and by the flourishing of the study of religion in the People’s Republic of China
today.
Other, complementary global factors may also be responsible for the rise
of religious studies worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. One is what we might
call the ‘World War II effect’. Such an effect is discernible in the constellation
of knowledge in both the natural and social sciences. To quote Frank and
Gabler (2006: 67) again: ‘The war stigmatized ethnic nationalisms and other
exclusive corporate groupings and on the flipside gave rise to expressions of
encompassing humanity (e.g. in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
adopted in 1948).’ One supposes that one kind of ‘exclusive corporate
grouping’ that the war may have helped stigmatize, especially given the long
history of Christian involvement with European if not Nazi anti-Semitism, was
the kind of privileged epistemic community that religious claims presuppose.
We should also not overlook other, basic global factors in the post-World War
II environment that may have helped undercut claims specific to isolated
religious corporate groupings, at least among people with sufficient resources:
the emergence of commercial television and commercial jet air travel.
(Presumably, these effects would only be amplified by more recent developments
such as videoconferencing, the Internet, and email. One should note, however,
that the use of these technologies is hardly incompatible with strongly held,
exclusive religious convictions.)
Besides the global and political factors already mentioned, a finely grained
history of the study of religions in any locality will need, no doubt, to take
into account local factors as well (cf. Borgeaud 1999, cited by Stausberg). It
seems likely that the changing demographic patterns which resulted when the
empire not only ‘wrote back’ (Rushdie 1982; cf. Ashcroft, Giffiths, and Tiffin
1989) but also settled in the land of the former colonizers significantly shaped
the development of religious studies in the UK. In the US, a series of decisions
by the Supreme Court, starting with McCollum v. Board of Education, 333
US 203 (1948), applied First Amendment protections against religious
establishment to state and local governments, including school districts,
resulting in a body of law that proscribed the teaching ofreligion in public
institutions but allowed and even encouraged teaching aboutit (School District
of Abington v. Schempp374 US 225 [1963]). In sub-Saharan Africa, according
to Ezra Chitando, the different colonial policies of the British, the French, the
Portuguese, and the Belgians are responsible for the significantly different
trajectories of the study of religion in different regions. In China after the
Cultural Revolution scholars came to terms with Marx’s views through an
‘Opium War’, a term with unique cultural resonances in China. In Latin
America, very real limitations posed by the demands of politicians, together
with a complicated story of relations between church and state, have obliged
scholars to work within parameters that have been in some respects unique to
the region.308
GREGORY D. ALLES