interpretations, and reflections on institutional religions
(such as Christianity and Buddhism), on religious texts (such
as the Bhagavadg ̄ıta ̄ and the Bible), and on the role of reli-
gious practices and claims in society (such as religion and law
or psychology of religion).
This early phase of amateur and academic study of reli-
gion was wide-ranging, yet disciplinary identity and overall
theoretical coherence were still in development. Often un-
easy (even antagonistic) mixtures of theology, history, and
social sciences evolved in this early academic study of reli-
gion. Even though clear disciplinary identity was lacking, ac-
tive study proceeded in several areas. Unique among these
was the American school of psychology of religion. Stanley
Hall (1884–1924)—trained at Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory
of experimental psychology in Leipzig—brought European
psychology to the United States and set the stage for the de-
velopment of an original American psychology of religion by
James H. Leuba (1868–1946), Edwin Diller Starbuck
(1866–1947), William James (1842–1910), and others. Pos-
itivism and American “pragmatism” were this new psycholo-
gy’s orientation, questionnaires and surveys became one of
its primary methods, and the psychology of religious conver-
sion was one of its early foci. Leuba addressed conversion
from the psychological point of view and as a scientific ratio-
nalist in his 1896 dissertation in psychology (written at Clark
University under Stanley Hall). Starbuck and James, from
different perspectives, were more accepting of transcendental
realities and distinctly “religious” experience, but nonetheless
their approaches were thoroughly scholarly in Starbuck’s The
Psychology of Religion and James’s The Varieties of Religious
Experience.
Another fruitful area of research was in the emerging
discourses of American anthropology. North American
scholars and professional (and amateur) ethnologists had a
long encounter with indigenous Americans. Franz Boas,
Robert H. Lowie, Paul Radin, Alfred L. Kroeber, and Clyde
Kluckhohn (to name a few) all showed significant interest in
religious aspects of Native American cultures (worldviews,
ceremonies, and myths). Boas (1858–1942) at Columbia
University trained numerous anthropologists (Lowie, Radin,
and Kroeber among them) who tended to work from the
basic assumption that understanding native cultures required
careful study of their “religions” (rituals, myths, and cus-
toms). The influence of Native American studies and Ameri-
can anthropology had wider impact than just the Americas,
being of interest to both anthropologists and scholars of reli-
gion in Europe. Whereas such thinkers as the French Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl tended toward the philosophical and theoretical,
American anthropologists contributed a strong emphasis on
empirical fieldwork and (following Boas), a keen sense of his-
tory, and even a distrust of overtheorizing the data.
One of the peculiarities of American higher education
is that the major universities have not been—and arguably
still are not—state institutions as they have been in most
parts of the world. The development of divinity schools at
such institutions as Chicago, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
led the early- and mid-twentieth-century development of the
academic study of religion. Whereas social sciences (psychol-
ogy, anthropology, sociology) were contributing both data
and theories to the study of religion, it was often these divini-
ty schools that led the self-conscious pursuit for an American
“comparative religion” or “history of religions.” Harvard and
Chicago are two notable examples, training many of the his-
torians and comparativists who populated the many depart-
ments of religious and cultural studies of the 1960s, 1970s,
and following decades.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND RELATED DISCIPLINES. Following
the lead of these divinity schools, “religious studies” emerged
as an academic discipline during the 1960s and 1970s in pri-
vate and state universities. Religious studies include disci-
plinary approaches such as anthropology, sociology, history,
and philology. Other approaches are geographic or chrono-
logical, such as religion in America, East Asian cultures and
religions, and ancient Near Eastern studies. Others are drawn
from doctrinal or community boundaries, such as Buddhist,
Hindu, Islamic, or Christian studies.After World War II, following the earlier interests of
Clark, James, and Boas and even such thinkers as John
Dewey, several new voices and schools of thought spoke
from within the emerging field of religious studies. Promi-
nent among them were Erwin R. Goodenough (Yale), Wil-
fred Cantwell Smith (Harvard), Joachim Wach (responsible
for the program at Brown and for shaping the program at
the University of Chicago), Mircea Eliade (following Wach
at the University of Chicago), and the Scottish-born Ninian
Smart (University of California, Santa Barbara). From differ-
ent perspectives, their approaches tended to treat the topic
of religion as a self-generated category whose study was an
act of interpretation and understanding. Their interests (phi-
losophy, sociology, history, and phenomenology) and area
studies backgrounds (Christianity, Hinduism, and Bud-
dhism) varied. Eliade was particularly prominent among
these mid-century voices. He tended to look at religious
products (myths and rituals) as manifestations of sacred (or
mystical) reality that originated outside of human experi-
ence. Thus he collected vast amounts of diverse cultural ma-
terial into general categories, such as “myth,” as exemplified
in his Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958). Even though
this kind of study brought together broadly divergent materi-
als into overarching categories, there was also a strong sense
of contextual history in the Chicago school of the history of
religions. The Chicago journal History of Religions, begun in
1961 at the height of Eliade’s prominence, has tended to
publish detailed and context-rich historically grounded
studies.
The approaches of these mid-century thinkers varied
widely but might be described as treating religious institu-
tions and behaviors as phenomena similar to literature, a
music composition, or a performance. Following the analogy
of the arts, a particular religious ritual must be interpretedSTUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA 8785