Getting Religion Wrong

While one might expect a religious studies scholar to know something basic about religion, that is not always the case. Consider, for example, the following passage from a recent Oxford University Press book on religion by Tim Clydesdale, Professor of Sociology at the College of New Jersey, and Kathleen Garces-Foley, Professor of Religious Studies at Marymount University. In discussing a survey that they conducted, they note that

1 out of 11 indicate Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Eastern Orthodox, or "other non-Christian" religion (hereafter, "other" religion).

They scarcely discuss those in the other religion category. I suspect because, as a sociologist, Clydesdale knows that the sample is so statistically small that it may not be responsible to do so. Instead the authors say that they have decided to focus

on the lives of the 91% of American twentysomethings who affiliate with Christianity (Catholic or Protestant) or have no religious affiliation.

 (Tim Clydesdale and Kathleen Garces-Foley, The Twenty-something Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 24.)

Latter-day Saints are used to being mischaracterized, and one would not necessarily expect a sociologist to get denominational distinctions sorted out, but apparently it is too much to expect a professor of religious studies to know that Eastern Orthodox Christians are Christians.

Religious Studies at BYU

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, former president of BYU, outlines the place of Religious Studies at BYU in a recently published interview:

I think we will want to keep asking hard questions: how much is practical, how much is needed, how many lines of communication do we need, and what books are good enough to carry our imprimatur. When we know which products those are, then we should do a world-class job with them. I would like this [the Religious Studies Center] to become known as the scholarly voice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on matters that would normally be considered as "religious studies." When people think, "Where do I look to see the real heartbeat of intellectual life and academic contribution for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," I want them to think BYU, and at BYU when the issue is religious scholarship, I want them to think of the Religious Studies Center.

(Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and Thomas Wayment, "The RSC Turns Forty: A Convesation with Elder Jeffrey R. Holland," Religious Educator 16/2 [2015]: 3.)

Later in the interview Elder Holland also gave kudos to BYU Studies for its work in that field.

A Brief History of Religious Studies

This brief history of Religious Studies comes from George Marsden, who previously had written a history of how the American university system had gone from Protestant establishment to establish non-belief:

The rise of religion departments in many universities during the mid-twentieth century originally had as part of its rationale the promotions of . . . broadly Christian or Judeo-Christian ideals. Religion could be viewed as a special field of scientific study, but also as a source of inspiration going beyond science. Usually the religion taught was broadly ecumenical and interfaith, allowing little room for more traditional versions of Protestantism, Catholicism, or Orthodox Judaism.

During the 1960s and the 1970s the field of religion continued to grow, but in order to establish its academic credibility, it was increasingly marked by an emphasis on the scientific study of religion and decreasingly seen as a haven in the universities, or even in mainstream church-related colleges, for religious perspectives. The leaders in the field of religious studies now more often presented it as analogous to the social sciences rather than to the uplifting humanities, such as literature. The transformation in religious studies since the early 1960s had some parallels in the field of literature. Literature was no longer regarded first of all as uplifting, as it had been in the 1950s, but rather became a field whose academic status was legitimated by technical methodologies, often evidenced by esoteric terminology. Segments of religious studies followed similar paths, transforming themselves into cultural study and the comparative studies of the history of religions.

The new religious studies raised the academic credibility of the field and brought fresh insights on many religious phenomena. From the point of view of our own inquiry, however, they must be seen as part of the wider trend of insistence that the only place for religion in the mainstream academy is as an object of study.

(George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21-22.)

In Religious Studies, as in most of academia, you are supposed to check your religion at the door.

The Effect of Jewish Studies on Judaism

A friend of mine sent me a link to this older article where the inimitable Jacob Neusner, who taught Jewish Studies for years at a secular university, discusses how Jewish Studies has tended to undercut Judaism.

One very important point he makes in the essay is this:

When believing and practicing Jews decide who will teach what to whom, they take for granted that some things are more important than others. They affirm the cogency of the subject and know how things fit together. The Judaic system governs the things that are learned. To teachers and students, the classical texts convey truth. What follows? The Talmud is more important than a cookbook. The Jewish sponsors of Jewish learning derive the scale of values from the received canon and tradition.

Universities, by contrast, have no stake in according to Scripture or Midrash and Talmud a superior position in the curriculum. Learning in every topic and discipline defines its own priorities, and reason is not governed by revelation. So the curriculum is a mishmash of this and that — discrete details of a main point that does not register. Anything that is Jewish is as worthy of study as anything else that is Jewish. At my own college, the history of the bagel and the status of women in Jewish law have served equally well as topics of graduation essays.

Substitute "Mormon" for "Jewish" and "General Conference" for the "Talmud" and you probably have an apt description of Mormon Studies.

Neusner's point, of course, is one of the frustrating things about studying ancient Egyptian religion. Any inscription or text is taken as equally important with any other inscription or text. No system governs what is learned or studied and we do not know how things fit together. What is valuable and what is not? How are we to know? I have made the argument that the things that the Egyptians endlessly repeated to the point that modern scholars see them as "banal" are probably the most important things. Without an ancient Egyptian informant, that is an educated guess. One has to wonder if all the outpouring of writings of Egyptian religion is as valid as the outpouring of writings in Mormon Studies.

Why You Should Go Into Mormon Studies

According to this article if you get a degree in Religious Studies (of which Mormon Studies is a subset) you can look forward to the following:

• You might get really lucky and make $32,000 dollars a year; of course you are just as likely to earn $23,000 dollars a year (that's below the poverty level for a family of four).


• 35% of graduates will be employed in jobs that they did not even need a college degree for.


• 58% of graduates will be employed in low wage service jobs (waiting tables, janitors, maids, cashiers, etc.; on the bright side, those are honorable professions).


• It is a little unclear but it looks like only 7% of Religious Studies majors find employment in the field. You could be that one in fourteen who actually makes it (comparatively) big.


• You will be competing with over 54,000 people for that job.


• A Religious Studies major is more likely to find employment than someone in Mormon Studies.


• The faceless person who sets your insurance premiums will likely start out at at least double your salary. 

Good luck!

Religious Studies Does It Again

Craig Blomberg buries some of his more interesting observations in footnotes:

One of the true scandals of the modern academy, apparently almost entirely unaddressed in the guild, involves the number of instructors in religious studies promoting, in their classes, Dan Brown's wholly fictitious claims about what took place at Nicaea as if they were actually based on historical fact. Yet in the past decade, one of the most recurring questions I have been asked by students on university campuses where I have spoken is how the Council of Nicaea determined the NT canon. When I explain that this wasn't what Nicaea was about, they state in disbelief or reply that one of their professors taught them that it was.

(Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible [Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2014], 240 n. 79.)

I really have no reason to doubt the veracity of Blomberg's account. This would mean that some (or perhaps many) of those who teach religious studies do not actually know what they are talking about, at least on certain subjects. Now, it is one thing to make mistakes when one is dealing with a subject outside one's specialty, but what does one say about getting basic facts wrong in one's specialty?

More on the Death of the Humanities

Walter Russell Mead's blog has a post on the death of the humanities, but he also suggests how the humanities might still survive. He points out that the humanities died because the professors abandoned the great books and great ideas, which they were supposed to be engaged with, for the latest fad.

Great teachers teaching great books and great ideas are exactly what most students need. Unfortunately, too many people in the field in the last generation were interested in producing bad or indifferent teachers who taught dull and impenetrable books filled with tendentious and superficial ideas. And as for concepts like character and spiritual development, forget it.

Mead notes that not only have the students abandoned their support for the humanities, but the donors and other supporters have too. No one really has an interest in supporting people who are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, or who argue that what their doing has no interest or relevance to anyone. Those who abandon the best books for the mediocre probably deserve to be abandoned. As Mead puts it:

The priests deserted the gods; the gods have deserted the temple.

Yet, no one really wants to hold the guilty accountable.

On Religious Studies and the Death of the Humanities

Se-Woong Koo, a lecturer at Yale (poor fellow), recently wrote about the death of the humanities in Inside Higher Ed. Here are some highlights:

In all those years I was pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies, thee [sic] question of what my profession really stood for rarely came up in conversation with fellow academics.

So those in religious studies rarely discuss what the discipline is really up to. Critical thinking apparently is something applied to others, never themselves.

I saw my teachers and peers struggle against the tide of general indifference aimed at our discipline and succumb to unhappiness or cynicism. It was heartbreaking.

So the practitioners of the discipline are unhappy and cynical and the public is apathetic. This matches my experience too.

The author went to teach in Bangladesh.

My new students came from 12 different countries, and many of them had been brought up in deeply religious households, representing nearly all traditions practiced throughout Asia. They, however, knew about religion only what they had heard from priests, monks, or imams, and did not understand what it meant to study religion from an academic point of view.

So the intrepid author was ready to teach these poor benighted rubes about what religion really is about. After all, he had a degree in religious studies.

But what was meant to be a straightforward comparison of religious traditions around the region quickly slipped from my control and morphed into a terrible mess. I remember an early lesson: When I suggested during a class on religious pilgrimage that a visit to a Muslim saint’s shrine had the potential to constitute worship, it incited a near-riot.

Several Muslim students immediately protested that I was suggesting heresy, citing a Quranic injunction that only Allah should be revered. . . . Instead of provoking a thoughtful discussion, my idea of comparative religious studies seemed only to strike students as blasphemous.

So here was someone who knew a little about a bunch of different religions trying to teach a group of students about their religions about which he knows a little and they know a great deal. He did not know enough about their religion to know that some of the things that he was saying were deeply offensive. In other words, he knew a little, but not enough.

I have found that, in general, those in religious studies do not understand blasphemy very well. They have no visceral response to it, whereas those who are actually religious usually do. Practitioners of religious studies also do not understand that the basic ideas of religious studies are largely blasphemous. (A kindly man once pointed out to me that my calling his faith a religion was, itself, offensive; I changed my paper accordingly.)

With my early enthusiasm and amusement depleted, I was ready to declare neutral instruction of religion in Bangladesh impossible. But over the course of the semester I could discern one positive effect of our classroom exercise: students’ increasing skepticism toward received wisdom.

Increased skepticism is a positive effect? I think his earlier conclusion was wiser. Religion is not neutral ground. Anyone who thinks differently does not understand it.

The author continues his narrative and came to the conclusion that:

The humanities is not just about disseminating facts or teaching interpretive skills or making a living; it is about taking a very public stance that above the specifics of widely divergent human ideas exist more important, universally applicable ideals of truth and freedom.

Yes, some things are more important than others and it is important to be able to articulate what they are. Specifically,

humanistic endeavor is meant to make us not only better thinkers, but also more empowered and virtuous human beings.

When scandal befell his institution (which involved appointing someone to fill an administrative post without proper academic credentials--in this case any academic credentials), most of his colleagues advised him to do nothing.

Several of my colleagues on the faculty, though wonderful as individuals, demurred from taking a stance for fear of being targeted by the administration for retribution or losing the professional and financial benefits they enjoyed.

Neal A. Maxwell once wryly observed:

Professors of philosophy often discuss the reality of reality, sometimes with great intensity and sometimes with bemused detachment-but they always cash their paychecks.
(Things As They Really Are, footnote to chapter 1)

While some faculty, at least those who are not cynical, might still have some devotion to ideals, administrators tend to have no vested interest in being virtuous or promoting virtue, and are often petty tyrants.

It was simultaneously flummoxing and devastating to hear a humanist say that when called to think about the real-life implications of our discipline, we should resort to inaction.

 He notes that his students

gave up and succumbed to cynicism about higher education and the world, seeing many of their professors do nothing to live by the principles taught in class, and recognizing the humanities as exquisitely crafted words utterly devoid of substance.

 So, the author too concludes:

I can only conclude, with no small amount of sadness, that most humanists are not, nor do they care to be, exemplary human beings.

And so,

the humanities will always appear irrelevant as long as its practitioners refrain from demonstrating a tangible link between what they preach and how they behave.

It seems to me that Koo has provided two interesting insights, one intentionally and one unintentionally. The first insight, which was unintentional, is that the branch of humanities that he studied, religious studies, is a blasphemous parasite on the religions it studies. (This is not to say that it has to be that way or should be that way, but that mostly it is that way.) The second is that the humanities has failed to make people better people. It fails as a religion. Hugh Nibley recognized this more than half a century ago in a discussion of his own education:

Typical was the committee's rejection of my first subject for a thesis: I wanted to write about the perennial phenomenon of the mob in the ancient world; the the committee found the subject altogether too unreal, too irrelevant to the mood and spirit of the modern world, to appeal even to normal curiosity. How could you expect such men to be aware of the desperately lonely and unhappy young people all around them, seething with resentment and building up to some kind of an explosion (which occurred in the sixties), frustrated at every turn as they asked for the bread of life and got only processed academic factory food served at an automat? (CWHN 17:13).

Those searching for the bread of life will not find it in the humanities, much less in religious studies.

Time after time, scholars note that various ancient cultures have no word for religion. (Notice that English has to use a loan word from another language.) Religion was just what one did because of one's relationship with God. Religious studies, as presently practiced, does nothing to improve behavior and neither does the humanities. They are a poor substitute for religion or faith itself.

Dever on Religion

William Dever, who is an archaeologist, describes his view of studying religion:

As an archaeologist and an anthropologist, and thus a historian, I shall argue that philosophy and theology are distractions. These disciplines may well be legitimate and interesting in their own right; but they get us nowhere. . . . Indeed, they are barriers to understanding. (William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2005], 8.)

Archaeologists deal with realia, real things. People who deal with real things tend to have a different view on things than those who do not.

Rodney Stark on Religious Studies

Rodney Stark provides a great quote about Religious Studies in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, many in Religious Studies were predicting an end to religious denominations.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact was that all these assumptions about religious change were based on the impressions of "experts," none of whom had seen any data on what people in the churches did or didn't believe. Worse yet, these"experts" were mostly based in the elite, very liberal divinity schools, where they were isolated and insulated from ordinary believers. All they knew for certain was what they no longer believed. (Rodney Stark, What Americans Really Believe [Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2008], 4.)

I have seen little to indicate that Religious Studies has changed much in the intervening half century.