Before Hinduism
Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4517445 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael J Altman (0000-0003-0620-8390, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 260-295 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Religion and American Culture A Journal of Interpretation (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1052-1151 • E-ISSN: 1533-8568 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1525/rac.2016.26.2.260 |
| OpenAlex | W2513531995 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 25 |
American interest in and knowledge of religion in India began before Americans imagined Hinduism as a coherent world religion. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Americans used a variety of terms to describe, represent, and imagine the religious culture of India: Gentoos, Hindoos, religion of the Hindoos, Hindoo religion, Brahmanism, heathenism, and paganism. Each term meant different things to different writers at different times. But there was no Hinduism, a world religion originating in India and comparable to others, in America prior to the late nineteenth century. Americans read and wrote about "Hindoos" and "Hindoo religion," something altogether different from Hindus and Hinduism. This article analyzes two examples of American representations of Hindoo religion before Hinduism. First, it examines American missionary reports about "Hindoo heathenism" written by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions missionaries and published in American missionary journals in the early nineteenth century. Second, it examines the Unitarian interest in Rammohun Roy and his growing popularity in New England during the 1820s and 1830s. Unitarian interest in Roy and ABCFM missionary reports exemplify the ways Protestant questions and interests shaped the American understanding of religions and the eventual construction of "world religions" such as Hinduism to suit American Protestant concerns
Christianity · Hinduism · History of religions · Paganism · Political science · Popularity · Protestantism · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment · Religious studies
Explaining religion
Comparative religion
Savage systems
Hinduism Reconsidered
Was Hinduism Invented?
The World's Parliament of Religions
Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain
The Dawn of Religious Pluralism
The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America
The Fact and Fiction of Cotton Mather's Correspondence with German Pietist August Hermann Francke
A History of American Magazines
Yankee India
The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America
Unitarians and India
The Oriental Religions and American Thought
Yankee India
On Hindu, Hindustān, Hinduism and Hindutva
The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
Raja Rammohan Ray
Protestant America and the Pagan World
Jagannath Revisited
American Missionaries and Hinduism
Religion and Pilgrim Tax Under the Company Raj
The Invention of World Religions
Who Invented Hinduism
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |