Modern Intellectual History

http://journals.cambridge.org/MIH
Additional services for Modern

Intellectual

History:
Email alerts: Click here
Subscriptions: Click here
Commercial reprints: Click here
Terms of use : Click here

PORTENTS OF A DISCIPLINE: THE STUDY OF RELIGION BEFORE

RELIGIOUS STUDIES
LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT
Modern Intellectual History / Volume 11 / Issue 01 / April 2014, pp 211 - 220
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244313000395, Published online: 05 March 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244313000395

How to cite this article:
LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT (2014). PORTENTS OF A DISCIPLINE: THE STUDY OF
RELIGION BEFORE RELIGIOUS STUDIES . Modern Intellectual History, 11, pp
211-220 doi:10.1017/S1479244313000395
Request Permissions : Click here

Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/MIH, IP address: 129.67.119.83 on 20 Aug 2016

Modern Intellectual History, 11, 1 (2014), pp. 211220

doi:10.1017/S1479244313000395


C Cambridge University Press 2014

portents of a discipline: the

study of religion before
religious studies
leigh eric schmidt
Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Washington University in St Louis
E-mail: leigh.e.schmidt@wustl.edu

Elizabeth A. Clark, Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in
Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain, 18601915 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2010)

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
fluidinterdisciplinary 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. Clarks Founding the Fathers illuminates the importance of
Protestant theological institutions in shaping the study of religion in nineteenthcentury America, suggesting, in particular, how well-trained church historians
pointed the way toward disciplinary consolidation and specialization. Marjorie
Wheeler-Barclays 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?
211

212 leigh eric schmidt

If God and the Devil both reside in the details, so too does meticulous
historical scholarship. Clarks Founding the Fathers is no exception. Some 561
pages, 2,280 footnotes devoted to six church history professors at four American
seminariesthat, 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 traditions
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 Clarks
own lifetime commitment to the scholarly enterprise of studying the early history
of Christianity.
Clarks details often possess the shine of luminous particularitythe 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 collectionsay, Andovers or Princetonsran
in the range of six to ten thousand volumes, while Munichs 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 Tubingen to try to augment their institutions meager holdings. Philip Schaff
proved when abroad such a book-buying zealot for Unions library that the
seminarys president had to plead with him not to run the school into too much
debt. If and when they did succeed in landing important collectionsbuying up
the private libraries of prominent German scholars was a preferred tacticthese
church historians often returned home to institutions that saw their libraries

portents of a discipline

as closed-up depots, not gleaming laboratories for research. Yales 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, Harvards 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). Clarks 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.1
Upon hearing the news of the ASCHs founding Adolf von Harnack, one of
Berlins 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 Princetons Samuel Miller, all of Clarks characters
had significant exposure to German scholarship and esteemed it as advanced
learnings 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 Wissenschaftthe 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 Clarks reading,
1

For a complementary history of American church history, including the ASCHs

relationship with the AHA, see Henry Warner Bowden, Church History in the Age of
Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States, 18761918 (Chapel Hill, 1971), esp.
23945.

213

214 leigh eric schmidt

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 resourcesindeed, 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 Americas 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 domainoften in substantial advance of what was going
on elsewhere in the American academyClark supplies an important corrective
lens.
Yet, as Clark well knows, these church historians were theologically cautious
men. Five of her six figuresEphraim Emerton, as a skeptical Unitarian, is
the outlierwere 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 Christianitys 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. Clarks church historians, in other words, were moving crab-like
into the future. Ensconced within the countrys 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 learningin Schaffs case, imposingly sobut 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 Clarks fascinating booka carefully nuanced
history of early Christian studies as an American enterprise.

portents of a discipline

Clarks 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 suggestedin its comparative breadth, social
evolutionism, and cosmopolitanismthat 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).2 Yet
hers is a tempered embracea 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. Clarks
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-Barclays 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 Clarks American Protestant professors of church history. The backdrop for
Wheeler-Barclays 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

For this basic interpretive divide on the secularization of American higher education see
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment
to Established Nonbelief (New York, 1994); and John F. Wilson, Introduction, in Jon H.
Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and Secular University (Princeton, 2000), 316. For
a particularly robust version of the de-Christianization argument see David Hollinger,
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual
History (Princeton, 1996).

215

216 leigh eric schmidt

six intellectualsFriedrich Max Muller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William

Robertston Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrisonwere 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. Muller 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 religions enchantments and sciences 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 Christianitys hold on the religious imagination. WheelerBarclay 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. Muller 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 universitys 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

portents of a discipline

religion, developing a view of religion as fundamentally a form of social bonding

and collective communion. While Robertson Smiths private professions of faith
remained deeply evangelical, his theorizing of religion augured Durkheims 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 Harrisons feminist take on classical culture
in which the rediscovery of a Dionysian religion was thought necessary to free
her own society of Christianitys 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-taughthe boasted that he
had never sat for an examination in his lifehe was only belatedly given an
academic appointment at Oxford (76). Muller fashioned himself the scholars
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, Muller 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 Langs 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 selfdeprecating, he frequently depreciated his own work, calling himself only an

217

218 leigh eric schmidt

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. Clarks Protestant professors exercised formidable power in
the study of religion on the American side, and there was hardly anything like
Wheeler-Barclays 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.3 Morris Jastrow, with his German PhD and his ties to
Dutch academics like C. P. Tiele, was trying to act as Americas Max Muller
in enunciating the scientific study of religion at the University of Pennsylvania.
Coeval with Jastrows efforts, Crawford Toyan erstwhile Baptist who early in his
career had fallen out of his denominations good graces as a result of his critical
biblical scholarshiptook 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, Americas exponents of comparative religion did not stand
particularly tall when measured against the leadership that British, Dutch, and
French scholars were exercising.4 At the turn of the twentieth century, Protestants
3
4

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1982), 433.
See Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh, 1905).
Jordan noted at 143 that it has often been alleged that scholarship in the United States
lent practically no aid towards the inauguration of the Science of Comparative Religion.
Jordan disputed that claim, though not vigorously. He pointed to a range of New England
amateurs from Hannah Adams to Lydia Maria Child to Samuel Johnson as perhaps the
best answer the country had to that charge, but these were not the professorial masters
whom Jordan was intent on exalting in his study. James Turner takes a similar tack in a
recent, slimly compact set of three lectures on the fields American history; he looks to the
same cluster of Unitarians for disciplinary harbingers, but their efforts nonetheless usually
look slipshod to him in view of what comes later. See James Turner, Religion Enters the
Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America (Athens, GA, 2011), 54.
For a still standard survey of the disciplines history see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion:
A History, 2nd edn (London, 1986). While Sharpe sees the American contribution as
modest, he does accord it particular significance in the emergent psychology of religion
G. Stanley Hall, William James, Edwin Starbuck, James Leuba, and company. For the
late nineteenth-century leadership of the Dutch universities see Arie L. Molendijk, The
Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden, 2005); and, for a valuable

portents of a discipline

still held something approaching a monopoly on the study of religion at the

countrys 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).5
But emphasizing that American Protestant monolith can be highly misleading; it
misses all the work that was being done on religion outside the universitys walls
but within sight of its towers.
American amateurs had none of the institutional prestige of Clarks 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.6 When even the most
ambitious of liberal Protestant projectsthe Worlds Parliament of Religions
(1893)had little notion of how to incorporate indigenous religious traditions
into its ecumenical love-fest, amateur ethnologistsincluding Alice Fletcher and
Francis La Fleschehad 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 hardpressed to gain a foothold in the American academy should they have desired

set of essays crossing multiple national bounds see Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds.,
Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion (Leiden, 1998).
See Marsden, Soul of the American University, 3347; D. G. Hart, The University Gets
Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Baltimore, 1999), esp. 75
87; Conrad Cherry, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American
Protestantism (Bloomington, 1995); and Robert S. Shepard, Gods People in the Ivory Tower:
Religion in the Early American University (Brooklyn, 1991).
I have stressed the role of such amateurs in Cosmopolitan Piety: Sympathy, Comparative
Religions, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, in Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt,
and Mark Valeri, eds., Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America
(Baltimore, 2006), 199221; On Sympathy, Suspicion, and Studying Religion: Historical
Reflections on a Doubled Inheritance, in Robert A. Orsi, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to Religious Studies (Cambridge, 2011), 1735; and Heavens Bride: The Unprintable Life
of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (New
York, 2010), 3387. That emphasis, in turn, owes a debt to Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender
of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

219

220 leigh eric schmidt

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 Americas seminaries, colleges, and universities.
The amateurs rarely got inside the doorthe PhD octopus made sure of
thatbut 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 universitys walls. The arcane and cosmopolitan religious quests of
Madame Blavatsky, Henry Olcott, and Sarah Farmer came home to roost inside
the academy with Mircea Eliades 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
patternone 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 melange of
amateurs with assorted professional descendants across the humanities and social
sciences. Clarks Protestant professors could hold off the heretics for a time, but
soon they would be overrunnot only by Wheeler-Barclays 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.