Why Religious Studies?

We have the conversation every year. My colleagues and I have pored over PhD applications and have selected our shortlist. We have interviewed a handful of candidates for our tiny number of admission slots, and we have asked these promising junior scholars a series of standardized questions about their research interests. And now we are in a Zoom room quibbling over a student's answer to one of our go-to questions: Why religious studies? As graduate chair of my department's small program, I have always found our conversations about this particular question fascinating. We ask the question because it helps us see how applicants think about our department and also because it shows how students with previous training in history, anthropology, or area studies align themselves with conversations in the field they aim to join. But as much as the blunt question reveals, it also induces moments of mild tension among the faculty. Not everyone in my department has a PhD in the academic study of religion. Some of us are more comfortable with theologically normative work than others. Some of us are historians, others are theorists. We are of different "academic ages." Due to these diverse professional experiences and intellectual commitments, somebody inevitably protests if I describe the list of theoretical books that we ask all of our PhD students to read as our "canon" or if I suggest that we are all drawn together by a shared set of questions and methods. To be clear, there is no dirty laundry to air here. I raise this genial disagreement not because my department is internally fractious (we are decidedly not) but rather because it represents a question haunting the academic study of religion as currently practiced in most North American universities. That is, are we a methodologically pluralistic field drawn together by a shared interest in religion as a topic? Or are we rather a discipline that has its own distinct set of questions and methods?1 As someone with BA, MA, and PhD degrees in "Religious Studies," "Asian Religions," and "Religion," respectively, I had long assumed the former. But recently, I have come to embrace the latter position: The academic study of religion is a discipline, with all of the complicated entailments of that word. My position as Graduate Chair has been one impetus for my change of heart. During the aforementioned interviews, I have noticed that applicants often cite "interdisciplinarity" as the primary reason that they are drawn to our program. This reasonable statement begs a follow-up question: Why is the academic study of religion a site for "interdisciplinary" work in a way that other fields, like anthropology or the history of science, are not? I, therefore, encourage incoming PhD students to think carefully about what distinguishes the academic study of religion from other fields so that they know the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological approaches favored by departments across campus. That is, what are they getting from us that they cannot get elsewhere? My conviction that the academic study of religion is a discipline rather than a field also reflects my intellectual connections to adjacent "interdisciplinary" departments and scholarly associations. As someone with one foot in Asian studies, I often wonder if there is a question that binds scholars of Asia together. If so, what on earth is it beyond a soft and obviously inconsistent commitment to continental geography?2 At least scholars of religion have a basic question that we all share, albeit with varying degrees of anxiety: What is religion? To be sure, this essentialist version of our shared question is, at best, a corrective for the widespread assumption that religion, like pornography, is something that we "know when we see it."3 Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to find workable definitions of religion that are universally applicable, and the seemingly interminable debates surrounding this definitional practice have led some to throw up their hands in frustration and just encourage all of us to get on with our studies already.4 But even those who tire of such definitional questions cannot dismiss them out of hand. As Kathryn Gin Lum has argued, our relentless questioning of the category "religion" differentiates us from other disciplines, like history, that somewhat blithely assume operative concepts such as the straightforward progression of chronological time (2018, 52–91). It is obvious that other disciplines study religion, and even do so well on their own terms. There is no shortage of scholars in humanistic and social scientific disciplines who acknowledge that religion is important, even if they have sometimes found excuses to treat religion as beneath their notice.5 Quantitatively oriented disciplines, like sociology, may treat religion as a variable that can be measured. Qualitative research, like history, may treat religion as a causal factor when documenting change over time. Some of the best theoretical work in "our" discipline has been generated by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. But I see what we do as characterized by a distinction that constitutes a major difference: Somewhat ironically, other disciplines assume that religion is "out there," whereas scholars of religion reject that very premise. This has been particularly true in the subfield known as critical secularism studies, which has (among many other things) helpfully clarified that the academic study of religion is itself a secularist endeavor.6 That is, by carving "religion" off from the rest of social life and observing the new object of study from "a pretend outside," scholars of religion recapitulate the religion/not-religion distinction that lies at the heart of political secularism (Dressler and Mandair, 2011, 1–24).7 The questions about how to define religion are, therefore, not tedious scholarly handwringing but rather rigorous ethical reflections on how we can establish and maintain a suitably critical stance. With apologies to J.Z. Smith, religion is not solely the creation of the scholar's study (1982, xi). But Smith was right insofar as people in and outside of the academy make religion.8 The contemporary academic study of religion builds out from this constructivist insight to carve a middle path between reification and reduction. This is discipline, for it involves the difficult work of holding contradictory truths in mind simultaneously. For us, religion is not epiphenomenal (it cannot be reduced to economic, political, or psychological factors), but religion is also not just unproblematically out there in the world.9 Religions are "dependent social facts" that can be empirically studied (they exist in the world as tax-exempt organizations, as individuals' avowed confessions, and as politically influential lobbies); they deserve attention precisely because the facticity of their doctrines and the efficacy of their ritual practices stubbornly resist empirical verification. The modes of social organization that people typically call "religions" take empirically unverifiable ideas (a chosen people, divine judgment, and the cycle of birth and rebirth) as given, and do so to profound social, political, and economic effect. If the academic study of religion is a discipline, then what are the methodological commitments that distinguish the field? I have a list that reflects my training as a modernist, an expert in "Asian religions," and devotee of critical secularism studies. This list cannot help but be normative, but then again, what is discipline if not the creation and maintenance of norms?10 First, scholars of religion may cover diverse topics and various time periods, geographies, and traditions, but we should habitually ask one question as a matter of course: Who calls what "religion"? This question makes for good historical analysis by focusing attention on moments when specific actors name particular practices, ideas, or objects as "religion" or as "religious." It makes for good ethnographic analysis because it clarifies that people may not carve up social life in the same way that scholars do.11 Furthermore, the question is ethically honest because it forces the researcher to consider why, as a scholar of religion, they choose to study particular material, including premodern societies where the category did not yet exist.12 A party need not call their practice "religion" for it to be a suitable object of study for our discipline, but the scholar of religion must have a good rationale for why that practice deserves to be studied as (or in conjunction with) religion. Second, scholars of religion must pay attention to rupture and transition at least as much as we attend to continuity and tradition, which means analyzing not only conventionally "religious" places (like the churches, temples, and synagogues that benefit from tax exemption under secularist legal regimes), but also places like courtrooms, scientific laboratories, and music halls, where people may appeal to religion for the purpose of securing justice, describing insight, or expressing inspiration. Take, for example, Charles McCrary's recent exploration of the religion-making of bureaucrats considering conscientious objection petitions or Donovan O. Schaefer's discussion of the divine inspiration animating the laboratories of revered scientists.13 Third, when describing processes and products of religion-making, the scholar should attend to the implicit categories that simultaneously structure and undermine "religion" and "not-religion" in quotidian speech. As a number of scholars have now shown, behind every binary lies at least one "third term" that helps the binary make sense.14 Some of these words, like "superstition," have been central to governance in secularist states; others, like "cult," allow authorities to designate groups they do not like as "not-religion" in order to deny them legitimacy and legal protections.15 But semantically ambiguous terms also do more positive religion-making work. For example, a word like "morality" signals "religion" to some people even as it disavows religion in the same breath. The same is true for "spirituality." Fourth, while recent work on affect theory has persuasively shown that human beings do not exclusively inhabit a world of discourse, language remains the primary way that humans translate affective orientations into socially cognizable and politically influential actions (Schaefer 2015, 7–10). This means that behavior, including speech, is data for analysis, but it also means that doctrine does not (indeed, cannot) exist as the sole driver of behavior. While a specific doctrinal milieu might shape affective orientations, citations of doctrine are, at best, ex post facto rationalizations of behavior. Observable actions may or may not conform with stated doctrinal commitments, and humans are relentlessly inventive in creatively interpreting existing doctrines. In the words of Buddhist studies scholar Jacqueline Stone, "doctrine is ideologically underdetermined; there is nothing intrinsic to it that determines, a priori, how it will be appropriated in specific contexts" (1999, 183). Fifth, while we do not live in a world exclusively constituted by language, our linguistic choices influence our interpretations. This means that our decisions on a line-by-line, sentence-by-sentence level must match the conceptual frameworks that structure our big-picture arguments. Because religion-making requires agents, the scholar of religion must never default to the passive voice (by extension, the scholar must never turn "religion" or "religions" into agents) (Campany 2003). Similarly, because religion-making focuses on processes rather than products, scholars of religion should focus analytical attention on verbs (actions), then nouns (agents and objects), and should never trust adjectives. To cite the most obvious example, the adjective "religious" and its conjoined twin, "secular," may seem self-evident, but we should resist the idea that any unambiguously "religious" group, person, or practice exists in the world. In so doing, we will be best prepared to study the stuff that most people mean when they call something "religion." These observations about precision in language bring me back to the question with which I started this essay. If imprecise adjectives sneakily do our thinking for us, why on earth would so many departments, including my own, take the unwieldy name Religious Studies? I raise this issue because I think that scholars of religion, like other humanists, have often struggled to make our discipline's value legible to people unfamiliar with what we do. This includes not only students (undergraduates have told me that they interpret "religious studies" as "sitting around and reading the Bible") but also deans, university presidents, and state legislators. When manufactured scarcity and overhyped crises induce deans and provosts and university presidents to survey their institutions in search of programs to cut, humanities departments like religious studies are often the first to go. This short-sighted approach mistakes disciplinary impact for the number of majors, downplaying the fact that politicians, business leaders, and parents have spent decades pressuring students to pursue ostensibly lucrative careers like finance or computer science at the expense of majoring in the humanities (Kraus 2023). The impulse to cut humanities programs also overlooks the fact that we actually make money for universities due to the often high number of "butts in seats" in our classes compared to our low overhead costs. More generally, the impulse to cut the academic study of religion as a supposedly superfluous academic program reflects the commonsensical, utterly false assumption that religion is epiphenomenal, or vestigial, and therefore unimportant. It is incumbent on all of us to make a case for why our discipline cannot and will not be replicated in any other department. What we do (and how we do it) has real value for citizens in democratic societies. Take this real-world example: A prominent politician facing a controversial policy choice holds a press conference in which he announces that he has "prayed over" the matter and come to a decision. This rhetorical power play interrupts democratic deliberation by transmuting matters of public concern into private whim; it places the collective good into the black box of personal prayer. It makes it impossible for constituents to hold the politician to account. He prayed over it, after all. But scholars of religion can at least describe the contours of the black box even if we cannot climb inside. We specialize in analyzing the kind of reasoning that links public policy to empirically unverifiable claims. Claiming this analytical practice as our own and training students in how to perform it themselves is good not just because it provides our discipline with raison d'être but because it makes for healthy, informed democratic citizenship and collective decision-making. Another way of putting it is this: Humans do irrational stuff all the time. Some academic disciplines (like economics) blithely ignore this, treating all humans as rational actors who occasionally malfunction. Other academic disciplines, like psychology, study such inconsistencies almost exclusively at the individual level. Scholars of religion differ from these other fields insofar as we assume irrationality rather than trying to explain it away, and we regularly deal with irrationality at scales beyond the narrow scope of the solitary individual. We have now spent decades developing methods for describing how irrational claims become collective reason. That is valuable. It is also difficult. But that difficulty is why the academic study of religion has a rightful place in the academy, not as a mere appendage to "real" disciplines like history or sociology, but as an intellectual discipline with its own inimitable methods stemming from a counterintuitive premise: Everyone else thinks religion is a thing, but our very uncertainty on the matter highlights the political effects of that assumption. To be sure, the academic study of religion has its own irrational proclivities and ideological tendencies.16 Some scholars have even lauded the field as a way to do stealth theology in tax-funded universities.17 In previous publications, I have personally expressed misgivings about the political impacts of our work.18 But religious studies is the humanistic discipline that is singularly best prepared to identify how certain types of empirically unverifiable claims affect all of us: making place, demarcating space, and structuring time.19