Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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understood in the reflective methodological literature in the field. Given the proliferation of relevant publications, however, this review cannot hope to be comprehensive. Accordingly, I restrict my analyses to Anglo-American (including Canadian) treatments of the subject, beginning with the attempts to provide a definitive statement on the notion in representative encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries. Despite the diversity of views that will emerge in this analysis of the literature about the study of religion as it is currently carried out in colleges and universities, I shall attempt in the conclusion to draw out some warrantable generalizations about ‘religious studies’ that may assist those coming new to the field.

Encyclopedic treatment of the notion of religious studies

Encyclopedic treatments of ‘religious studies’ consider the term to refer to a new kind of study of religious phenomena – that is an exercise free from narrow ecclesiastical interference and more general religious influence. Religious studies, that is, is often taken to be other than a religious quest or undertaking and, unlike earlier scholarly studies within the framework of the academy (colleges and universities), seems to work on the assumption of religion’s status as a purely social phenomenon. There is agreement not only that there existed a scholarly study of religion in the university prior to the emergence of religious studies departments in the modern university, but also that it was religious or theological in character. (‘Theology’ is often used in the literature to refer not only to a particular discipline but also, more generally, to denote any kind of confessional or religious orientation.) Indeed, not only was it religious, it was parochial, exclusivist, and therefore sectarian and ideological. As I show here, however, the encyclopedia portraits are not internally coherent in their accounts of this enterprise and therefore leave much to be desired with respect to defining the term.

Those who consult the new Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987) for enlightenment on the notion of ‘religious studies’ (Vol. XII: 334) will find the cross-reference ‘Study of Religion, article on Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline’ (Vol. XIV) – an entry that consists of essays by Seymour Cain (‘History of Study’), Eric J. Sharpe (‘Methodological Issues’), and Thomas Benson (‘Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline’), the last of which purports to trace ‘the development of religious studies as part of the liberal arts curriculum of secular and sectarian institutions of higher learning during the latter half of the twentieth century’ (64). According to Benson, religious studies is a scholarly or academic undertaking aimed at ‘fostering critical understanding of religious traditions and values’ (89) as opposed to a religious exercise designed to nurture faith. It is therefore a new enterprise, distinct from an earlier style of ‘faith-based’ study of religion in the university that is usually referred to as ‘theology.’

Harold Remus, in the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (1988, Vol. III), claims that the development of new academic disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, applied to the study of religion at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘led eventually to the development of an academic field designated religion or religious studies that was dedicated in principle to the academic study of religion …’ (1658). There is a clear line of demarcation, he insists, between this new discipline and its forerunner (the religiously committed study of religion). Religious studies, he warns, must not be confused with religious education which, like theology, is confessional in nature. ‘Religious studies,’ he writes, ‘does not seek to inculcate religious doctrines or specific religious values, to strengthen or win commitment to a religious tradition or institution, or to provide instruction preparatory to

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professional training for the ministry or rabbinate’ (1653). For Remus, therefore, religious studies cannot involve instruction in religion but can Ânevertheless teach about religion (1657).

Alan Olson presents a similar picture of ‘religious studies’ in the Encyclopedia of Religious Education (1990a), insisting that such studies are ‘to be distinguished from theological studies programs at the some two hundred and fifty seminaries and divinity schools in the United States and Canada’ (549). For more than a century, he claims, religious studies has been trying to differentiate itself from religious and theological enterprises as a study that excludes personal belief. In his view, ‘religious studies is meant to identify an objective, scientific, non-biased study of religion as distinct from ‘theological’ and/or ‘confessional’ study for the purpose of increasing the faith, understanding, and institutional commitment of individual degree candidates in a particular religion’ (549–50). Thus, according to Olson, whereas the academic study of religion in the US had been primarily in the care of religiously founded institutions until well into the twentieth century – and, therefore, had been essentially religious in character – by the 1950s it became more scientific and ‘emerged as an important Âinterdisciplinary, polymethodological, and cross-cultural area of academic inquiry’ (551).

The entry by Ninian Smart on ‘Religious Studies in Higher Education’ in John Hinnells’ The New Penguin Dictionary of Religions (1997) echoes Olson’s description. After acknowledging the existence of long-standing traditional approaches to the study of religion in institutions of higher learning, Smart maintains that ‘Religious Studies as a new multidisciplinary subject incorporating history of religions, cross-cultural topics, social-scientific approaches and ethical and philosophical reflections … came to prominence chiefly in the 1960s and early 1970s’ (420). The significance of the new ‘discipline,’ it is suggested, is that the academic study of religions in the modern university made possible a variety of scholarly approaches different from those sanctioned up to then by the traditional theological framework. Smart argues that this shift of approach clearly broadened the scope of studies in religion.

Despite the advent of a new and clearly defined scholarly approach to religious studies, that new study does not consistently reflect the neutral status of an objective science. Benson points to this, for example, arguing that even though admitting religious studies results from secularizing forces in society, what lies behind the emergence of this new field is not primarily a scientific impulse. Religious studies programs, he notes, have usually been created in response to student and community interests, so that, even though such studies of religion are not as overtly religious as they once were, they are nevertheless concerned with more than scientific knowledge, for they are often touted as an important element in the ‘liberal education’ dedicated to the cultivation of the self. As he puts it, religious studies is ‘generally influenced by pluralistic assumptions and [has] tended toward global perspectives on the nature and history of religion’ (1987: 89). As a consequence, religious studies, even while bringing a broader curriculum to the religion department and considerably undermining the traditional seminary model, has unfortunately held the door open to ‘a crazy quilt of courses encompassing many disciplines, eras, regions, languages, and methods of inquiry’ (91) – including traditional seminary-type offerings of Christian history, theology, biblical studies, religious ethics, religious thought, and religious education. The survival of religious studies in the US, he suggests, is therefore tied not to the social sciences but rather to the fate of the humanities which are, like theology in the past, directed not only toward providing knowledge about the human estate, but to the search for meaning, the inculcation of values, and the formation of the character of students. Recognizing this, Benson points to the vestigial religious overtones to ‘religious studies’ in the university context, noting that in the publicly

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funded university, the study of religion occasionally raises apprehension ‘concerning church– state relations and the constitutional status of state-funded religious studies’ (89). Objections to such studies in the public university context, he suggests, have eased in the light of court decisions that have distinguished teaching about religion (even with the overtones described) from religious indoctrination, implying that only self-ascribed sectarian religious education need be excluded from the field. In Benson’s estimation, therefore, religious studies seems to connote a broadly liberal religious education directed toward the formation of character and the betterment of society rather than scientific study aimed at knowledge and explanation of religious phenomena. He admits that in the 1960s there was deep interest in gaining disciplinary status for religious studies, but not on the grounds of its being a science. Rather, such status was sought on the basis of scholarly interest in a common subject matter: ‘the nature and diverse manifestations of religious experience’ (91). But this, he declares, is not sufficient to warrant its recognition as a discipline, because it clearly does not have a method peculiar to itself. ‘Religious studies are, perhaps, best understood,’ he therefore concludes, ‘as a community of disciplines gathered around the complex phenomenon of religious belief and practice’ (92).

Although Remus argued for a line of demarcation between instruction in religion and teaching about religion, he also noted that such teaching about religion is of particular importance to liberal education (1988: 1658). And in so doing, he seems to suggest that religious studies is more than merely a scientific undertaking, despite his insistence that it is not the task of liberal education to make the university a religious place (1658). He claims, for example, that it is not only the emergence of the social sciences that provided an impetus to the development of this new field, but that a ‘decline in institutional religions has also been a factor in enrolment in religious studies courses …’ (1658), suggesting thereby that the new enterprise has become in some sense a surrogate religion. Courses available in the new departments, that is, provide students with ‘opportunities to pursue some of the basic human issues – such as freedom, justice, love, evil, death – that universities were often bypassing in favor of technical and analytical study’ (1659). Thus, although not intending to indoctrinate, the new religious studies department nevertheless constitutes an element in the student’s search for meaning in life; it is not simply concerned with obtaining empirical and theoretical knowledge about religion.

Olson’s demarcation of religious studies from a religio-theological study of religion is at least as ambiguous. For Olson, however, the reasons no such clear demarcation is possible are connected to the nature of science rather than to the nature of either religion or religious studies. A proper understanding of ‘science,’ Olson insists, will be seen to exclude all possibility of providing a fully naturalistic explanation for religion. ‘Religious studies,’ he writes, ‘has greatly contributed to the growing awareness that true science does not have to do with the development of a monolithic discipline, but with the collective efforts of a community of scholars illuminating one or more facets of the truth’ (1990a: 551, emphasis added). In an article on the university in the same encyclopedia (1990b), Olson’s notion of religious studies is further clarified in his claim that the discipline is an important element in the humanities because it provides sustained attention to religious values, making knowledge alone an insufficient goal of the enterprise. Consequently for Olson – although he does not spell it out in great detail – a scientific study of religion that seeks to study religion wholly objectively is little more than an ideology of secular humanism.

The essay by Smart in Hinnells’ The New Penguin Dictionary of Religions also acknowledges that the so-called new religious studies is not altogether new; in fact, it offers programs that

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often parallel those offered in divinity schools and departments of theology. It is acknowledged, moreover, that, at least in part, religious studies is fuelled by ‘a growth in questing and questioning’ rather than by the ideal of obtaining objective knowledge about religion (1995: 420–1). Thus, even though involving the sciences in the study of religion, the new religious studies is not unambiguously scientific in intent or in practice. Not only is it determined by a religious or theological agenda, it is also shaped, Smart argues, by other ideological agendas. Since its emergence in the 1960s it has been profoundly affected by newer, non-objectivist approaches to the understanding of human phenomena such as feminism and postmodernist theorizing (421). Smart then concludes by pointing out how important religious studies is to the humanities – and by implication – to the humanist (and ‘liberal education’) agenda: ‘Religious Studies is in one sense a branch of social science but has also begun to play a vital role in the humanities, both because of its cross-cultural commitments and because of its serious consideration of diversity of human world-views’ (421).

In light of this analysis of the encyclopedists’ efforts to provide an account of ‘religious studies’ – of the academic study of religion in the university context – scholars will have to acknowledge, as does Adrian Cunningham (1990), that ‘perhaps “religious” [in the phrase “religious studies”] may still carry hints of its earlier usage to describe adherents, and of the ambiguities of “religious education” …’ (30). Michael Pye (1991) makes the same point more forcefully, arguing that ‘the adjective “religious” can easily suggest, and sometimes may be intended to suggest, that these “studies” are supposed to be religious in orientation and not simply studies of religion …’ (41). The term is often used, he maintains,to designate those subjects and activities which in the past have constituted theological enterprises, and must therefore be taken for ‘camouflage for theology’ (42).

The lack of clarity and precision in the encyclopedia definitions of ‘religious studies’ is not surprising for it reflects current practices in the enterprise as it is observed in college and university departments around the world. A critical review of the self-reflective literature on “religious studies” as it is carried on in Canada, Great Britain, the United States of America, and elsewhere in the world will, I suggest, lend credence to Cunningham’s and Pye’s assessment that the field fails to live up to the implicit ideal of it as a scientific rather than a religious undertaking found in the encyclopaedic accounts.

‘Religious studies’ in Canada

The character of the academic study of religion is thoroughly analysed in the ambitious state- of-the-art reviews of religious studies in Canadian universities directed by Harold Coward. Six volumes of the study have appeared between 1983 and 2001, covering the provinces of Alberta (Neufeldt 1983), Quebec (Rousseau and Despland 1988), Ontario (Remus et al. 1992), Manitoba and Saskatchewan (Badertscher et al. 1993), British Columbia (Fraser 1995), and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland (Bowlby 2001).

Although entitled ‘The Study of Religion in Canada/Sciences Religieuses au Canada,’ the projected study is described in the editor’s introduction to each volume as ‘A State-of-the- Art Review of religious studies in Canada’ (emphasis added), which seems to identify ‘religious studies’ in university departments very broadly with any and every type of study of religion carried on in institutions of higher learning. The ambiguity of the project description, in fact, provides other authors in the series all the encouragement needed for dealing not only with the academic study of religion in the university setting but also with the religious and

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theological study of religion in other post-secondary educational institutions from bible schools to seminaries. Brian Fraser, for example, entitles his state-of-the-art review not ‘Religious Studies in British Columbia’ but The Study of Religion in British Columbia (1995), and makes it very clear early on in the volume that he believes the ambiguity of the project title leaves room for argument to the effect that the kinds of study carried on in these very different institutions are not only complementary but in some fundamental sense the same. ‘In the other volumes in the Canadian Corporation for the Study of Religion (CCSR) series on the study of religion in Canada,’ he writes, ‘the focus has been on religious studies in the secular university, with minimal attention being paid to various approaches of theological studies’ (viii). As there is only one department of religious studies in universities in British Columbia (UBC), and because Fraser works, as he puts it, from a ‘vocational base in theological studies,’ he chose ‘to focus on the broader subject indicated by the original designation of the series as a whole, i.e. the study of religion’ (viii–ix). A comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in that province, he insists therefore, ‘requires that appropriate attention be paid to both religious studies and theological studies’ (ix). This, in his view, moreover, is not mandated simply by the fact that two radically different kinds of study of religion exist in institutions of higher education. It exists also because they have complementary interests, so that a proper study of ‘religious studies’ requires that this fact be recognized. According to Fraser, for example, both types of study of religion exact an element of commitment aside from that found in religious institutions; for while religious institutions of higher learning are committed to enhancing ‘participation in and contribution to religious traditions and communities that govern the institutions in which the study takes place’ (viii), the so-called neutral and non-advocative study of religion in the university is also directed toward results ‘that intend to elucidate the questions of human existence that religions have always tried to confront’ (viii). Religious studies, therefore, even though having ‘nothing whatsoever to do with the professional training of ministers’ (20), seems to be a kind of non-sectarian civil religion or general theology fit for ‘a public and pluralistic institution’ (viii) because it engages fundamental questions of meaning in human existence. His views in this regard are clearly exhibited in his praise for the work of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, which, he claims, emerged in part as ‘the result of the need for an expanded view of studies in religion’ (109) wherein the ‘interdisciplinary nature of its commitment brings together the various voices of the scholarly worlds, while not ignoring the community at large, [to address] major challenges of global concern …’ (109). And it is in light of this kind of project that Fraser expresses the hope for an integration of the various approaches ‘to the study of religion and the religions themselves[,] and for the development of a [university-based] doctoral program in religious/theological studies’ (109, emphasis added).

Had Fraser consulted the first volume in this series, he would not have needed to provide justificatory argument for his study of religious and theological programs of study in British Columbia’s religious institutions. For in Ronald W. Neufeldt’s (1983) account of ‘religious studies’ in Alberta he acknowledges that some scholars ‘expressed some opposition to the inclusion of theological colleges and bible colleges and institutions’ (xi) but nevertheless in his study proceeded to support such an expanded notion of the field – as has every subsequent study.

In all of the programs described in the Canadian studies, only that of the University of Regina is (in theory at least) purely epistemic in orientation. And its view about the nature of the discipline clearly places it in a minority. There were some early indications that religious studies would be identified primarily with a non-religious, scientific approach