nations. In
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TOWARD A GLOBAL VISION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
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