The end of the Victorian science of religion

In order to neutralize the threat of scientific reductionism (see also Chapter 3, §Th e threat of a scientific and comparative study of religion), a number of strategies were advanced.

As time went by, a more complex dialogue between theology and (an increasingly theology-friendly) HoR began to take place. For instance, American theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer (1927-), well-versed in the phenomenological trends of HoR, resorted to a more radical answer which posited the ‘death of God’ tout court, i.e. the loss of any meaningful link between this world and a transcendent, divine reality. What followed was a frankly paradoxical debate in which HoR became, to a certain extent, more royalist than the king himself, for HoR came to the rescue of positive, orthodox theology, while Altizer’s radical theology embraced the comparative and phenomenological eclipse or death of god (see Ricketts 1978; Altizer 2006; cf.

These brief historical digressions, just like Smith’s trial, reveal how complicated and intertwined the relationship between theology and the comparative study of religion was, and how powerful the theological ballast had always been. While Darwinian evolutionary biology had been able to breach gradually the wall of institutionalization in the United Kingdom thanks to the absence of pre-existing, exclusive disciplinary structures and a lack of reliable scientific paradigms (i.e. natural theology was the institutional framework), the comparative science of religion had to fight theological hierarchies and their doctrinal force on their own turf (see Sharpe 1986: 129, and Finkelstein 2000; cf. Ruse 2013). As if that were not enough, the discipline was faltering under the weight of an unchecked and overabundant production of armchair hypotheses and grandiose systematizations. In the absence of an epistemological protocol, and without a consistent peer control, every theory coexisted with its opposite, with scholars unable to falsify each other’s claims beyond any reasonable doubt. Any Romantic, (re)invented folkloric poem claimed to have been fortuitously rediscovered was philologically dissected and compared to real historical documents from the past (cf. Kippenberg 2002: 66). Religious traditions were reinvented on the basis of ideological, and political, preconceptions, connecting the dots from scanty archaeological and textual documents to recreate a prestigious past (e.g. Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992; Thiesse 1999; Baar 2010; Merlo 2011).

The Victorian science of religion was to become the victim of its own success. First, as shown in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 2, a disillusion of sorts impinged on the development of such discipline. Second, and equally important, the community of peers generally reacted quite harshly to this unprecedented, impudent and unholy hybrid of Humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. Notwithstanding its ultimate adoption for missionizing support and purposes (e.g.

Eventually, in Britain, the comparative science of religion was displaced by a renewed anthropology less interested in theoretical speculations and more focused on functional aspects and diligent fieldwork. There were still pockets of scholars involved in the historical study of religion(s), of course, but the first British department fully dedicated to the comparative history of religions was inaugurated only in 1967, at Lancaster University, by professor of Religious Studies Ninian Smart (1927-2001) (Turner 2014: 379). It could be said that, at the turn of the century, the concomitant adoption of ritual as the focus of investigation sealed the end of the first wave of scientific approaches to the study of religion (Murray 2010: 126-7). The only way for comparative religion to survive was to renounce science altogether, to leave the social sciences, relocate within the Humanities, and emigrate to Continental Europe (Turner 2014: 378-9; cf. Martin 2016: 34).