Carleton 50th Anniversary of the Department of Religion
Paul R. Powers, Lewis & Clark College
January 14, 2006

In spite of the nature of this gathering, my implicit argument here is that Religious Studies is not particularly distinctive within the liberal arts curriculum, and that this is actually one of its strengths.

At Lewis & Clark college, like many other schools, few students enter college planning to major in religious studies. This is in part because the study of religion is not undertaken in most high schools, so the possibility has not occurred to many people. But for a variety of reasons, college students often find themselves curious about religion and religious studies classes. I’m proud to say that at Lewis & Clark my department’s average enrollments are among the highest at the school. We get a lot of what I call ‘accidental minors’—students who take a class, like it, then take another one or two, and find themselves about to complete a five-course minor. We also have a healthy and growing number of majors, many of whom, again, had no prior plan to take this path.

The same thing happened to me at Carleton, where I entered anticipating a major in English, then considered philosophy, and finally succumbed to the enticements of religion; I blame Prof. Crouter’s Schleiermacher course, as well as Prof. Bardwell Smith’s on Hinduism.

When students (or their parents) ask me what someone can do with a religious studies major, I often say that this major is a lot like any other major in the humanities, or some in the social sciences, except that you have to spend more time explaining it to people.

That is, the skills you develop, the information you accumulate, and the career paths the major prepares you for, are all very similar to those in other humanities/social science disciplines. But when you tell people you are or were a religion major, you will often get a peculiar response:

People tend to think that a religious studies major must be strongly religious, and this tends to elicit either something almost resembling conspiratorial commiseration (“you’re a religion major? I’m a Catholic! Shhh… I actually go to church”), or a certain conspiratorial hostility (“you’re a religion major? so they got to you, too, huh?”). Or, at the very least, it sparks some serious confusion: a friend of mine, for example, who was a religion major at Brown University, was often asked whether this was leading to a career in the priesthood. This even from her own family, and in spite of the fact that she is a secular Jewish woman.

Even my colleagues at Lewis & Clark often make remarks that belie their misunderstanding of the discipline. More than once, a fellow faculty member has jokingly (or only half-jokingly, I fear) suggested that what we do in my department is teach students how to pray and chant; or that our department would deal with an administrative snafu by calling down the wrath of God.
While this confusion sometimes annoys me (leading me to chant and call down the wrath of God on my colleagues), it reflects a confusion within the discipline itself.

This confusion is nicely encapsulated by the scholar of Buddhist and Catholic thought, Paul Griffiths: The study of religion, he says, “is a scholarly enterprise without an identity, one that lacks any widely shared understanding of its central topic, or of the methods appropriate to the study of this topic” (“The Very Idea of Religion,” 1-2).

[Griffiths adds that “listening to these discussions, though, rapidly suggests the conclusion that hardly anyone has any idea what they are talking about—or, perhaps more accurately, that there are so many different ideas in play about what religion is that conversations in which the term figures significantly make the difficulties in communication at the Tower of Babel seem minor and easily dealt with” (“The Very Idea of Religion,” 1-2).]

Charlotte Allen describes the study of religion as “a shapeless beast, half social science, half humanistic discipline, lumbering through the academy with no clear methodology or raison d’etre” –she asserts that this “may be a good thing,” as it allows the discipline to pitch as large a tent as possible (quoted by McCutcheon, “More than a Shapeless Beast,” 17).
Both Griffiths and Allen seem to agree that the most important division within religious studies is between what we might call the religious study of religion, on the one hand, and the non-religious, on the other.

As Russell McCutcheon, a partisan in the debate, puts it, the central disagreement in the field concerns whether religion is, on the one hand “simply… a self-evidently meaningful, apolitical, unique phenomenon that causes other things to happen but is itself uncaused since it is an indescribable impulse and personal conviction” (“More than a Shapeless Beast,” 17); or, on the other “a product of human biology, psyches, history, or society” (ibid., 3). For McCutcheon, the shapelessness of religious studies “is a good thing only if we presume that religion is essentially a multifaceted mystery that gets shortchanged when understood exclusively as a human doing” (ibid., 17).

I have my own solution to this dilemma of how to understand the category of ‘religion’ and just what religious studies scholars actually do. I express my solution in a lecture I give in various classes under the admittedly melodramatic heading “There is no such thing as religion.”
My imagined interlocutor in this lecture is the popular independent scholar Karen Armstrong, who in her less careful moments espouses a certain neo-perennialism, which I will call the “all religions are one” position. This is the suggestion that the essence of each religious tradition is the same—usually formulated as some form of a quest for peace, love, and understanding.
This position, I believe, cannot stand serious scrutiny, and a clear-eyed, full-throated rejection of it would go a long way toward clarifying for ourselves and outsiders just what it is we do in religious studies. What we actually do in religious studies is not study all religion at once, or seek the essence of any or all traditions, but rather we start with and constantly return to various particular, specific phenomena—a text, a person, a place—all historically contextualized.

I take as my principal ally here the iconoclast Historian of Religions Jonathan Z. Smith, who has argued that “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytical purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy” (Imagining Religion, xi).

Smith is emphatically not arguing that we should abandon the term ‘religion’ or the academic study of religion. But we need to realize that the phenomena we call “religion, religions, and religious” do not come to us so labeled, with the relationships among themselves already made apparent. What we study in religious studies is a messy and fascinating batch of phenomena, and we call it “religion” or “religious” out of our need for a space in which to think and converse. Religion is at least a term of convenience, and it may be much more than that—a necessary product of our innate tendency to think comparatively, analogically, and taxonomically.

In short, we must compare and classify phenomena, and we need terms like ‘religion’ to do so. But there is no single thing out there that is the essence or sum total of all religions.
“He who knows one, knows none,” as Max Mueller concluded—not because they are all the same, but rather because, as Smith puts it, classification and comparison, “by bringing disparate phenomena together in the space of a scholar’s intellect, often [produce] surprise, the condition which calls forth efforts of explanation” (J.Z. Smith, “A Matter of Class,” 175).

The category of “religion” itself is a hypothesis, a question mark. It should be a space for inquiry, not a foregone conclusion or reified entity. We should never stop ‘asking whether,’ rather than ‘assuming that,’ the many and various things we call religious really do have things in common.
The idea, for instance, that Hinduism and Islam are members of the same category is an idea we ought to be very careful about. It should be held onto very loosely indeed, so that the need to keep these two things together does not force us to do them violence in the process. A category that contains such messy, unwieldy, internally diverse phenomena as Hinduism and Islam is a category we really ought not take too seriously.

My description of religious studies and the very category of ‘religion’ as a space for open-ended inquiry bears, of course, on the question of the place of religious studies in the liberal arts.
When I teach a seminar on my academic sub-specialty, Islamic law, I begin with a lecture I call ‘Everything I ever Needed to Know I learned by Studying the treatment of intent and subjectivity in pre-modern Arabic Islamic Law texts.’ The title, of course, is adopted from Robert Fulghum’s anti-intellectual best-seller ‘Everything I Ever Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten,’ but mine has a different point: human phenomena are interconnected, and learning a lot about any one aspect of societies, cultures, histories, persons, and so forth, necessarily means learning a lot about a whole lot of things. My studies of intent in medieval Islamic law required and allowed me to study the philosophy of mind, language, and law; western legal history; Jewish and Christian legal and ethical thought; anthropological ritual theory; and Weberian and Durkheimian social theory; not to mention Islamic and Arabic history, political theory, ritual practice, and the fine points of Arabic grammar. The list could go on almost infinitely. What we know and learn is connected to more or less everything else we know and learn.

Thus I am frankly not sure that religious studies brings anything unique to the liberal arts table, and that does not trouble me one bit. To me, there is nothing overwhelmingly special about religious studies that isn’t special about the liberal arts in general. Rather, we who engage in religious studies are at our best when interwoven into a wide range of conversations that freely cross disciplinary boundaries, boundaries which these conversations expose as largely arbitrary. We may need departments and divisions for administrative measuring and marketing purposes, but like the category ‘religion’ itself, we ought not to take these categories too seriously. They ought to be question marks and parenthetical asides, rather than exclamation points, within the truly important things: the conversations that make up the liberal arts.