PART 1 1
âThe Religions of the Worldâ before âWorld Religionsâ
The historical domain that is the principal concern of this book, in chronological terms, roughly coincides with the âlongâ nineteenth century, or the period spanning the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to the outbreak of the First World War. As noted in the introduction, this time in European history is characterizedâamong very many other things, to be sureâby pronounced uncertainty, volatility, and multiplicity in the ways in which religions were identified and categorized. The task at hand is to demarcate this domain provisionally by marking its outer limits, as it were, and this task will be approached from several directions. The chapter begins in section 1 with a snapshot of what came immediately after this period, then moves back in time in section 2 to offer a rough sketch of what preceded it, and concludes in section 3 with a brief look at a few examples dating from the first half of the nineteenth century that testify to the erosionâthus adumbrating the eventual collapseâof the previous, long regnant system of classification.
1. âWorld Religionsâ in the Age of World Wars
We begin with a glance at the moment when the term âworld religionsâ in the English language came to be commonly used in more or less the same senseâand for more or less the same purposeâthat we employ it today. Because there was a visible increase in the publication of books on this general topic, one might make a preliminary judgment that the 1920s and early 1930s mark something of a watershed. As we shall see, this is also the period when something closely resembling todayâs world religions courses began to appear in college curricula in North America.
Considering that the period in question came in the wake of one devastating world war and coincided with an uneasy calm before another, it may seem unsurprising that the literature from those years on any topic should be fraught with a heightened sense of crisis. Yet why should the study of religion and the topic of âthe religions of the worldâ be particularly tied to this period of crisis? Arguably, the earliest instance in which the first global war was rendered in print specifically as a religious crisis may be Stanley A. Cookâs The Study of Religions. In the preface, dated September 1914, the author states:
Whether his pronouncement should be judged as truly prescient or merely as an early appearance of a clichĂ©, the intuition expressed by this author seems to have endured for decades thereafter. In the meantime, the sentiment only gained strength that the study of religions (in the plural) was an especial exigency of modernity, that is, modernity as an experience fraught with novelty and violence. Two of the earliest books bearing âworld religionsâ in their titlesâwith âreligionsâ again in the plural2âshare this sentiment, as the nearly identical titles themselves make obvious: one is called Modern Tendencies in World Religions (1933), and the other, Modern Trends in World-Religions (1934). The prevailing mood of these books is that the whole world is undergoing a profound transformation utterly unlike any other in history. At the same time, it is also implied that an adequate appreciation and comprehension of this transformation is possible only from a widely panoramic, indeed imperially global, perspective. The opening paragraph of the first volume announces:
As the author goes on to qualify, his point here is not that religion had never changed in earlier times but rather that the nature and the magnitude of change occurring in the present era is unprecedented.4 This sentiment is echoed exactly by the opening paragraph of the other volume:
The prose of both these texts is vibrant with the pulse of the present. There is a feeling of great urgency as religions everywhere are said to face unprecedented radical challenges from without. We witness here the great religions of the world precipitously rising to the field of common discourse as something eminently alive, that is, as âlivingâ religions, very much present among us, if not in our own immediate neighborhood then elsewhere in the very same world we live in.6 And if the living religious traditions are thus multiple, what ushers them all to the common moment of great crisis is one and the same: modernity. In short, what makes âworld religionsâ imaginable and palpable as an objective reality is something like a new sensibility of global awareness, a sense of immediacy of the far and wide world.
What gave particular urgency to this new perception of the increasingly global reality was that the news coming from afar was on balance not very good; certainly by the 1930s there was a growing sense of an impending, or perhaps already unfolding catastrophe. Indeed, a few years earlier, in 1929, a book entitled Christianity and Some Living Religions of the East was issued, which opened with an even more pronounced tone of alarm:
Here, again, a precipitous plunge into uncanny awareness of the global is the opening move of a world religions text. In fact, all three of these books seem to persuade their readers at the outset that one should want to acquire, and acquire quickly, a sweeping knowledge of the multiplicity of religions in the world because a new techno-geopolitics was unfolding dramatically before oneâs eyes, and it was vitally necessary to come to terms with this strangely brave new world, indeed with a brand new sense of the world itself. The new vision of the world was a necessary consequence of violent globalization in the form of colonialism and the explosive expansion of so-called free trade, as these were the principal means through which the West had become connected, inextricably linked with the whole world. At the same time, in this novel state of global connectedness, the West suddenly found itself to be not so much in masterly control as perilously vulnerable, as it found its own state of well-being inexorably dependent on unseen and unknown realities as remote as a village halfway across the planet. In order to avert real dangers that lurked everywhere, far-reaching attention was urgent, gathering of global intelligence essential.8
It may be said, therefore, that in the decades following the First World War, world religions discourse unseated an earlier obsession with primitive, prehistoric, or rudimentary religions. Not only did the surging interest in the immediate present supplant the search for the distant, possibly irrecoverable, moment of the origin of religion, there also was a new, or renewed, appreciation of the fact that the time-honored great religions of the world had already gone through many processes of radical transformation, even if the past transformations had been ârelatively slow and dignifiedâ by comparison. Of utmost interest now were each traditionâs resiliency, adaptability, and sheer vitality for survival and growth in the face of the rising tide of modernization and increasing global competition.
In contrast to the great world religions, each with its own history, primitive religions lacked interest at this time because, supposedly, primitive religions had experienced little historical transformation. The following statement from the introduction to Hegelâs Philosophy of History may be cited as a prototype of this line of thought. After a brief discussion concerning the total absence of political constitution, the presence of cannibalism, and other curious features of the African continent, Hegel concludes:
Clearly, a tacit understanding among those who felt themselves to be riding the crest of the historical wave was that primitive peoples of Africa and elsewhereâbrittle and unmalleable remnants of the past as they were, hitherto untouched and untested by timeâwere doomed to extinction in the near future, whether this process was to be through actual obliteration of the population or through irreversible assimilation into another, more developed mode of existence, whether this anticipated outcome was to be celebrated or lamented.10 Primitive religions thus abdicated their place of prominence in the study of religion and gave way to the great historical religions of the world.11 Henceforth cultic practices that were not part of the world historical movement came to be treated primarily in a cognate field specializing in the study of the prehistoric and the primitive called âanthropology of religion.â12
This new arrangement notwithstanding, âprimitive religion,â though somewhat demoted, did not disappear entirely from the new mapping. To the extent that the world religions discourse aspired to embody the impartial principle of global coverage, many historians of religion were reluctant to endorse a summary dismissal of the minor and the inchoate, and hence they sought and found a way to accommodate the little traditions of tribal societies in the new epistemic regime. When these minority traditions came to be included in the scope of world religions, it was under a generic rubric, now named âprimal,â âtribal,â âindigenous,â or âpreliterateâ religions, distinguished from, but still kept adjacent to, ancient and prehistoric religions. We see this arrangement succinctly expressed by Jack Finegan in The Archaeology of World Religions (1952):
One may reasonably ask why, in the case of preliterate peoples alone, their âfaithâ can be âdealt with collectivelyâ as a generic type, whereas all other âforms of faithâ are treated individually as historically unique and specific traditions.14 The convention of summarily treating âprimitivism,â under whatever name, is now more or less routine, such that an explicit justification for this peculiar arrangement is not to be found unless one looks into some early-twentieth-century texts. In a book published in 1904, John Arnott MacCulloch (1868â1950), for instance, blithely opines that âthe aspects of savage religion do not vary greatly wherever it is found,â and on that ground, he suggests, a general treatment of them as a type would âensure a better acquaintance with religion at a low level than a separate account of each savage race would do.â15 As we shall see, this handling of âprimitivismâ is analogous to the way an older system of classifying religions dealt...