"The Failure of American Religious History" by D. G. Hart, in The Journal of the Historical Society (Spring 2000), 656 Beacon St., Mezzanine, Boston, Mass. 02215–2010.

Trying in recent decades to make their "The past three decades have witnessed a discipline more relevant and academically great expansion of non-Protestant academic respectable, religious historians have ended studies of religion," he says, "but no serious up trivializing it, argues Hart, a professor of engagement of the fundamental intellectual church history at Westminster Theological question of what religion is doing in the Seminary in Philadelphia. academy."

It was only during the 1950s that religion, which previously had been confined largely to seminaries and university divinity schools, emerged as a separate academic field, when private colleges and universities began to establish religion departments. Many state universities followed suit during the next decade. But "clerical motives dominated the field. Not only did religion faculty still harbor older notions of caring for the souls of students, but the courses they offered were virtually identical to the curriculum at Protestant seminaries and divinity schools, minus the practical work in pastoral ministry," Hart says. Reflecting "a mainstream Protestant hegemony" and narrowly focused on church history, religious historians at the time gave short shrift to Mormons, Christian Scientists, African Americans, and others outside that mainstream.

To rectify this and to integrate their subject into the respectable ranks of professional history, religious historians began in the 1970s to turn away from the Protestant mainstream. They took their lead from social historians, and set out to demonstrate the relevance of religion to "the victims of American hegemony." Leaving "the straight and narrow path" of church history, they took "the long and winding road of diversity," through the study of minorities: Jews, ethnic Catholics, evangelicals, African Americans, women, Hispanics, Native Americans, and gays and lesbians.

This academic strategy, Hart writes, "inevitably identifies religion with the latest census statistics rather than with the practices and beliefs of religious traditions and communions." It also fails to add much to what other academic historians have been doing in their studies of cultural diversity. Those historians "largely remained indifferent to American religious history."

But "pure church history," even if carried out with more intellectual integrity than in the past, "would not have succeeded any better," Hart says. Accounts of "the religious life of individuals and communions" are of little interest to those outside the particular fold.

What historians of religion in America should be addressing, in Hart’s view, are the ways in which religion has influenced "the policies, institutions, and culture that have shaped the United States." The failure of religious history, and the reason the field remains marginal, he says, is precisely that "it has focused for most of the past three decades on marginal topics."