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

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it enquires after the meaning of religious data and is therefore a mode of ‘research’ linking descriptive with normative concerns (560). He contrasts this kind of study of religion with the more explicitly normative ‘theological History of Religions’ cited in his earlier essay, but it is clear that this ‘humanistic History of Religions’ also stands in contrast to the purely socialscientific study of religion represented by scholars affiliated to the IAHR. As one historian of the development of religious studies in the US puts it, despite the claim of having become an independent scientific enterprise in addition to the other social sciences, it has remained haunted by religious aspirations (Reuben 1996: 142). The religious studies of the post1960s, in particular has always been concerned with more than scientific description and explanation of religion. As D. G. Hart echoes (1992: 207–8), post-1960s religious studies in the US is a discipline imbued with spiritual value; and the students of religion (as represented by the AAR) draw support from the humanities for their enterprise by stressing the spiritual relevance of their studies to the natural sciences.

The confusion that characterizes the post-war notion of ‘religious studies’ in the American context is rather clearly documented in Walter H. Capps’s Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (1995). Although Capps refers to religious studies as an intellectual discipline which ‘provides training and practice … in directing and conducting inquiry regarding the subject of religion’ (xiv), whereby the subject of religion can be made intelligible, he also claims that ‘religious studies is a relatively new subject-field concerning those whose intellectual composition there is as yet no consensus’ (xv). He maintains that this is partly because the principal contributions to the field have been made by persons in other disciplines such as history and the social sciences, and because ‘convictional goals’ have affected the processes of interpretation applied (XXII).

Scientific inquiry, therefore, is secondary to the fundamental questions about meaning and value that provide a coherent framework within which the multiplicity of disciplines making up the field operate. Capps argues that it ought not to surprise anyone to see such a religious goal characterize this academic study. For, as he notes, not only was the historical and comparative study of religion established in the universities in the late nineteenth century and until the Second World War undertaken largely by scholars involved both in the study and the practice of religion (325), but one can also make a strong case that the subsequent flowering of the study of religion in the university context – and especially so in the US – was due to its character as a liberal theological undertaking. According to Capps, that is, it is largely because of the Tillichian conceptualization of the theological enterprise that students of religion gained ‘forceful and clear access to the more inclusive cultural worlds, and in ways that could be sanctioned religiously and theologically’ (290). He rejects the view that the perpetuation of theological reflection in the religious studies enterprise undermines its academic or scientific respectability (325). Instead, the student of religion must recognize that religious studies, insofar as it is merely the sum of the analytical and interpretive achievements of the various constituent fields of research, does not do full justice to the subject of religion. Furthermore, the polymethodic and multidisciplinary character of the academic study of religion today constitutes ‘religious studies’ only if all these fields are working together to show ‘that religion has a necessary and proper place within the inventory of elements of which the scope of knowledge is comprised’ (345). ‘In sum,’ he concludes broadly, ‘religious studies recognizes that religion is not fully translatable into religious studies, and this is an analytical and interpretive truth’ (347).

More recent work in America concurs with Capps’s conclusion. In his introduction to Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998a), Mark C. Taylor claims both that prior to the

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1960s, religious studies was essentially a Christian (Protestant) undertaking and that the raison d’être of the new religious studies since that time is still essentially religious but neither particularly Protestant or Christian. At that time, ‘departments and programs in religion tended to be either extensions of the chaplain’s office, which was almost always Christian and usually Protestant, or affiliated with philosophy departments, which were primarily if not exclusively concerned with Western intellectual history;’ whereas after the 1960s they are associated not with science, but rather with ‘the flowering of the 1960s counter culture’ (Taylor 1998a: 11). Although he admits that religious studies has been ‘profoundly influenced by developments dating back to the Enlightenment’ (10), its new incarnation in university departments in the US was predominantly influenced by multicultural sensibilities created by the civil rights and anti-war movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s. If the ‘how’ of religious studies has changed because of the increased influence of the social sciences in cultural studies during this period, he avers nevertheless that this has not altered the essence of the discipline; that is, even if a social scientific study of religion has somehow displaced the old theology, it has not displaced the fundamental religious concern that has always – and always will – characterize the field. Taylor notes elsewhere (1994) that it is precisely for this reason that religious studies is an academically suspect discipline in secular colleges and universities (1994: 950). Yet even though the field of religious studies became captive to other methodologies, he argues, it cannot be reduced to them (951), because the secular approach of the sciences absolutize their understanding of religion and are themselves, Âtherefore, simply another form of theology.

For Taylor, there is no appropriate procedure for a comprehensive scientific study of religion, and religious studies must therefore be both multidisciplinary and multicultural. But if he seems to discern the complexity of his stance, he nevertheless does not assist the scholarly study under question by his fluid description. Postmodernism, he maintains, undermines all possibility of a fundamental method or comprehensive explanatory approach to the data of the field. Consequently its quarry cannot be cognition; rather it must seek to understand religion by applying a multiplicity of notions and concepts that might act as ‘enabling constraints’ (1998a: 16) for a discourse of a different kind: ‘for exploring the territory of religion’ (17) by means of a ‘dialogue between religious studies and important work going on in other areas of the arts, humanities, and social sciences’ (18). Such a religious studies, he points out, properly transcends scientific reductionism and, like the study of religion antedating it, recognizes that ‘[r]eligion … is not epiphenomenal but sui generis’ (6; see also 1999: 4). Stated differently, scientific theory is not not-theological, as Taylor might express it, because theory itself is theo-logical and onto-theological in character, given that it is a search either for an ‘overarching or underlying unity’ that will coherently frame the data. As he puts it:

The gaze of the theorist strives to reduce differences to identity and complexity to simplicity. When understood in this way, the shift from theology to theory does not, as so many contemporary theorists think, escape God but exchanges overt faith for covert belief in the One in and through which all is understood. (1999: 76)

The new post-1960s study of religion in the American context on this reading of the situation is not new in its fundamental orientation from the traditional study of religion in the university. The religious discourse of traditional studies is replaced not by scientific discourse but rather by a different form of religious discourse – namely, the discourse of

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‘responsible inquiry’ that ‘neither demands answers nor believes in progress but seeks to keep the future open by a relentless questioning that unsettles everything by settling nothing. To settle nothing is to leave nothing unanswered. Forever unanswered’ (Taylor 1994: 963). This kind of ‘responsible discourse,’ it is quite apparent, is not primarily concerned with obtaining knowledge about religions and religion, but rather with the wellbeing of the individual.

‘Religious studies’ globally

That there is no general convergence of opinion about the nature of religious studies among students of religion in the Anglo-American university context is clearly demonstrated by the analyses of the various Canadian, British, and American views presented above. The same can be said about religious studies globally. Although a ‘thick description’ of the global situation cannot be given, I will nevertheless attempt a brief sketch of similar problems raised in ‘religious studies’ discussions elsewhere in the world. Eric J. Sharpe, for example, notes that although the study of religion in Australian universities and colleges was from its inception free from confessional attachments, ‘[that is] not to say … that those involved in teaching these various programmes were without theological interests’ (1986b: 249).

He continues:

On the whole, rather few [Australian students of religion] could be regarded as ‘secular’ scholars, and many held a form of dual citizenship, being ‘theological’ and ‘scientific’ at the same time … All in all, the positions occupied by Australian scholars in the field by the late 1970s mirrored fairly accurately the divisions observable anywhere in the world … (249)

In an essay entitled ‘South Africa’s Contribution to Religious Studies,’ Martin Prozesky claims that the discipline has made a significant contribution to society because of the peculiarity of its being both scientific and ‘more than’ science. The student of religion, he insists, must go beyond merely seeking an explanation of religious phenomena to ‘a genuinely liberative practice’ (Prozesky 1990: 18). According to Prozesky, the student of religion is able to do this because religion itself is a humanizing force, which, when properly understood, will have a transformative effect upon those who study it.

Another striking example is provided by Michael Pye, in his ‘Religious Studies in Europe: Structures and Desiderata’ (1991), where he points out that the ambiguities and confusions that plague the notion of ‘religious studies’ in the Anglo-American context also have their counterpart in Europe. He points out that in Germany, for example, ‘the term Religionswissenschaft in the singular (science of religion, which for Pye is the same as religious studies) is rivalled in some universities by the plural Religionswissenschaften (sciences of religion) which tends to mean religious sciences with a religious motivation, including Catholic and Protestant theology’ (41). The evidence, then, regarding the diversity of perceptions, claims, and proposals about ‘religious studies’ as an enterprise carried out in the context of the modern university cannot be ignored, and would seem to lead to only one conclusion – that ‘religious studies,’ as Michael Pye has suggested, is ‘a flag of convenience’ (1994: 52) used by scholars, programs, and institutions to ‘legitimate’ the aims, methods, and procedures they adopt in their study of religions. A more recent survey of the field by a team of international scholars titled Religious Studies: A Global View (Alles 2008) not only attests

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to the versatility of the designation for the field but also confirms the continuing influence of religion and theology on it.

I do not think matters are quite as bleak as Pye paints it, however, and, in concluding this discussion, I will attempt to set out what general agreements might be reached as to the meaning and use of the term ‘religious studies’ by those involved in an academic study of religion in the context of the modern university.

‘Religious studies’: a summary and proposal

The term ‘religious studies’ it appears from this discussion, is used in two quite different yet not wholly unconnected ways. In one sense, as the state-of-the-art reviews of ‘religious studies’ in universities around the world suggest, the term includes whatever study of religion and religions is undertaken in any post-secondary institution of education, whether religious or secular, and regardless of the methodology adopted. Here the term is often taken to be commensurate with ‘the academic study of religion’ and ‘the scholarly study of religion,’ which notions themselves are often used synonymously. In this case, then, as Michael Pye puts it, the notion of religious studies ‘covers a multitude of possibilities’ (1991: 42), although it excludes outright confessional and apologetic studies of religion or of a particular religious tradition. Nevertheless, as the ‘methodological’ literature in the field shows, Pye’s multitude of possibilities does involve studies that have a good deal of ‘continuity’ with such confessional studies including forms of religious education that provide an ‘experiential understanding’ of religion (Holley 1978; Bischoff 1975; Hull 1984; Prothero 2007), as well as ‘revised,’ non-confessional forms of theology (Novak 1971; Thiemann 1990; Ford 1999) and postmodern theology (see Wiebe 2008). The second, more common use of the term, however, is as a designation for a particular kind of approach to the study of religion with a particular aim, methodology, or style that distinguishes it from the type of (religious/ confessional) study of religion antedating it. And when used in this sense, it still refers to the study of religion undertaken in the academy, but now designates an enterprise legitimated by the academy – in this case the modern research university – because it measures up to the received criteria of scientific study in the other university disciplines. Identification of religious studies with the academic study of religion in this instance, therefore, does not apply to all post-secondary research carried out under that rubric. ‘Religious studies’ as an academic undertaking, therefore, ought to connote a scientific enterprise even though it does not, as some would argue, constitute a scientific discipline (see, for example, Pye 1991). I use the notion of ‘enterprise’ here as defined by Robert A. McCaughey (1984) as ‘any organized understanding of sufficient magnitude and duration to permit its participants to derive a measure of identity from it’ (xiii).

As ‘scientific,’ the enterprise is chiefly characterized by an epistemic intention, taking for granted that the natural and social sciences are the only legitimate models for the objective study of religion; but it does not itself constitute a distinct scientific discipline. The primarily epistemic focus in this version of religious studies clearly distinguishes it from the types referred to above. It is not that earlier types of religious studies wholly reject the contributions made by the natural and social sciences to their understanding of religion, but just that the epistemic intention that informs the sciences is subordinated to religious commitments or theological assumptions; that it is placed in the service of other goals, such as the formation of character or the achievement of some form of religious enlightenment. The earlier exercises are nevertheless ‘academic enterprises,’ because they are pursued

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by scholars in the context of the university, but they might be appropriately considered ‘mixed genre enterprises’ because they attempt to blend scientific and extra-scientific goals. Religious studies as a ‘scientific enterprise,’ however, is a naturalistic study of religion carried out in several complementary disciplines. And the review of the literature above provides evidence of the widely held view that the field is polymethodic and multidisciplinary – as does the volume in which this essay appears. Religious studies, in this view, therefore, is not a separate discipline but instead a general rubric for empirical and scientific studies of religion which alone are appropriate in the context of a modern research university dedicated to the advancement of objective knowledge about the world, both natural (physical) and social.

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