Religious History as Religious Studies

Scholars who contribute to the field of religious history are more likely to have doctoral degrees from history programs than they are from religious studies departments. How might the study of religion press scholars of history to rethink their organizing principles when imagining pedagogies of history? Recent years have included the publication of many significant texts which grapple with the problem of history in the study of religion. This presentation seeks to illuminate the central features of that more theoretical bibliography to see how it may bear on the design of syllabus for religious history. Such a discussion will predictably contest the necessary importance of chronological order; distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ documents; and the secular presumptions of modern historical practice. In addition to these basic inquiries into the structuring religious history, examinations of historiography within the study of religion reveal that selection of subjects, themes, and interpretive motifs reveal ideological concerns beyond the merely accusation of Protestant privileging. How we imagine the relationship between the definition of religion and the shaping of history through religiousness determines our students’ sense of the heroes, heroines, persecutions, and hagiographies of the past. Through a study of contemporary perspective on the problems of history and historical practice within religious studies, this paper begins to note just how impossible religious history is to do responsibly within the classroom. Syllabi on the subject of U.S. religious history will be used to illustrate the argument.