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

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to understanding religion (Anderson 1972), but, as the state-of-the-art studies make clear, such views did not have a significant impact on the development of the field in Canada. Charles Davis’s essay on ‘The Reconvergence of Theology and Religious Studies’ (1974–5) better captures the aims and desires of those involved in Canadian university departments of religion, as is clearly evident in the majority of the contributions to the more recent volume of essays, Religious Studies: Issues, Prospects and Proposals (1991), edited by Klaus Klostermaier and Larry Hurtado. While recognizing something new in contemporary religious studies, the editors nevertheless pointedly invited participants to the conference ‘to consider the study of religion at public universities as a continuation of the intellectual examination of religion which goes back over the ages’ (ix, emphasis added). This is also clearly evident in the character of the research activities of the majority of those who contribute to the Canadian journal Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, whose pages are for the most part filled with religious and theological research rather than with scientific studies of religion (Riley 1984). Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, religious studies in Canada, for the most part, has been more concerned with a ‘learned practice of religion’ rather than with seeking a scientific explanation of it (Wiebe 2006).

‘Religious Studies’ in Great Britain

Although there are no other state-of-the-art reviews of the field of religious studies as extensive as that undertaken by the Canadians, the festschrift for Geoffrey Parrinder, edited by Ursula King and entitled Turning Points in Religious Studies (1990), provides a comparable one-volume review of the emergence, development, and current state of religious studies in Great Britain. This volume is of particular interest because it unequivocally presents itself as providing an account of religious studies as a new discipline, clearly distinguishable from the theological approaches to the study of religion that had until recently characterized university scholarship. As the fly-leaf notice about the volume puts it: ‘Religious Studies was first introduced as a new discipline in various universities and colleges around the world in the 1960s. This discipline brought about a reorientation of the study of religion, created new perspectives, and influenced all sectors of education’ (emphasis added). The clarity of this brief statement about a new discipline that has re-orientated scholarship in religion, however, is quickly effaced by the editor’s general introduction to the essays intended to document both the emergence of the new discipline and the major turning points in its evolution. For King speaks here not of a discipline, but rather of a field of study which ‘found wider recognition from the 1960s and 1970s onwards when the term “Religious Studies” came first into general use’ (15). But as a field, religious studies cannot be characterized methodologically, for fields of study involve a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches to a particular subject matter of interest. Her introduction to the essays on the institutional growth of religious studies in the universities of England, Scotland, and Wales, moreover, compromises the claim that the so-called new discipline brought about a re-orientation of the study of religion already in existence prior to the 1960s. These essays, she writes, ‘show how much the course of Religious Studies and the history of its programmes have been intertwined with and often curtailed by earlier institutional developments in the study of theology, so that it has often been difficult to maintain the distinctiveness of Religious Studies’ (16). Having acknowledged this, King then goes on to claim that religious studies cannot really ‘be fully understood without looking at the closely associated developments in religious education and practical issues in interfaith dialogue …’ (16), suggesting that

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religious studies is – and ought to be – more than an academic (scientific) discipline. Thus she includes in the volume not only essays on the development of the ‘new discipline’ but also on the role of religious studies in relation to developments in religious education, interreligious dialogue and philosophy of religion. For King, these ‘concerns’ characterize distinct approaches to the subject matter of religious studies and are therefore some of the disciplines that characterize the field as multidisciplinary; but all of them clearly reflect the traditional religious and theological concerns of the scholarly study of religion which ‘Religious Studies’ ought to have superseded. As Robert Jackson points out in his essay on ‘Religious Studies and Developments in Religious Education’ (1990), for example, religious education embodies not only an epistemic or scientific concern about religion, but also sees religion itself as a form of knowledge and a distinct realm of experience (107); and religious education, therefore, as directed to awakening ‘a unique spiritual dimension of experience’ in children (110). The raison d’être of religious education, therefore, is not only epistemic but formative; aimed at helping children exercise their spiritual curiosity, and encouraging ‘in them an imaginative openness to the infinite possibilities of life’ (110). W. Owen Cole’s discussion of ‘The New Educational Reform Act and Worship in County Schools of England and Wales’ (1990) similarly confirms the judgement that religious education is concerned not only with gaining knowledge about religion but also with nurturing religious growth and development. As Cole puts it: ‘Some kind of collective gathering is considered desirable by most teachers for a number of purposes including the collective exploration of and reflection upon values and beliefs …’ (129–30, emphasis added). The fact that philosophy holds the same kind of religious and theological import as one of the disciplines that make up the multidisciplinary enterprise of religious studies is clearly evident in Keith Ward’s ‘The Study of Truth and Dialogue in Religion’ (1990). For Ward, philosophy’s value to religious studies is to be found in its concerns with the meaning and truth of religion (230).

Interestingly (if not ironically), only Marcus Braybrooke – Chairman of the interfaith movement ‘World Congress of Faiths’ – appears to assume that religious studies is a genuinely new approach to the study of religion. Braybrooke writes: ‘The underlying hope of the interfaith movement, although not of the academic study of religions, is that in some way religions are complementary or convergent’ (1990: 138, emphasis added). He nevertheless seems to believe that a positive complementarity exists between religious studies and interfaith development. And Eleanor Nesbitt’s article on Sikhism (1990) presents a similar proposal for encouraging a positive Ârelationship between the modern student of religion and the religious devotee.

The descriptions of the emergence of religious studies in the universities in England (Adrian Cunningham), Scotland (Andrew F. Walls), and Wales (Cyril Williams), it must be noted, claim (or suggest) that it achieved status in the university as an autonomous discipline by virtue of its differentiation from religion and theology. Their claims, however, seem to be undermined by the editor of the volume in which they appear, for they are found in the context of numerous other contributions of the kind just described, as well as an essay by Ninian Smart

– ‘Concluding Reflections on Religious Studies in Global Perspective’ (1990) – that argue a contrary case. It is true that neither Smart nor the other essayists argue specifically against undertaking scientific analyses of religion and religions. Smart does argue, however, against what he calls a scientifically purist stance in religious studies. As with the other essayists, Smart insists that religious studies can only properly be understood as a polymethodic and multidisciplinary enterprise which embraces ‘as much as possible of the scholarship of all sorts going on in the world … [w]hether it is neutral and objective or religiously committed’

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(305, 300). As a non-purist study, religious studies, he claims, will triumph because it can ‘be a force for permitting deeper conversations between religions, without reverting into a simple exchange of pieties’ (305). In this light, it is ironic that Cunningham should remark, as I have already noted, that even though the designation ‘religious studies’ for the study of religion carried on in university departments has an honourable history, ‘perhaps “religious” may still carry hints of its earlier usage to describe adherents, and of ambiguities of “religious education,” and it would be better for the university area to be simply called religion”’ (30).

Given Ninian Smart’s widespread influence on the development of university studies of religion over the formative period under review here, not only in the UK but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the US, it may be helpful to elaborate more fully his views on the nature and structure of ‘religious studies.’ In ‘Some Thoughts on the Science of Religion’ (1996), Smart clearly differentiates between the scientific study of religion and religious studies, with the former being associated with a multiplicity of disciplines, including history, comparative religions, and other social scientific approaches to the study of religious phenomena (16). It is possible, Smart admits, to take ‘religious studies’ to be fully described as the scientific study of religion, but he thinks such an understanding falls short of the view of that enterprise held by the majority of those engaged in it. Thus he argues for a broader view of ‘religious studies’ that will include not only scientific studies but also ‘reflective studies’ (19). By ‘reflective studies’ Smart means the examination of philosophical questions about the meaning and value of religion, in the same sense presented by Keith Ward (1990). Smart admits that such a reflective religious studies involves itself in ‘presentational concerns,’ by which he means engagement with the questions of truth and meaning, yet he denies that this amounts to merging religious studies with theology (19). This on two grounds: first, that which he calls ‘extended pluralistic theologizing’ is clearly distinguishable from traditional theology; and second, that ‘certain reductionistic views of science are themselves ideological positions that are not clearly distinguishable from traditional theology’ (20). He argues, therefore, that talk of the science of religion as the core of religious studies is wholly reasonable, but only if it remains non-reductionist. As such, the science of religion would then allow for critical reflection on the meaning, truth, and value of religion insofar as it is not simply identified with traditional theology, which, he claims, ‘is tainted by arrogance, colonialism and a usual lack of pluralism’ (19). As he puts it, ‘[I]f Religious Studies is to take on board reflective studies, and with that get involved with any presentational concerns with theology or ideology, it is only with Extended Pluralistic Theologizing … that it should blend’ (19). For him, therefore, ‘[t]o be genuinely scientific and objective we need to be able to steer a middle channel between the Scylla of secret theology and the Charybdis of reductionism’ (20), which requires a blend of non-reductionistic scientific studies of religion with reflective, extended theology. Both traditional theology and scientific purism are excluded.

In his contribution to Jon R. Stone’s The Craft of Religious Studies (1998), Smart reiterates his concern about ‘scientific purism,’ even though he acknowledges that what is called modern religious studies arose only after the 1960s with the merger of the history of religions with the social sciences (18). The new discipline, he insists, must be both speculative and philosophically reflective, although he warns against its being used as as mere ‘clothing for a religious worldview’ (24). It is little wonder, therefore, that Smart characterizes religious studies here as a quest (ix). But neither should it come as a surprise, therefore, that many in the academic world, as Smart himself puts it, have categorized religious studies ‘as some form of tertiary Sunday School, … [and so] resist and despise it’ (24). There is sufficient confusion about the notion of ‘religious studies,’ he judiciously notes, that ‘the outside world

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in academia may be forgiven for misunderstanding what the field of Religious Studies is all about …’ (24). But it does not appear to me that his own characterizations of the field have helped dispel the confusion; indeed, his own work seems to contribute to a view of religious studies as a religious exercise.

Subsequent studies on the character of ‘religious studies’ in the UK confirm that the dominant conception of the study of religion in British universities is essentially as a religious exercise. The volume A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (Nicholson 2003), for example, treats essentially Christian topics from a Christian point of view, and

Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-first Century (Ford et al. 2005) attempts to show the interplay of the two fields in relation to a range of topics in Christian theology and thereby establish ground for a future in which theology and religious studies are pursued together.

‘Religious Studies’ in the United States of America

That this kind of confusion about the nature of religious studies also exists in the American context is clearly acknowledged in the report of the Committee on ‘Defining Scholarly Work’ of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). In a report entitled ‘Religious Studies and the Redefining Scholarship Project,’ the committee notes: ‘Religious Studies, however defined or wherever located, remains suspect in the eyes of many within the rest of the academy and continually finds itself marginalized or otherwise obscured due to the fact and/or perception of blurred boundaries between studying religion and being religious, or between education about and education in religion’(Myscofski and Pilgrim et al. 1993: 7).

The suspicion in which religious studies is held in the US academic context, therefore, is due primarily to the confusion of what is proposed as an academic (and therefore scientific) enterprise with a religious or theological undertaking. As in Canada and Great Britain, scholars in the US claim that a significant transformation in the nature of the study of religion in the university context occurred after the Second World War. In God’s People in the Ivory Tower: Religion in the Early American University (1991), Robert S. Shepard claims that the study of religion in US colleges and universities briefly flirted with the idea of creating a science of religion but remained essentially a kind of ‘Christian Religionswissenschaft’ that was essentially moralistic and apologetic in intent and practice. As such it was unable

to separate [itself] from the theological and professional concerns of the nascent university, particularly the rising seminary within the university. A theological agenda accompanied the entrance of comparative religion in American higher education despite the arguments, some rhetorical and some sincere, that the new discipline was objective, scientific, and appropriate as a liberal arts subject. (129)

Nevertheless, claims Shepard, the academic study of religion in US colleges and universities experienced a renaissance after the Second World War and within a very short period of time gained disciplinary status within the academic context. D. G. Hart (1992) comes to a similar conclusion in his analysis of the field of religious studies. While not unaware of the fact that the rapid growth of the field was stimulated by the cultural crisis generated by the Second World War, and that such studies were aimed at ensuring college and university students received an education that included ‘values-training’ and moral formation (209), he nonetheless insists that the development of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) transformed

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the field into a scientific discipline. These changes, he insists, constitute a watershed in the history of the study of religion in the US, because they involved the substitution of scientific explanations of religious phenomena for the earlier quest for religious, theological, and humanistic accounts of religion. ‘The new methods of studying religion advocated by the AAR,’ he writes, ‘signalled the demise of [the] Protestant dominance [of the field] as professors of religion became increasingly uncomfortable with their religious identification … By striving to make their discipline more scientific, religion scholars not only embraced the ideals of the academy but also freed themselves from the Protestant establishment’ (198). (Hart recapitulates the argument in his more recent book, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (2000).)

Were this picture true, scholars would be hard-pressed to explain why the so-called new discipline is still held in suspicion by the rest of the academic and scientific community. What does account for the suspicion, however, is the fact that the notion of religious studies is not in fact carried out within a naturalistic and scientific framework, but more nearly resembles the academic field as it first emerged in the US – namely, as an inchoate enterprise not easily distinguishable from theology and characterized primarily by apologetic and moral concerns. This is clearly evident in the review of the field produced for the AAR by Ray Hart, entitled ‘Religious and Theological Studies in American Higher Education’ (1991), even though he admits that the term ‘religious studies’ is now generally used to refer to ‘the scholarly, neutral and non-advocative study of multiple religious traditions’ (716). Hart notes that many in the AAR are extremely uncomfortable with ‘the nomenclature that discriminates “religious” from “theological studies”’ (716), and points out that the members of the Academy are divided between the terms ‘study of religion’ (gaining knowledge about religion) and ‘practice of religion’ (understanding the truth of religion) (734, 778); he then claims, however, that by far the majority of the members favor a style of scholarship that combines the two activities, or one that at the very least eschews a clear demarcation between them. Joseph Kitagawa’s essays, ‘The History of Religions in America’ (1959) and ‘Humanistic and Theological History of Religion with Special Reference to the North American Scene’ (1983), strengthen Hart’s contention considerably. In the first essay, he maintains that the religious liberalism of the World’s Parliament of Religions served as the fundamental impetus for the establishment of the study of comparative religions – which later became religious studies – in American universities, even though he acknowledges that the participants at the Parliament meeting in 1893 for the most part gathered together representatives of the world’s faiths rather than scholars of religion. In drawing attention to this, Kitagawa underlines the fact that the academic study of religion in the US has more than one dimension; it has involved historical and social scientific analysis, but it has also moved beyond what such analyses can provide. Consequently he distinguishes the ‘History of Religions’ (as a scientific enterprise) from the ‘theological History of Religions’ – but with the implication that neither can do without the other. And he insists that the Religionswissenschaft later destined to become ‘religious studies’ is not simply scientific but rather ‘religio-scientific,’ being obliged to ‘view that data “religio-scientifically”’ (1959: 21). In the second essay, Kitagawa suggests that the scientific Enlightenment principles behind the scholarship of the members of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) have greatly affected the development of the field in the US, and yet – in keeping with his earlier analysis of Religionswissenschaft

– he refers to the discipline as ‘autonomous[,] situated between normative studies … and descriptive studies’ (1983: 559). Unlike other social sciences, then, for Kitagawa this discipline does not simply seek descriptions or explanations of events and processes; rather,