With so many religious communities arguing about one another, a reader needed an account that did more than repeat their disputes. Hannah Adams (1755–1831) tried to provide one. Her dictionary, first published in 1784 and repeatedly revised, described denominations and religions for people unable to consult their many sources. She sought to avoid the hostile language through which a group’s opponents so often introduced it to the public.
That was a demanding editorial undertaking. Fairness required attention to how believers described themselves, but information about distant traditions often arrived through travellers, missionaries, or comparative scholars. Their explanations already contained judgments about what was original, what had been corrupted, and which teachings mattered most. Removing an insult did not remove those decisions from the material.
For Indian religion, Adams drew on John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798). His account of a supposedly ancient scripture could appear in a reference work as information about religious belief, although the source behind it remained difficult to verify. A reader turning to an entry had little reason to reconstruct the whole controversy that preceded it. The form of the dictionary made information easy to consult while making its history less visible.
Adams returned to the undertaking across successive editions, widening American readers’ access to religious knowledge and treating differences with a care that many of her sources lacked. Accuracy still depended on the testimony available to her. A reader consulting the revised dictionary encountered the results of both labours, the effort to describe people fairly and the continuing work of deciding whose account to use.