ABSTRACT
Despite its length, the point of this chapter is a rather simple one, although its implications are, hopefully, somewhat more complex and far-reaching. Beginning in the late 1950s, scholars of religion employed an effective collection of decorative displays to re-establish the study of religion as a credible academic pursuit. As documented by Robert Shepard, comparative religion flourished only briefly in North American universities prior to World War I; despite its longtime success in Europe, the field had to wait for another generation of scholars (foremost among them, Eliade) to reinvigorate it on this side of the Atlantic. My interest, therefore, in this chapter is to examine the rhetorical strategies deployed by a collection of self-named historians of religion in the 1950s and 1960s in their effort to recreate an institutionally autonomous, humanistically based, study of religion.
