Snapshots from a Fast‐Moving Train: Religious History 1960–2025

The Journal of Religious History began life in Australia and New Zealand in 1960. In the Foreword to its first issue, the editors stressed the broad remit of its field of enquiry and hoped that it would be ‘a meeting place’ for all who recognised ‘the pervasive role of religion in history’. Announcing that it was not the organ of any particular party or school, their aim was to create a forum in which believers and non-believers, Christians and non-Christians, Catholics and Protestants, could engage in ‘honest conversation’ on themes of common interest. Distancing themselves from the ‘polemics and evasions’ commonly associated with the study of Churches and sects, they conceived of the journal as an ecumenical enterprise. They sought to rescue the subject from the margins of academic enquiry and to highlight the fundamental relevance of religion to understanding human politics, society, and culture in all periods. The same aspirations remain central to its endeavours 65 years later, even if its submissions are still overwhelmingly focused on the Christian tradition. Inclusive in scope and international in reach, it has become an enduring feature of the wider scholarly landscape.1 The JORH was not the only new journal dedicated to the history of religion to be founded in the middle decades of the twentieth century. 1950 saw the launch of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, a Cambridge-based initiative with a narrower focus on the origins and evolution of the Christian Church from the era of the New Testament onwards. Four years after the JORH appeared in 1964, the recently formed Ecclesiastical History Society published the first volume of Studies in Church History. Like the JEH, it confined itself to the history of the Christian faith and, at least initially, maintained a traditional emphasis upon ideas, laws, liturgies, official personnel and institutional forms. But both broke out of the mould of older denominational societies and welcomed contributions from the ‘members of all Communions’.2 Their shared effort to transcend the straitjacket of confessional history reflected the winds of change sweeping through European society and the historical profession more generally. They reflected intellectual and social developments that were eroding its fundamental truth claims. In hindsight, the JEH, JORH and SCH may be seen as responses to the increasing secularisation of Western society and the declining importance of faith in everyday life. Founded in the same period as Past and Present (1952) and prior to the emergence of History Workshop Journal in 1976, they were the product of a moment in which Marxist theories of history were fashionable in the academy, in which radical second-wave feminism was appearing on the horizon, and in which new approaches imported from the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, were reconstituting the study of this subject. A key symptom of this was the steady displacement of ecclesiastical history by the social and cultural history of religion. This redirected attention from the centre to the localities, from clerical hierarchies to the lay population, and from institutional structures to subaltern figures, including heretics and deviant minorities, at the grassroots. It prioritised recovering the attitudes of the illiterate and non-elite by interrogating their words and actions and it fostered close investigation of the role that religion plays in shaping identity, forming community, and fomenting conflict. It set out to rescue popular beliefs and practices from ‘the condescension of posterity’, though it also tended to interpret them in instrumentalist terms and to treat them with a degree of tacit disdain.3 It revised conventional assumptions about the impact of major movements of religious renewal, especially the Reformation, highlighting continuities, tensions and contradictions that qualify the triumphalist stories told by their early apologists. It taught us to regard its Catholic and Protestant manifestations as parallel impulses that sprang from the same intellectual and spiritual roots.4 In the half century since the launch of JORH in 1960, the confessional and denominational perspectives that once dominated the field of religious history have further lessened their grip, not least because its practitioners are no longer solely or primarily self-consciously committed people of faith. Indeed, many have no religious affiliation and are self-confessed agnostics, if not atheists. Horizontal histories of the interactions between those who hold different beliefs and creeds have replaced vertical ones celebrating the heroic resistance, spiritual purity, and splendid isolation of their members.5 This has not only stimulated an extensive body of work on coexistence, confessional ambiguity, pluralism, and multi-confessionalism; it has also encouraged critical interrogation of conventional assumptions about the waning of persecution and the rise of toleration.6 It has helped us to rethink religious violence and to recognise the ongoing imperative to cleanse and purify.7 Teleological narratives about these themes have been among the most conspicuous casualties of the glaring gap between neo-liberal ideals and practical realities. Other linear stories have likewise been exposed to sharp scrutiny. The role of religion, and more particularly Protestantism, in the making of modernity is no longer taken for granted. Claims about its place in state formation, the origins of capitalism, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, the emergence of empirical science, and the ‘civilising process’ have been complicated, if not cut down to size. The cyclical and contingent quality of such developments has been emphasised, not least in the context of contemporary events that illustrate their distinct limitations and fragilities.8 Even so, beyond – and often within – scholarly circles they continue to exhibit surprising resilience. A strong reaction against Christo- and Eurocentric paradigms is another development that is gathering momentum. The interplay between Christianity, Islam and Judaism now commands more attention. Interest in missionary evangelism, cross-cultural encounter, and religiously motivated migration, settlement, and plantation is likewise expanding.9 Global and transnational approaches are proliferating as the call to ‘decentre’ and ‘provincialise Europe’ is systematically translated into practice, as historians grapple with the toxic legacies of colonialism, slavery, and racism, and as they evaluate how religious institutions and actors were implicated in these processes.10 Against a backdrop in which the geographical centre of gravity of 21st-century Christianity has shifted from the northern to the southern hemisphere, investigating the multifaith histories of Africa, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia is acquiring greater urgency.11 The ideological origins of the terms and taxonomies we use to describe religious phenomena and groups are also being placed under the spotlight, as is their capacity to perpetuate the very prejudices we seek to transcend. ‘Heathenism’ and ‘paganism’, for instance, are labels that reproduce orientalist hierarchies of Western superiority over less advanced, ‘backward’, and ‘barbarous’ civilisations.12 They entrench insidious distinctions between religion and magic, ‘reason’ and ‘superstition’, that legitimate discrimination, conquest, and discipline. Instead, scholars now strive to reconstruct the lenses through which indigenous peoples perceived their polytheistic worlds and the intervention of supernatural forces in their bodies and souls.13 They draw inspiration from studies that have sought to uncover the inner logic and intelligibility of systems of thought divergent from modern outlooks, including witchcraft and demonology.14 The insight that ‘rationality’ is not an objective but a relative category is partly a side-effect of the epistemological self-reflexiveness bequeathed to us by postmodernism and the linguistic turn. In recent years, religious historians have not only approached their sources with deeper awareness of the unspoken assumptions they carry. They have also recognised the long shadows they cast in both popular memory and scholarly history and the extent to which these colour and shape how we write about the Christian and non-Christian past. They have demonstrated that the archives on which we rely are themselves implicated in the invention of traditions that buttress partisan positions and entrench confessional biases.15 Such investigations are prompting renewed appraisal of Churches, religious orders, missionary societies, and other organisations as bureaucratic structures. They are redirecting attention towards how they manage information, organise communication, craft their own reputations, and leave legacies for posterity.16 Cumulatively, these historiographical and methodological tendencies have served to destabilise dominant models of periodisation and to blur the boundaries that have been erected between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages and between early and later modernity. The growing consensus that the Reformation was not a time-limited, landmark event but rather one aspect of a protracted, iterative, and reversible process of religious renewal is one reflection of this process.17 Another is the increasing tendency to acknowledge the presence of multiple temporal regimes and to speak of Judaisms, Christianities, Islams, and Hinduisms in the plural.18 Religious history is becoming more attuned to the fact that divisions of time are neither neutral nor universal. It is rejecting the assumed dominance of singular orthodoxies in favour of recognising the polycentric quality of faith as it is practised by overlapping communities of belief in different locations.19 All of these developments are indicative of an environment in which, notwithstanding the confident predictions to the contrary offered by some mid twentieth-century commentators, religion remains a vital force. It continues to stir passions, capture hearts, unite and divide societies, and stoke violence. Far from being irrelevant to and sidelined from modern life, it is omnipresent in domestic and international politics and in news headlines. Its potency is evident not only in the terrorist acts committed by radical Islamists and in renewed outbreaks of antisemitism, but also in the tensions and conflicts about gender and sexuality, reproduction and abortion, that are fracturing the worldwide Anglican and Roman Catholic communions and North American Protestantism. At the same time, basic religious literacy is declining in ways that risk breeding misunderstanding about both contemporary and past developments. In the space remaining, I point to some current and emerging trends which both extend the trajectories I have traced and pull in competing directions. In doing so, I draw examples from my own specialism as a student of Christianity in Britain and Europe in the Reformation era. The first trend is a noticeable renewal of interest in spirituality and subjective religious experience. After a hiatus born of the scholarly tendencies described earlier, these topics are now rising up the agenda once more. Animated by a broader turn towards the emotions, senses and the body, the workings of the Holy Spirit in individual hearts and minds are becoming fertile territory for investigation.20 Rejecting an earlier revisionist emphasis on political pragmatism, economic opportunism, and hollow conformity, Reformation historians are reinserting the personal epiphanies experienced by converts into the story of religious change in this period. Conscious that ‘Christians are more than credal statements on legs’, they are actively addressing the question of what it meant to be Protestant and Catholic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.21 Recovery of the intensely affective dimensions of piety is one step towards rebalancing investigations that have often dwelt on ‘the casing of the watch’ at the expense of the inner mechanisms that made believers move and tick.22 Together with new studies of ‘the word made flesh’ and of bodily gesture as an outward manifestation of inner convictions,23 they are indicative of the displacement of the distorting polarities of ‘clerical and lay’, ‘elite and popular’, by the more inclusive concepts of ‘lived religion’ and ‘religious experience’. These signal an ethnographic approach that highlights the agency which people exercise in embodying their faith in everyday life and in quotidian routines, rather than within the framework of formal ecclesiastical institutions.24 The surge of studies of material culture is a further index of the same subtle but significant shift in scholarly priorities – a shift that has also helped to puncture lingering presuppositions about both Protestantism's intrinsically logocentric and iconophobic character and its alleged distrust and harsh repression of the unruly human passions. In its own way, it too was a religion of things and a faith of intense feelings.25 One of those feelings was doubt and disbelief. Recent work has helpfully begun to conceive of these less as the opposites of religion than as its twins. It has probed the paradoxical combination of intense devotion and increased scepticism in late medieval religion.26 It has raised questions about Lucien Febvre's influential thesis about the impossibility of ‘atheism’ in the Renaissance and re-opened the debate about the nature and extent of conscious rejection of Christian orthodoxy in the centuries preceding the Enlightenment.27 It has also highlighted the existential anxieties and the deep seam of soteriological uncertainty integral to devotion in a period that was experiencing its own profound crisis of truth and concerns about credulity.28 One consequence was that the very act of believing became an increasingly onerous and demanding obligation, if not ‘a Sisyphean task’.29 The intricate connections between different varieties of Christian atheism and changing attitudes to the sacred are also being explored afresh, in ways that are revitalising tired debates about desacralisation. The dichotomies between science and religion, naturalism and supernaturalism, we have inherited and internalised are themselves now recognised to be of relatively recent, and indeed, polemical origin.30 These trends reflect an emerging sense in some quarters that, for all the energy it has injected into the field, the social and cultural history of religion has not served theology particularly well. In its focus on collective behaviour over individual conviction, doing over thinking, it has arguably hollowed out its central essence and left us with a conception of religion akin to a with a in the The tendency to treat theology as a and body of of relevance or interest to people be ongoing to thought and which may itself be a of the between the and body in the late seventeenth century. as an and of theology be taken as a and of In to be into the social and cultural history of religion. In this regard it is to that the of thesis about the Protestant work may now be the between the of and the of remain are that the between religion and faith and and the is into The divide between those these is still deep and but investigations of how Christian and theology economic thought and behaviour and to the of both the and social that this is now to is scope for historians of religion into with those the of work and the very of and in the studies and intellectual impulses to through have been for a The traditional focus of the on a of of and has to and investigations of the between and in their the for the of a to the of fundamental political were in on and the of which was the was to It is a new of scholars who have ‘the of religion’ to this field and in doing a to the and with which it has long a close in a of published in this a call to things their and to the to the of religion as a for the emergence of It of a truth and the and of the of people in the and they to modern and It own disbelief. A feature of current in this field is of the assumptions that many studies published in the half of the twentieth century. it was once to religious as a for and as a for basic this is now as Such are of a wider distrust of the assumptions that the models by the of social science, especially At its most this has to of the methodological in their to earlier and the to be of the call of critical many scholars of religion continue to draw inspiration from this body of They it and to rethink what belief is and to the of and and in the making of religion as a and regard it as a it as and that from a understanding of what the of faith meant to the who practised The and of they in approaches to the history of religion are but no less A the declining of ecclesiastical history within the historical is even more in its of trends in historical and in its for the of the subject into the of This against the pull of social is still a in Britain and But it with a tendency that is even more evident among some practitioners of religious history in the but not in and in institutions with different of the Christian tradition. In these the of past beliefs to cultural are even more One has that the of and naturalism that modern of was but ‘a born of call for the of the is a of that the ‘a of religious truth from is no longer this is another of A recent about early modern of and has the upon to a new This study a to those who regard such as that be from the of its to questions about the events by in favour of on the that to it the assumptions that epistemological and its to acknowledge the place of the in the This exercise in and history has but it has also with a Its between and investigation of truth has both and it is a to of the from a and a of the of for it especially to the study of It both upon and the that the Reformation in how Christians the which many now that its on perspectives and has the character of Christian and confessional The up by of this partly reflect the different epistemological priorities of those who study religious history in of and Religious Studies and those who in other including History. But they also that the in which academic enquiry is may be in the process of at least in some of the such a wider within and a of the field remains to be The trajectories that it in the half century be but the fact that it is still a focus for debate only be as an index of its religious history become in a new of culture or it I remain a broad of a of different and to a of to extend the of This has been an to a from a It has offered a on historiographical developments that have both and the study of religion since the first of this journal appeared in 1960. the JORH has to these more than some of its this may be because its were less and more at the The of and of approach that its in be key to its in the In a in which religious are still for and investigating how they have past remains as and as of the have a of interest to The that the of this study are on from the The are not to or