Rachel Wheeler
Indiana University - Purdue University

I never dreamed when I set off for Carleton in the fall of 1987 that I would become a Religion major. Religion had never played much of any role in my life, and it hadn’t really occurred to me that it could be something that you studied, rather than something that you did: I thought I would probably be a psychology or perhaps a political science major and from there perhaps head on to law school. But because religion was never mentioned in my public school education, enrolling in a religion class felt vaguely taboo, and for that reason all the more exciting and so I signed up for a freshman seminar with Chaplain Jewelnel Davis called “Contemporary Issues and Values” where we read everything from Martin Buber to biomedical ethics and I discovered that studying religion was basically a way to examine human nature and study history, and in a way that was far more exciting and engaging, I thought, than the way we had studied history in high school: as a series of facts and dates and wars.

As I kept taking religion classes, I was in denial that perhaps I was headed toward being a religion major. I’ll admit that I saw my religion courses as something like intellectual dessert and it didn’t really occur to me that one could make a full and nutritious meal from something so tasty. Religion fascinated me during my college years because it provided a tour through the varied ways humans have attempted to make sense of themselves, their communities and their place in the universe. I wasn’t so much seeking the answers as I was seeking the questions. And I discovered lots of great questions in studying Kierkegaard, comparative ethics, American religion and “post-Holocaust theology among other things; most fundamentally, questions about what it means to be human and what our human obligations are to one another. I think it wasn’t until my senior year, when I dropped “U.S. Women’s History” to add “Kierkegaard” – a decision that felt heretical in an age of political correctness—that I owned up to a growing realization that what I was learning in my religious studies courses was really the heart of a liberal arts education, not an interesting side trip. Critical reading and writing skills were central of course, but even more important, and more particular to religion courses was an education in deep empathy for the diversity of human experience: whatever the particular topic, religion classes posed the challenge of exercising an imaginative leap to contemplate what the world would look like if one were a Puritan in 17th century New England (my particular obsession at the time), a medieval Jew, or a liberation theologian. What I particularly appreciated was the fine balance between critical analysis and deep empathy fostered in the classroom. Our goal was not a warm, fuzzy uncritical relativism, but neither was it a cynical effort to expose religion as the opiate that deluded the masses.

My reasons for studying religion have changed over the years from college to grad school to my first job at a small liberal arts college and now as a member of a faculty of liberal arts college within a public university with 30,000 students. The first year of grad school was a period of severe disillusionment: we would now study how other scholars had approached the primary texts rather than the texts themselves. I felt I had entered a museum with velvet ropes cordoning off all the interesting stuff and leaving me with catalog copy instead. I made my peace eventually, coming to the humbling realization that I did indeed have much to learn from those scholars who had gone before me. It was during grad school that I realized my identity as a scholar was as a historian and ended up completing my degree in History with a focus on American religious history.

My students at IUPUI are very different from those I encountered at Lewis and Clark and in a way that I have found very exciting and rewarding, somewhat to my surprise. IUPUI is a big public university with a largely commuter student body. By far the majority of the students I teach are enrolled in one of my two introductory classes: Intro to Religion or Intro to American Religion, both of which are departmental “service” classes. Neither really serves as a feeder to the major, and most students take the courses to fulfill distribution requirements. Most are vocational students: students pursuing a degree not necessarily with traditional liberal arts goals in mind but of simply attaining a degree as a pathway to a better job and a better life than their parents. Many are non-traditional students, returning to complete a degree after having a family, or first generation college students, or the children of immigrants. So I have many nursing students, or “general studies” students, and a wide variety of majors, and only a tiny majority intending to major in the liberal arts.

When I took the job, I expected that teaching would be my least favorite part of the job – that teaching mostly intro classes to students who were far less prepared for college work than students at a private liberal arts college would be somewhat tedious at best. I completely changed my goals in teaching: no longer was I hoping to transmit an appreciation and understanding of the role of religion in the development of American history, or the finer points of writing a critical essay. I would now teach religious literacy, so that one day when a nurse encountered a Jehovah’s Witness, he would know about their beliefs blood transfusions, and so that evangelical Protestants would understand something about their Muslim co-workers, etc. (And my personal mission has been to eradicate the habit among evangelical Protestants of asking the question, “Are you Christian? Or Catholic?”)

I was afraid this would be a recipe for boredom: I couldn’t assign the texts that I found intellectually challenging and stimulating and I thought my revised goal of teaching what I call “religious literacy” would not be terribly rewarding. (I would now use actual textbooks and even use multiple choice questions on exams – the only way to make it through a pile of 100 bluebooks without a TA!) But I’ve been quite pleasantly surprised and I am now convinced that the study of religion provides a unique way of encouraging students to reach beyond their own experiences, at whatever level they are at academically. In a way, Religious Studies is a great leveler—almost no one enters their first Religion class with any background in the academic study of religion.

In our department, we agree to teach Ninian Smart’s “dimensions of religion” (mythical, doctrinal, ethical, etc) in our individual sections of Intro. At first I thought this would be rather tedious, but I’ve found it is a very effective teaching tool. In a sense I guess it is like the lost art of diagramming sentences: students learn to analyze religious traditions in light of standard components. It allows them to see their own traditions in a new light and gives them a basis to connect with and understand other religious traditions. Whether they come from evangelical Protestant families with deep roots in the Midwest, or are recent transplants from India via Queens, or Zimbabwe, the dimensions provide them with a neutral way to explore their religious differences and learn from each other. They end up with a vocabulary that enables them to think analytically about their own religious traditions without being put on the defensive.

For the final project for the course, I send students out to attend religious services. I usually arrange visits at places they are not likely to wander into on their own: a black Pentecostal church, a Vietnamese Buddhist temple, a mosque, a synagogue. Their assignment is to give a presentation or final paper analyzing the service in light of the dimensions. While they may find the experience initially strange and foreign, with the help of the dimensional approach, they generally find they are able to appreciate the experience as an expression of shared human values and experiences.

Surprisingly, teaching at IUPUI has meant something of a return for me to the excitement I experienced as an undergrad at Carleton. I occasionally wish teaching provided more of the intellectual challenge that would come with teaching graduate students, but at the end of the day, it is enormously rewarding to feel I can contribute in some small way to expanding the horizons of a new generation of students, by providing them with the opportunity to think and talk about the deeply human experience of religion.