Academic disciplines, including departments of history, emerged slowly and unevenly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Professional societies, including the American Historical Association (AHA) at its founding in 1884, were generally tiny organizations, a few would-be specialists collecting together to stake a claim on a distinct scholarly identity. Fields of study were necessarily fluid—interdisciplinary because they remained, to a large degree, predisciplinary. As fields went, the study of religion appeared especially amorphous; it was spread out across philology, history, classics, folklore, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, and oriental studies. Adding to the complexity more than simplifying it was the persisting claim that the study of religion belonged specifically (if not exclusively) to theology and hence to seminaries and divinity schools. Elizabeth A. Clark's Founding the Fathers illuminates the importance of Protestant theological institutions in shaping the study of religion in nineteenth-century America, suggesting, in particular, how well-trained church historians pointed the way toward disciplinary consolidation and specialization. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay's Science of Religion, by contrast, explores the leading British intellectuals responsible for extending the study of religion across a broad swath of the new human sciences. Together these two books offer an excellent opportunity to reflect on what religion looked like as a learned object of inquiry before religious studies fully crystallized as an academic discipline in the middle third of the twentieth century. Clark opens the introduction to her book with an epigraph from Hayden White: “The question is, What is involved in the transformation of a field of studies into a discipline?” (1). What indeed?

If God and the Devil both reside in the details, so too does meticulous historical scholarship. Clark's Founding the Fathers is no exception. Some 561 pages, 2,280 footnotes devoted to six church history professors at four American seminaries—that, it seems safe to say, constitutes scrupulously detailed analysis and documentation of her subject. Her figures include Samuel Miller at Princeton Theological Seminary; Henry Boynton Smith, Roswell Dwight Hitchcock, and Philip Schaff at Union Theological Seminary; George Park Fisher at Yale Divinity School (known then as the Yale Theological Department); and Ephraim Emerton at Harvard Divinity School. Immersed in the archival sources, including students’ notes from the professors’ classes, Clark paints a pointillist picture of how these men approached the history of Christianity, particularly the tradition's first four centuries. These American church historians probed the polity of early Christianity for lessons in support of Protestant church government and republicanism against the hierarchies and tyrannies of Roman Catholicism. They looked askance at the rise of asceticism and celibacy, playing it off the bounties and blessings of Protestant domesticity. They worried over Augustine, both a Protestant darling for his anti-Pelagian posture and an ominous Catholic ecclesiast in his failure to recognize the religious liberty of the Donatists. Throughout the book Clark thoroughly contextualizes not only how these historians did their work, but also why they pursued the questions they did. In all kinds of ways, the book is a fitting and impressive monument to Clark's own lifetime commitment to the scholarly enterprise of studying the early history of Christianity.

Clark's details often possess the shine of luminous particularity—the sparkle of special finds in the archives. (The delight in such fine-grained discoveries is clearly redoubled in this instance; as a historian of late antiquity, Clark is not used to such bounteous remains.) One shard after another makes vivid, for example, the very frailty of the infrastructure for advanced learning in mid-nineteenth-century America. Library holdings were thin at best; one group of clergymen lamented in 1844 that all the seminary libraries in the country combined held about 130,000 volumes. That was a small fraction of what had been consolidated in singular European hubs. A large American collection—say, Andover's or Princeton’s—ran in the range of six to ten thousand volumes, while Munich's alone was nearing 800,000. That American paucity made these professors as much book hunters as library-based scholars. Off they would go to booksellers in London, Berlin, or Tübingen to try to augment their institution's meager holdings. Philip Schaff proved when abroad such a book-buying zealot for Union's library that the seminary's president had to plead with him not to run the school into too much debt. If and when they did succeed in landing important collections—buying up the private libraries of prominent German scholars was a preferred tactic—these church historians often returned home to institutions that saw their libraries as closed-up depots, not gleaming laboratories for research. Yale's theological library was open one hour a week in 1829; Princeton seminary managed to open its library two times a week in the 1850s. It was a big deal in 1870, Clark notes, when Yale established a reading room that was open for three hours in the afternoons.

The puniness of the library collections matched well with the relative shapelessness of the historical profession in mid-nineteenth-century America. These church historians had to work hard to distinguish their enterprise as a field unto itself. The difficulty of their task mirrored the larger struggle of historians to gain distinct professional standing in American colleges and universities. At the time the AHA made its underwhelming debut, Harvard's Charles Eliot lamented that most American colleges and universities had “no teacher of history whatever”; the field could be subsumed into classics, given over to hobbyists, or simply left out entirely (139). Clark's church historians were intent on improving that sorry state of affairs. They successfully pushed, for example, to consolidate several professorial chairs in their field: Princeton in 1813, Union in 1850, Yale in 1861, and Harvard in 1882. The American Society of Church History (ASCH), which Schaff organized in his own home in 1888, was an effort to take that professionalism to the next level; the group was imagined as a scientific society for specialists in ecclesiastical history and for a time officially partnered with the AHA.Footnote ¹

Upon hearing the news of the ASCH's founding Adolf von Harnack, one of Berlin's intellectual lions, opined that “America has put us in Europe to shame”; if so, that was certainly a reversal of the usual hierarchy in the nineteenth century (46). Except for Princeton's Samuel Miller, all of Clark's characters had significant exposure to German scholarship and esteemed it as advanced learning's touchstone. In theological fields especially, American students headed off to Germany in greater numbers and earlier (on the whole) than in other fields. As Clark argues, this cadre of church historians was out front in the American exchange with the new models of German Wissenschaft—the careful use of primary sources, the adoption of the seminar method in teaching, the establishment of academic journals, and the emphasis on student research over tired recitation. At some level the famed tilt toward German research methods at Johns Hopkins in the 1870s had little on Union Seminary in the 1850s. In at least partially disentangling early church history from Patristics as a theological enterprise, these seminary professors, on Clark's reading, inched American scholarship along the path toward more specialized forms of humanistic inquiry at the turn of the twentieth century. She dwells on how much these six historians did with so few resources—indeed, how they pioneered critical historical scholarship in the United States; how they fostered through their research methods, philological training, and teaching practices what amounted at the time to “America's closest equivalent to graduate schools in the Humanities” (1). For those historians of American higher education who have never cast a glance at theological education and the deeply learned scholarship produced within that domain—often in substantial advance of what was going on elsewhere in the American academy—Clark supplies an important corrective lens.

Yet, as Clark well knows, these church historians were theologically cautious men. Five of her six figures—Ephraim Emerton, as a skeptical Unitarian, is the outlier—were scholars who hoped to serve both seminary learning and the Protestant churches well. They remained “biblically centered, evangelical Protestants” (136). As historians, they saw the church fathers as having only a “humble place” in the long history of Christianity, especially in comparison to the New Testament world of Jesus and the renewed light of the Reformation (3). That rather lowly estimate of the Patristic inheritance allowed them greater freedom to historicize Christianity's theological foundations, but it only partially removed their work from the realm of apologetics. In their relationship with European intellectual life, they served more as filters than as conduits, hoping to spare the United States the worst excesses of Continental scholarship, whether embodied in David Strauss, Ernest Renan, or Ferdinand Baur. Their pedagogy moved beyond the tried-and-true Baconianism that so long supported an “Evidences of Christianity” model of learning in American colleges, but it could only move so far (7). For all the inroads they allowed critical historical methods, the hand of Providence remained indisputably apparent in their philosophy of history and the supernatural genuineness of Protestant Christianity was never in serious doubt. Clark's church historians, in other words, were moving crab-like into the future. Ensconced within the country's leading Protestant theological institutions, they could exercise a disproportionate influence on what counted as safe and respectable learning and what did not. As historians, they were dedicated men of learning—in Schaff's case, imposingly so—but they remained Protestant conservators. In tenaciously playing that role, they themselves are better seen as occupying only a humble place in the history of how the academic study of religion took shape over the longer haul. There is not much slight in that estimate. At the end of the day, that mundane academic history was not the history that mattered most to them; what counted still was the history of the work of redemption. And certainly there is no slight at all to Clark's fascinating book—a carefully nuanced history of early Christian studies as an American enterprise.

Clark's church historians seem rarely to have registered it, but all around them by the 1870s and 1880s the study of religion showed disquieting signs of being carried well beyond their reach through the promulgation of a new science of religion. This emergent enterprise suggested—in its comparative breadth, social evolutionism, and cosmopolitanism—that Christian theology would no longer even own “religion” as a field of inquiry, let alone the whole of moral philosophy and natural history. That species of Protestant diminishment little troubles Clark; indeed, it is the way these church historians, in their research and teaching methods, unwittingly contributed to the displacement of their own theological preoccupations that most attracts Clark to them. For all the admiring attention she accords these seminary professors, she has no desire to be grouped with those historians who worry over the lost soul of the American university, those who think that nonbelief has been established as the operative norm in higher learning and that this has unfairly marginalized a rich Protestant inheritance. She would come closer to joining arms with those who welcome the de-Christianization of once sectarian institutions, those who vigorously commend the secular advances of the modern research university (not least in the study of Christianity itself).Footnote ² Yet hers is a tempered embrace—a judicious recognition that the modern scholarly disciplines of history and religious studies owe more to these Protestant professors than any happy, easy, or glib relinquishment of them would suggest. Clark's moderating posture is both necessary and well considered, but it is nonetheless hard to hold on to when faced with the sea change that ensued: in this case, just how far the new science of religion carried the field from its former seminary moorings. It would take at least another half-century to make this institutionally and intellectually obvious, but the death knell for the study of religion as Protestant theological studies had already been sounded with the rise and flourishing of the Victorian science of religion from the late 1860s forward.

Wheeler-Barclay's examination of the emergence of the science of religion provides a compelling account of that intellectual transformation. Her British proponents of this freshly imagined human science offer a productive contrast to Clark's American Protestant professors of church history. The backdrop for Wheeler-Barclay's story is the Victorian crisis of faith, and she presents the science of religion as part and parcel of that broader “cultural disorientation” (2). Her six intellectuals—Friedrich Max Müller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertston Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison—were all thoroughly enmeshed in the religious and scientific quandaries of their age. If they sometimes imagined themselves as the inventors of a dispassionate science, they were nonetheless regularly tempted to romantic nostalgia and spiritual longing. To be sure, these new scientists of religion could be out-and-out naturalists, as Tylor was in his announced battle with primitive superstitions and archaic survivals, but they were more likely to adopt deeply conflicted postures. Müller was nominally a liberal Christian in search of the cosmopolitan religion of the future; Robertson Smith was a natal evangelical bound to his Presbyterian community of faith even when his historicism and functionalism seemed at odds with those convictions; Frazer, a melancholy recluse with a huge public following, was torn between religion's enchantments and science's disenchantments; Lang, a roving antimodernist sickened by industrialism and materialism, turned to folklore and psychical research as potential antidotes; and Harrison was a creative classicist looking for post-Christian liberation in ancient festivals and lost matriarchies. Celebrated for their learning and productivity, these intellectuals had a large footprint in late Victorian culture precisely because their work bespoke the profound slippage in Christianity's hold on the religious imagination. Wheeler-Barclay does a superb job of explicating the science of religion as a complex, multilayered response to that cultural drift into religious uncertainty. The new science could be a positivist enterprise, but it rarely maintained that disinterested pose for long.

In the eyes of its most prominent practitioners, what dignified the science of religion as a science was its post-Christian qualities, the space it opened up for studying religion in non-confessional modes. The burgeoning field had no agreed-upon method (it was borne along by philology, history, anthropology, and sociology), but it was of one mind about what it was not, namely Christian theology. Müller played nice with the Anglican establishment, but neither his Sanskrit studies nor his romantic universalism aligned well with it. Tylor was sure that the main problem he had in legitimating anthropology as a discipline at Oxford was the university's persisting ecclesiasticism. Between “the philosophy of the savage thinker” and “the modern professor of theology” he could see little progress; the latter type represented one of those unfortunate “survivals” that the new human sciences were designed to combat (100). William Robertson Smith, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a devout churchgoer himself, found out the hard way that the higher criticism of the Bible did not sit well with the Free Church of Scotland. Put on church trial twice, he was eventually deprived of his academic chair in Hebrew and Old Testament exegesis at Aberdeen; he left Scotland to become a professor of Arabic at Cambridge (Harvard twice tried to hire him as well). Once at Cambridge he wound his way ever deeper into the science of religion, developing a view of religion as fundamentally a form of social bonding and collective communion. While Robertson Smith's private professions of faith remained deeply evangelical, his theorizing of religion augured Durkheim's view of religion as totemic solidarity. All told, there was not much consolation for the divinity professors in having the study of religion veer off in these sociological directions. Nor would there be in Harrison's feminist take on classical culture in which the rediscovery of a Dionysian religion was thought necessary to free her own society of Christianity's repressiveness. “If we are to keep our hold on religion,” she succinctly remarked in 1913, “theology must go” (234).

Wheeler-Barclay concentrates on university-based academics as the developers of a “field of discourse” about religion that was separable from Christian theology (18). Yet this budding scholarship was hardly confined to the universities and a narrow group of credentialed professionals. As Wheeler-Barclay remarks, “The new ‘science’ did not begin as an academic specialty, but took shape through the public give-and-take of books, lectures, and articles that appeared in the great Victorian reviews” (18). Right through the end of the nineteenth century at least, the work of amateurs held up well against the inchoate groupings of professionals and specialists. Tylor, for example, began his career as a rather sickly travel writer who stumbled into anthropology; essentially self-taught—he boasted that “he had never sat for an examination in his life”—he was only belatedly given an academic appointment at Oxford (76). Müller fashioned himself the scholar's scholar, but that hardly kept him from dedicating his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) to an American amateur (none other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had recently visited Oxford). Likewise, Müller was indebted to an American medical doctor, Alexander Wilder, by no means a professional in the science of religion, for introducing his work on India to an interested public across the Atlantic.

Andrew Lang, “the divine amateur,” fully illustrates the consequential role that a clever man of letters could play in the emergent science (110). Dubbing his own autobiographical musings Adventures among Books, he spent his life exuberantly commenting on the latest works in folklore, comparative mythology, anthropology, classics, psychical research, and Scottish history. Early on, he followed Tylor and the Scottish lawyer John F. McLennan into anthropology (McLennan had distinguished himself as an ethnologist of primitive marriage customs; like Lang, he never held a professorship). Later on, Lang would turn to psychical phenomena and make a plea, worthy of William James, for the “X region” of the human psyche from which the marvelous, mystical, and visionary could percolate to the surface of consciousness (113). Not that Lang's dilettante status was simply emancipating; if it freed him to comment on anything and everything that caught his eye, it could also be debilitating. Painfully self-deprecating, he frequently depreciated his own work, calling himself “only an amateur . . . one of the outer circle” (115). His vital presence in just about every scholarly debate animating the early science of religion belies that self-estimate, and yet his doubts made perfect sense. Given how much energy scholars were expending by the 1880s and 1890s to establish themselves as bona fide specialists and vetted professionals, amateurs had good reason to feel increasingly insecure about their place in higher learning.

The amateurs provide a good way to bring the American and British stories together. Clark's Protestant professors exercised formidable power in the study of religion on the American side, and there was hardly anything like Wheeler-Barclay's bloc of highly prominent British intellectuals advocating the development of the science of religion in American colleges and universities. William James remarked favorably in the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) on the “beginnings of a ‘Science of Religions,’ so-called,” but it was hardly a ringing endorsement.Footnote ³ Morris Jastrow, with his German PhD and his ties to Dutch academics like C. P. Tiele, was trying to act as America's Max Müller in enunciating the scientific study of religion at the University of Pennsylvania. Coeval with Jastrow's efforts, Crawford Toy—an erstwhile Baptist who early in his career had fallen out of his denomination's good graces as a result of his critical biblical scholarship—took up the task of promoting the science in earnest at Harvard (it had previously sparked to life there among Unitarian inquirers such as James Freeman Clarke who promoted the endeavor as apiece with liberal theology). All told, America's exponents of comparative religion did not stand particularly tall when measured against the leadership that British, Dutch, and French scholars were exercising.Footnote ⁴ At the turn of the twentieth century, Protestants still held something approaching a monopoly on the study of religion at the country's leading private universities (especially through the divinity schools), and that dominance was often extended to the growing state universities as well (with the creation of Bible chairs and allied schools of religion, for example).Footnote ⁵ But emphasizing that American Protestant monolith can be highly misleading; it misses all the work that was being done on religion outside the university's walls but within sight of its towers.

American amateurs had none of the institutional prestige of Clark's Protestant professors, but what they lacked in university standing they made up for in boldness. Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Helen Gardener, Ida Craddock, and Matilda Joslyn Gage were in no danger of getting seminary or university appointments, but in their lectures and writings they posed more productive questions about biblical authority, gender relations, and legal history than any American church historian managed to broach.Footnote ⁶ When even the most ambitious of liberal Protestant projects—the World's Parliament of Religions (1893)—had little notion of how to incorporate indigenous religious traditions into its ecumenical love-fest, amateur ethnologists—including Alice Fletcher and Francis La Flesche—had already made serious efforts at fieldwork among several Plains tribal groups. (Their improvised research programs ultimately paid off in professional recognition: Fletcher gained an appointment at the Peabody and La Flesche at the Smithsonian.) The study of religion blossomed in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but that flowering often took place on the periphery of advanced learning as it was centralized in the universities. The enterprise burgeoned especially among freethinkers, suffragists, post-Protestant liberals, and theosophical comparativists, most of whom would have been hard-pressed to gain a foothold in the American academy should they have desired it. For every German-credentialed church historian, there were simply dozens of barbarians at the gates, untethered challengers who were often frighteningly unencumbered by the evangelical Protestant frames of reference that continued to shape America's seminaries, colleges, and universities.

The amateurs rarely got inside the door—the PhD octopus made sure of that—but their questions frequently did. Child, Gage, Stanton, and Craddock had all passed from the scene by 1902, but over the next quarter-century both Jane Ellen Harrison and Elsie Clews Parsons, to take an exemplar from each side of the Atlantic, produced banner works on like-minded themes from within the university's walls. The arcane and cosmopolitan religious quests of Madame Blavatsky, Henry Olcott, and Sarah Farmer came home to roost inside the academy with Mircea Eliade's history of religions and in the illustrious pilgrimages of scholars from Huston Smith and Joseph Campbell to Diana Eck. In momentarily turning the kaleidoscope away from Protestant colleges, universities, and divinity schools, the disciplinary fragments settle into a new pattern—one in which the study of religion in the nineteenth-century United States can be seen as already well on its way to jettisoning theological studies as its measure. Rearranged, the glass pieces reveal instead a colorful mélange of amateurs with assorted professional descendants across the humanities and social sciences. Clark's Protestant professors could hold off the heretics for a time, but soon they would be overrun—not only by Wheeler-Barclay's weighty scholars in a range of fields, but also by unorthodox amateurs who found it inconceivable to regard the study of religion as the learned wing of the Protestant establishment.