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An Unnatural History of Religions (hereafter, AUHR) begins with a question: “How come that, despite centuries of scientific research, the main academic discipline dedicated to the historical study of religion has been – and still is – so blindly devoted to an apologetic study of its research subject?”1 Ambasciano’s answer is multifaceted, but centres on the cognitive processes which mean that scientific reasoning is more taxing and less “natural” than emotional, intuitive, motivated reasoning. This I do not dispute, though I approach the subject as a critical historian, rather than a cognitivist. But in this short response, I want to further develop an answer which Ambasciano touches on in a few places in AUHR which focus on the relationship between the discipline and the various institutions and professional organisations in which we operate as scholars. The answer, I suggest, is that Religious Studies (hereafter, RS)2 remains confessional and fideistic because most of the scholars who constitute it want it to be that way – much as in the heyday of its predecessor, the History of Religions (hereafter, HoR). That no other discipline has been such a haven for pseudoscience within the modern academy is a point that Ambasciano makes repeatedly and forcefully throughout AUHR, as well as the introduction to this issue.

"When the chips are down" : a response to Ambasciano