that encouraged a more sympathetic assessment of early and medieval Christianity and a cautious celebration of difference among ethnic groups.14 While championing Christianity’s historical development was necessary for according signal importance to the Protestant Reformation, exhibiting sympathy with Christianity’s distant past, however, became ever more difficult for American Protestant professors in an era of increasing Roman Catholic presence, one that saw the promulgation of Vatican decrees on the Immaculate Conception of Mary (1854), the Syllabus of Errors (1864), and Papal Infallibility (1870)—and unprecedented Catholic immigration to American shores. Steering an uneasy course between “decline” and “development,” these professors provided a (limited) counterbalance to American Protestants’ hostility to Roman Catholicism in the present and to periods of history perceived as “Catholic,” the patristic era in particular.15 The professors’ attempts at tolerant understanding, however strained, coupled with their knowledge of German scholarship and interest in new methodologies of historical practice, distinguished them from many evangelical Protestants of their time.
In particular, the rise of asceticism in early Christianity and its persistence into the present presented a major conceptual stumbling block to the professors’ sympathetic assessment of Roman Catholicism. The professors argued that since Jesus had gloriously raised women, marriage, and family from their allegedly demoralized status in ancient paganism and Judaism, proponents of asceticism grievously misinterpreted his intentions. Yet in pitting the Protestant idealization of family against the Roman Catholic promotion of celibacy, the professors confronted a new challenge: advocates of women’s rights who demanded—often with an appeal to New Testament teachings—equal opportunities in church and society. Ancient and modern ascetic devotees, on the one side, and American supporters of women’s suffrage, on the other, posed intellectual and social challenges to the Protestant professors’ reconstruction of early Christianity and its authority for the present.
Last, I suggest how these professors accorded Protestants’ favorite Church Father—Augustine—surprisingly rough treatment, even as they mined his writings for their own purposes. For Union and Yale professors, a more mellow form of Calvinism was in the making, one that mitigated the harsher implications of Augustine’s theory of original sin. Unbaptized babies were not to be automatically consigned to hell, and adult Christians, however “innately depraved,” were still deemed capable of righteous living. Moreover, the professors argued that Augustine’s collusion with state authorities in the persecution of Donatists laid the foundation for later religious repression—from which America, so “exceptional” in its (alleged) separation of church and state, had struggled free. Yet, on the side of appropriation, these same scholars borrowed Augustine’s explication of the early chapters of Genesis that detailed the development of human “races” to construct a “Christian” racial theory.
As students of American religion will readily observe, this book does not explore religion in nineteenth-century America, nor even nineteenthcentury Protestantism. There is scarcely a Baptist or a Methodist in sight on these pages.16 Jews (except as biblical characters) and women (except as mothers, wives, and daughters) are likewise absent.17 Contemporary Roman Catholics are cast largely, although not exclusively, in the role of antagonists. “Others,” such as “Hindoos” or “Mohammedans,” are variously the objects of anthropological curiosity, of Protestant derision, or of missionizing concern.
This limitation is unsurprising, considering the identity of the figures under consideration. The professors at two of the schools, Union and Yale, called themselves evangelicals, but this designation must be distinguished from its present customary usage.18 By “evangelical,” these professors selfidentify as proponents of theologies derived from the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) branch of Protestantism, softened by influences stemming from German Pietism, from latter-day proponents of Jonathan Edwards’s theology, and from American religious enthusiasm of a more decorous variety.19 Manifesting little association with the more celebrated revivalist emphases of their time,20 they can be styled (in Curtis D. Johnson’s classification) “Formalists”: their notion of “orderly faith” required “consistent doctrine, decorum in worship, and biblical interpretation through a well-educated ministry.”21 Unlike their Princeton colleagues, however, the Union and Yale professors largely discarded Scottish Common Sense philosophy in favor of approaches touched by German Idealism and Romanticism.22 Yet also unlike the Unitarians at Harvard, they staunchly upheld doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus, and a high view of biblical accuracy, which (so they claimed) conformed comfortably to scientific discoveries.23
Colleges and the Study of Religion
Religion and history, the two disciplines that today frame the study of ancient church history, had an uncertain start in the American academy. In early American colleges, religion was considered a “frame of reference,” not “a subject for scientific study”24: religion was assumed, not taught. The lack of instruction in subjects pertaining to religion may puzzle, since American colleges founded before, and well into, the nineteenth century were largely religious in nature,25 often functioning as “the intellectual arm of American Protestantism.”26
The lack of academic coursework in religion, to be sure, did not leave students religion-less. In the eighteenth century, undergraduates—those at Yale, for instance—devoted some hours on Friday and Saturday to “divinity.”27 Until the late nineteenth century, college seniors, even at the newer, state-supported public institutions,28 customarily took a required course entitled “Evidences of Christianity” (“natural theology” or “mental and moral philosophy”), often taught by the president of the college.29 This course, James Turner argues, “the chief curricular fallout” from Scottish Common Sense philosophy, was “a hodgepodge of intellectual flotsam and jetsam … from political economy to the origin of language to animals’ rights.”30 “Evidences” was usually students’ only actual course on religion. In the early 1870s, however, “Evidences” began to lose favor: Columbia discontinued it in 1871,31 Harvard in 1872.32 Other institutions followed.
Historians note the dramatic change in American higher education—an explosion in breadth, depth, and numbers—between 1860 and 1900.33 Writing at the turn to the twentieth century, Henry Adams observed: “America had made so vast a stride to empire that the world of 1860 stood already on a distant horizon somewhere on the same plane with the republic of Brutus and Cato, while school-boys read of Abraham Lincoln as they did of Julius Caesar.”34 The academic study of religion likewise experienced unprecedented change and growth during this period, as evidenced not only in seminaries, but also in colleges. As late as 1885, Yale College offered only three courses related to religion, but fifteen years later, more than fifty. By the early twentieth century, new fields such as comparative religion and psychology of religion had found their way into university curricula. At the University of California-Berkeley, for example, two courses in Asian religions were added in 1900, and in 1904, a course entitled “The Religious Practices and Beliefs of Non-literary Peoples.”35 In sum, something approaching Religious Studies was in the making.36
Even “Biblical Literature” was not a common collegiate offering until the late nineteenth century.37 William Rainey Harper (shortly to become founding President of the University of Chicago) introduced the study of the English Bible at Yale College in 1886. The trend soon spread.38 Indeed, “Bible” remained the staple of many college Religion Departments into the mid-twentieth century. The American Academy of Religion was originally named the “National Association of Biblical Instructors” and continued under that rubric as late as 1964.39 That the emphasis on “Bible” was not merely Christian, but resolutely Protestant, is a fact not always fully registered.40
From Harper’s time onward, professors of a liberal stripe could treat the English Bible, and more broadly, religion, less as a “deposit of revelation”
