and U.S. Americans (Japan). At the same time, it may not
do justice either to scholars who have urged the adoption of
humanistic models or to their situations simply to refer to
them as “westernized.” On the one hand, “Western” models
of education, such as Britain introduced into colonized Afri-
ca, were actually heavily theological. On the other, some
non-Westerners like early Japanese scholars of religions have
criticized Westerners for blurring the distinction between the
academic study of religion and theology.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION.
The preceding section contains unmistakable resonances
with the thought of Max Weber, especially his notions of
routinization, rational-bureaucratic authority, and the disen-
chantment of the modern world. Of the three conditions dis-
cussed above, however, perhaps only the second is actually
distinctively modern, and that only if we extend modernity
back into the immediate post-Reformation period, as histori-
ans of philosophy usually do. Nevertheless, the emergence
of the academic study of religion as a result of the confluence
of these three conditions is in fact a modern—or more re-
cent—development. Individual entries will summarize re-
gional histories in more detail. Here it may be helpful to ven-
ture a few signposts.
A tradition common in Europe and North America at-
tributes the birth of the “science of religion,” as it was called,
to the comparative philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–
1900), who referred to it for the first time in the 1867 pref-
ace to his Chips from a German Workshop. Nevertheless, sev-
eral factors complicate this birth story. First, Europeans be-
fore Müller had done philological, ethnographic, and
theoretical work that might just as well be considered a part
of the academic study of religion, e.g. the work of Eugène
Burnouf in the study of Buddhism. Second, inasmuch as
Müller’s own vision of the science of religion, informed by
German idealism, sought a scientific means to religious
truth, it is not clear that his science is precisely what we mean
by the study of religion. Third, traditions in the Middle East,
Japan, and perhaps elsewhere, too, that predate Müller’s talk
can claim equal regional significance in moving toward a sci-
ence of religions. In short, the birth of this field of study is
attributable not to a single event but to an extended and
complex series of events in several regions.
One major player in the European buildup to the study
of religion was philology. During the humanist movement
of the fifteenth century, Europeans learned Greek and He-
brew and critically edited ancient biblical manuscripts. In the
late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they followed a sim-
ilar pattern with regard to a broader range of materials. They
learned the “classical” languages of the Middle East and Asia
and set themselves to work on the “sacred books” written in
these languages, a move that some connect with a residual
Protestantism. They further deciphered ancient writing—
hieroglyphics, cuneiform—and opened new vistas in what
they saw, somewhat oddly, as their own antiquity, especially
prebiblical civilizations in the Middle East and the linkage
of European languages to Sanskrit and Old Iranian. Within
Europe incipient cultural nationalisms, inspired in part by
J. G. Herder (1744–1803), stimulated the collection, and at
times the wholesale invention, of local folklore. At the same
time, ethnographic reports of ideas and practices elsewhere—
custom reserves for Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) the
honor of being the first actual anthropological fieldworker—
poured into Europe. European thinkers filtered all this mate-
rial through mental sieves that sought to retrieve the essence
of religion and its earliest or primal forms, resulting in once
well-known theories such as fetishism, solar mythology, to-
temism, animism, pre-animism or dynamism, primitive mo-
notheism, and the magic-religion-science schema of James
George Frazer (1854–1941). These theories, in turn, provid-
ed a context for the reflection of thinkers such as Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917), Max Weber (1864–1920), and
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
Alongside philological, ethnographic, and folkloristic
studies, liberal Protestant theology played a major role in the
development of the academic study of religion in Europe and
North America. Inspired by Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768–1834), liberal theologians attempted to rescue Chris-
tianity from the critical results of natural science, history, and
ethnography by appealing to a supposedly universal religious
experience of which Christianity was the supreme manifesta-
tion. The result in the first half of the twentieth century was
a phenomenology of religion as developed by Nathan Söder-
blom, Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Friedrich Heiler (1892–
1967), Gustav Mensching (1901–1978), Gerardus van der
Leeuw (1890–1950), and their associates, and, with less
Christian emphasis, the similar endeavors of thinkers like
C. G. Jung (1875–1961) and Mircea Eliade. While philolo-
gists, ethnographers, and folklorists were often content to
work within academic units defined either by language and
culture (e.g., East Asian Languages and Civilizations) or by
a more general method (e.g., Cultural Anthropology), the
phenomenologists generally favored the placement of the ac-
ademic study of religion in a single, autonomous academic
unit or department.
Although the political convictions of individual scholars
varied, none of these moves happened in a political vacuum.
For example, Michel Despland has discussed the relationship
between the policies of the July Monarchy in France and a
hermeneutically oriented study of religious texts. David
Chidester has noted similarities between Britain’s manage-
ment of colonized peoples and its management of their reli-
gions. What Europeans and North Americans have noticed
less, perhaps, is how the encounter looked from the other
side.Colonial mastery provided Europeans with ready con-
trol over an extremely wide variety of materials not so easily
available to the colonized. It provided the motivation to
study those materials by making knowledge of the people to
whom they had belonged desirable. It also provided a safe
space from which scholars could examine the materials butSTUDY OF RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW 8763