“The Deposed Queen”: A Reflection on Crises in Religious Studies¹

When I started to think about how the field of religious studies has changed over the last 50 years, I read through quite a few essays on the state of the field. Religious studies can be an almost obsessively self-reflective field, and it appears I am guilty of this solipsism, too. The Talmudist Saul Lieberman once famously said, "Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship" (Ozick 2002, 143). I hope that, like nonsense, the history of solipsism is scholarship. In reading the history of the state of the field, two dynamics stood out to me. One of these dynamics remains the tendency to think of the field as both in crisis and in good times. The other dynamic has changed: imagining the field in terms of gender and power. When Religious Studies Review was first published 50 years ago, it was a great time to study religion. College and university departments in religious studies had grown throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, and new departments and programs were still being added into the 1970s (McLean 1957). Claude Welch's 1970 American Academy of Religion (AAR) presidential address discussed the "great upsurge in the academic study of religion," including greater student interest, especially in public and nonsectarian colleges and universities (1971, 4). Pressing questions about democracy, the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, and race in the United States—all of which included matters of religion—animated both academic pursuits and dinner conversations. Clyde Holbrook wrote about the mid-1960s: "Religion was 'in the air' so far as popular culture was concerned" (1963, 67), and students had big questions. Richard Wentz observed in 1970 that the growth of religious studies departments was "little short of phenomenal" (463). Religious studies scholars felt buoyed by the institutional growth and cultural relevance of their field. Later decades were also very good—or at least very important—times to study religion. In the 1990s, as cultural assumptions about the decline of religion and advance of secularism were crumbling, scholars of religion addressed pressing questions about religious trends in the modern world in both the classroom and their scholarship (see, e.g., Berger 1999. For a later reflection on the relevance of these topics for teaching, see Britt 2006). After the events of September 11, 2001, many scholars and nonscholars alike pointed to the necessity of studying religion. In his analysis of the events, Bruce Lincoln pointed to the necessity of returning to the question, "What do we mean by religion?" (2010, xi). Stephen Prothero averred that in a post-9/11 world, Americans "are not equipped for citizenship" if they lack religious literacy, which the field of religious studies helps provide (2008, 148). Today, political trends and events across the world have spawned a widespread interest in understanding religion in its relationship to nationalism, phenomena that religious studies scholars can help illuminate. In short, there is always something that makes religion feel very culturally relevant, whether that is the Cold War, conscientious objection during Vietnam, fundamentalism after 9/11, or the role of religious right in politics today. As nearly every conversation I have had with a neighboring airplane passenger in the past 20 years can attest, every time is an interesting time to study religion. Everybody concedes that grave troubles beset the higher learning and its institutional stewards in America. Analyses of the malaise usually include the financial squeeze, leveling or declining enrollments, curricular anomie, surging vocationalism, pedagogic tendentiousness, rampant specialization and compartmentalization, turning tenure into sloth, and converting academic freedom into partisan license. And each new diagnosis sends academics running for the stale nostrums of innovativeness, interdisciplinariness, and relevance. (1975, 264) The doom continued into the next decade. In 1986, philosopher of religion Carl Raschke wrote in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion: "The study of religion academic venture is pitching headlong toward an eleventh hour confrontation with its own legacy" (131). "The field now must face the wincing fact" of the disappearance of the factors that had allowed religious studies to grow, including, according to Raschke, the breakdown of a Protestant establishment, ample funding for higher education, and the viability of "studies" departments without "underlying conceptual architecture" (132). The field's past had been characterized by growth and abundance, but the present and future were grim. Without a central disciplinary method, religious studies, like women's studies and Black studies, would not have a future. These factors, he wrote, "in which the operative assumptions of the 'discipline' have been embedded from the beginning, have been quietly erased, particularly in the last four years" (132). The scare quotes around "discipline" signaled his suspicions about the possibilities for the future of the field. The 1980s, then, were also particularly dismal. As were the 1990s. J. Z. Smith wrote in 1995: "If 1963, the year of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on School District of Abington v. Schempp marks the mythical year of the founding of the present state of religious studies in the United States, then some apocalyptic-minded mythographer may yet point to 1993 as the year of the portent of its demise" (411; on the popularity of this false origin story of religious studies, see Imhoff 2016). Even the nonmythographers must recognize the unfortunate "economic forces" and religious studies' inability (or unwillingness) to adapt. In the 2000s, scholars lamented "departments closing and undergraduate numbers falling" (see, e.g., the conversation in the conference proceedings in Bunt 2004, 161). Throughout these decades, the doomsayers included presidents of the AAR and intellectual titans in the field. These scholars here were neither marginal voices nor spiteful critics. Sometimes, scholars even described a crisis at the same time as extolling the virtues of religious studies in higher education. For example, in their full-throated defense of religious studies, Margaret Mitchell and Jodi Magness weave both of these threads: "Informed and reasoned inquiry into religious traditions, texts, rituals, and practices is an essential component of civic life, on both individual and public levels. This is acutely the case in the present moment, even as religious studies faces significant challenges in the contemporary climate, both in higher education and our wider culture." They conclude: "We urge its protection and support into the future" (2022, 166–179). Scholars of religion have been lamenting the crisis, the grave troubles, and the withering of the field of religious studies ever since its arrival in US colleges and universities. Many of these troubles and crises seem constant: declining funding, declining enrollment, and a dearth of jobs for graduating PhDs appeared as concerns in every decade. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the issues these scholars describe are mirages or that they do not merit attention. Nor do I think that the troubles are identical: the political landscape with respect to higher education is different, the demographics of college attendance are different, the academic job market is transformed, and even today's financial problems have different contours than those of past decades. We can and should attend to these particulars. But we should not mistake our current set of crises as the first time the field has been "in crisis." Although the "best of times/worst of times" dynamic is one that has characterized the field of religious studies for the past 50 years, other dynamics have changed. While I was reading through these earlier decades of reflections on the field, another dynamic stuck out to me as I read through past state-of-the-field essays—one that seemed to have changed in recent decades. There are two parts to that dynamic: First, the overwhelming majority of scholars who offered meta-reflections on religious studies were men. Not all (in 1951, Virginia Corwin, e.g., contributed a chapter about the teaching of religion that counted religious studies programs; see 169–196), but the vast majority. Women scholars became better represented in these pieces as the decades went on, as one would expect, given the increasing numbers of women faculty in religious studies over the past 50 years. Second, and perhaps facilitated by the male-dominated nature of these reflective works of scholarship, many authors personified the field as female, especially its past as the "queen of the sciences." This image of the queen is almost always invoked as part of a declension narrative: once theology was held in the highest esteem, and then secularization (or another villain) came and displaced those big, important questions and modes of thought.2 These authors often see religious studies and theology as closely related, either with religious studies as growing out of theology or even as properly the same thing (e.g., Vance-Trembath 2006). Here, I have only quoted articles that discuss religious studies as a field (although many discuss theology, too) rather than those that are dedicated to theology alone. The narrative of the dethroned queen was popular in the second half of the 20th century, but it did not originate there. "The queen of the sciences is deposed from her throne," the theologian Francis Greenwood Peabody wrote in the first issue of Harvard Theological Review in 1908 (1). Francis X. Clooney cited the same passage in his 2008 article, noting how the same description of decline seemed to describe his own time (2008, 339–349). References and meditations on religious studies as a deposed or historical queen continued to appear throughout 20th- and into 21st-century appraisals of the field. In 1975, Ninian Smart wrote "Theology was once looked upon as the queen of the sciences; now it is often regarded as the knave of the arts" (1). Later the same year, biblical scholar Raymond Abba wrote about the "fall of the queen of the sciences" and repurposed another scholar's phrase to refer to religious studies as "'the harlot of the arts'" (1975, 355). Religious studies should be understood as a fallen woman—one who echoes biblical tropes of a sinful people turning away from their god. A 1990 article emphasized the importance of abjection: "Of course, she cannot come imperiously to demand the place of the 'queen of the Sciences.' She knows that the Middle Ages have passed. But if she comes humbly to subject herself to the discipline of scientific and critical method on the same terms as the other departments of study, then she has a valuable contribution to make" (Ross 1990, 7–8). Queen Religious Studies recognizes her fall and should subject herself if she is to contribute to the enterprise of knowledge. Less dramatic personifications to describe the supposed decline of the field abound. "Christian theology will [not] be re-enthroned as 'queen of the sciences.' Quite to the contrary, religion is now being subjected to the norms of the 'secular' world," a 1974 AAR roundtable declared (Huntsberry 1974, 734). An ethicist wrote in 2019: "Once hailed as the 'queen of the sciences,' its status has been questioned ever since" (van den Brink 2019, 442). A 2014 article about political theology narrated the history of religious studies: "There was a time when theology was the queen of the sciences . . . that time has long past" (Hawley 2014, 1631). These images make religious studies into a woman who has lost her power. In this way, these queen of the sciences narratives share characteristics with the crisis narratives—romanticized past, dim future, often a call to do something to save ourselves—and indeed, some articles do both. As Tomoko Masuzawa has recently shown, even this historical idea of theology as preeminent within the university has only tenuous historical evidence (2022, 1262–1285). Yet the narrative appeals to many scholars who write about the field of religious studies, perhaps because it creates an image of a golden age to which one might return, justifies the felt sense of the importance of the field, or serves as a past with which to chastise a field gone awry. The queen of the sciences references are not the only religious-studies-as-woman portraits of the field. Others similarly personified religious studies as a woman who was not in a position of privilege. Ronald Cottle wrote about the marriage of religious studies to the modern university: "Has it occurred to any of us that perhaps it is not only religious studies that should 'make up her face' for this wedding but that the groom, too, might be in need of dressing himself up a little?" (1973, 387). Even Cottle, who argued that the field of religious studies had something unique and important to teach the university, painted "her" as a woman who knew she should make herself pretty for others. Few of these authors focused their research on women as religious subjects or wrote sustained analyses of gender or femininity. But others who did focus on women and religion had different observations and critiques of the field. In 1976, in an early feminist critique of the field of religious studies, theologian Valerie Saiving asked, "Is scholarship in religious studies androcentric?" Yes, she answered, and at least as importantly, "That the question is being asked is a sign of a profound paradigm shift now underway in Western culture" (1976, 177). In recent decades, women scholars published many more state-of-the-field and history-of-the-field essays (for a few examples, see Coakley 2005; Jakelić and Starling 2006; Fredericks 2017; McClymond 2020; Magness and Mitchell 2022). They rarely personify the field's history as a queen, and when they do, it is usually to reject its resemblance to the present.3 Male scholars, too, have increasingly left it aside or rejected it (or, perhaps for authors of all genders, not known of it in the first place), though it remains as an occasional reference to a declension narrative (e.g., Olson 2010, 13). The paradigm then established and perpetuated in ever more virulent forms in successive epochs of our history is the paradigm of domination—the coercive control of men over nature and of some men over others. Domination has taken many forms in the history of the West: nation over nation, rulers over the ruled, the wealthy over the poor, the rape of the environment; and (on another level but governed by the same paradigm) the domination of mind over body, will over passion, intellect over feeling, competition over communion, and a patriarchal God over his subjects. (1976, 178) Yet other parts of Saiving's argument describe one of the most significant trends in religious studies scholarship over the past couple of decades: attention to power dynamics as central to the study of religion. Feminist studies of religion were some of the first to point to these issues, but they have hardly been the only. Scholars have both critiqued and built on those early studies to think in terms that now perceive domination (or power, in a Foucauldian mode) as central. The paradigm shift that Saiving pointed to may not have developed in precisely the way she imagined (or hoped), but the cluster of ideas she labels domination has become central to the field. Religious studies now regard issues such as colonialism and empire as not only important topics but as primary analytics. Many scholars study the constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality as central questions—and even those studies that do not foreground these questions are at least expected to note their influence. While the class has played a somewhat smaller role in religious studies scholarship, it also plays a recognizable role in the field. Perhaps one could say that the deposed queen has a useful vantage point from which to observe. In this interpretation, religious studies occupies a subordinated space that attunes it to other modes of subordination. Yet, I'm hesitant to endorse any narrative that paints the field as a woman defined only by her lost power or the need to make herself subservient. Instead, if we jettison the personification and instead see ourselves as a community of scholars (admittedly not romantic or metaphorical), we can sustain our investment in big questions and unequal relations—while also attending to the particulars of the crises of our moment.