This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

It is suggested that current religious studies are distorted by what sociologists sometimes call recipe knowledge, especially in relation to the common assumption – still partially valid – that religion should no longer be seen in essentialist or perennialist terms. The possibility of neo-perennialism is explored. Widespread assumptions about projecting onto faith traditions ‘essentialist’ understandings are critiqued, particularly in relation to Buddhism, and common assumptions about the inapplicability of terms such as religion and myth are questioned. In this context, evolutionary perspectives are important because ‘dual process’ notions of human cognition may be applied to the historical development of human religiosity. This means that a revived recognition of a universal aspect of human religiosity is necessary, based not on very questionable anthropological speculations of the kind that became common in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries but on current exploration of brain functioning and of its evolutionary development.