The mere existence of institutions such as universities
is not, however, sufficient for the emergence of the academic
study of religion. In Europe, for example, an interval of over
half a millennium intervened between the development of
the medieval universities and the emergence of the academic
study of religion. (By contrast, in sub-Saharan Africa that
study has been a component of such institutions almost from
the very beginning.) At least two other conditions are neces-
sary.
The first of these conditions requires thinkers to class
practices, claims, and forms of association together in ways
similar to the ways in which they are classed together by the
term “religion” in English and other European languages
today, and then to view the resulting set as a proper object
for study by a distinct group of scholars. Martin Riesebrodt
has argued that this classification is not as culturally limited
as it may at first seem. He has pointed out that people have
grouped together phenomena that German (and English)
speakers think of as religious even without having a generic
notion of religion. For example, A ́soka’s edicts treat
bra ̄hman:as (early Hindus) and ́sra ̄van:as (early Buddhists,
Jains, and other renouncers) as if they belonged to the same
class. Polemicists at Chinese courts during the first millenni-
um CE also thought of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian
teachings as of similar kind. Nevertheless, the manner in
which such classes are conceptualized—whether as dharm[a]
in Sanskrit-based languages, din in Arabic, shukyo ̄ in Japa-
nese, or something else—may present difficulties for the
emergence of the academic study of religion. For example,
the traditional institutionalized study of dharma, whose sense
in Sanskrit we might convey by terms such as statute, ordi-
nance, law, duty, justice, virtue, and morality as well as reli-
gion, bears little resemblance to anything that we would
know as either the academic study of religion or theology,
as even a passing acquaintance with the Dharma ́sa ̄stras makes
clear. Abrahim Khan suggests that this term’s meaning has
in fact hampered the emergence of the academic study of re-
ligion as a single, independent academic pursuit in India.
Japanese scholars in the Meiji era and later wrestled with the
meaning of the term “religion” in a somewhat different way.
In order to endorse the politically desirable view that Japan
was a secular state, they had to separate into religious and
nonreligious spheres beliefs and practices that had customari-
ly been classed together as Shinto ̄. In the second half of the
twentieth century, Africans, reacting to imported European
concepts, questioned the extent to which the term “religion”
really worked in African contexts. Although in North Ameri-
ca and Europe the academic study of religion is fairly widely
established today, some scholars in that region, too, have
questioned the extent to which the category “religion” is ap-
plicable across cultures. In doing so, they have seemed to call
the legitimacy of that study as a distinct field into question.
The combination of the institutionalization of knowl-
edge and the identification of religion as a fit object of study
does not inevitably lead to the emergence of the academic
study of religion. It might just as well lead to apologetics, as
happened in Middle Eastern and European universities dur-
ing the medieval period, or to a global theology or religious
philosophy, such as the philosophia perennis that attracts
thinkers around the world today. At least one further condi-
tion is necessary for the emergence of the academic study of
religion. That is the relinquishing of interest in establishing
traditional religious claims and turning instead to under-
standing and explaining religious phenomena, regardless of
provenance, through nonconfessional models. Herodotos
displays something of this attitude, in the absence of the
other two conditions, when he remarks that all people know
equally (little?) about the gods, so he is simply going to talk
about human affairs and customs.
Academic communities may adopt these pluralistic, hu-
manistic projects via different tracks. In contexts within
which one religion, such as Christianity or Islam, is consid-
ered to be uniquely true, an important step between apolo-
getics and the academic study of religion may be the convic-
tion that all religions share a basic core, rooted somehow in
the essence of humanity. This step is transitional, because it
leaves in place a tension between the concerns of a global reli-
gious philosophy or theology on the one hand, and under-
standing and explaining religions through nonconfessional
models on the other. Europe and its cultural descendants
largely followed this track. European thinkers such as Her-
bert of Cherbury (1583–1648) responded to the wars of
religion by formulating the notion of a “natural religion”
common to all people. The Romantics responded to Enlight-
enment rationality by celebrating universally human “inti-
mations of immortality” and of other religious profundities.
Both laid the foundations for the emergence of a comparative
study of religion whose character as a global theology was ex-
pressed well in the dying words of an early Swedish scholar
who also happened to be a Lutheran archbishop, Nathan Sö-
derblom (1866–1931): “I know God exists; I can prove it
from the history of religions.” Tensions between the compar-
ative study of religion as a global theology and an academic
study of religion that is more self-consciously humanistic re-
main especially strong in North America, in part as a result
of the profound influence once exercised by Mircea Eliade
(1907–1986).In contexts in which traditional claims to religious ex-
clusivity are lacking and all religions are somehow seen as
manifestations of religious truth, a different track for the
emergence of the academic study of religion is probably nec-
essary. That is because in these contexts it would simply be
a task of the local equivalent of theology or religious philoso-
phy to elucidate the common core of truth that all religions
share. Precisely what forces have stimulated a shift to the use
of nonreligious models in these areas remains a question for
future research. One certainly cannot overlook the impor-
tance of external stimuli, especially in regions that were heav-
ily colonized (sub-Saharan Africa) or that saw themselves en-
gaged in military and cultural competition with Europeans8762 STUDY OF RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW