(INTER)RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Making a Home in the Secular Academy
Kate McCarthy
As interfaith and interreligious studies programs—majors, minors, certificates, and concentrations—emerge in American colleges and universities, it is worth noting that the larger field of secular religious studies is not necessarily throwing a welcome party. While many of these new programs are housed or affiliated with religious studies departments, the relationship between the fields has not yet been clearly established, and tensions between them are deep and complicated. The case for establishing such programs as part of, or even allies to, religious studies requires careful mapping of purposes, methods, and values.
I come at this issue with double vision. I earned my PhD in systematic theology with a focus on Christian theologies of religious pluralism, and I am committed to a particular understanding of religious diversity as a public good. But I have spent my academic career in the religious studies department of a public university, where the word “theology” is sometimes suspect, and I am equally committed to the project of secular critical inquiry that is religious studies. Interreligious or interfaith studies as it is beginning to be defined is not a theological endeavor, yet its normative agenda and deep ties to the US interfaith movement whose roots and frameworks are Christian, as well as its friendly disposition toward religion itself, raise difficult challenges for an academic partnership. What’s more, the creation of interfaith and interreligious studies programs is often closely linked to extracurricular programs aimed at promoting intergroup understanding and inclusive campus climates, often under the auspices of larger diversity initiatives. Scholars of religion, then, may have trouble seeing this work as an area of academic research, relegating it instead to the world of student affairs.
But it is clear that serious secular academic work is being done in the area of interreligious relations, in a wide range of disciplines. Beyond the fields of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, American religious studies scholars working out of varied disciplinary frameworks have brought increasing attention to religious diversity, as evidenced by the success of Diana Eck’s A New Religious America (2001), Robert Wuthnow’s America and the Challenges of Religious Diversity (2005), and Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace: How Religion Unites and Divides Us (2010). The American Academy of Religion’s establishment of the Interfaith and Interreligious Studies Group in 2013 is an institutional marker of the growing size and legitimacy of this area of religion research.
Beyond religious studies, peace and conflict programs like those of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University rely on the work of political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists to understand the complicated role of religion in both fomenting and helping to resolve international and intercultural violence. Cognitive and moral psychologists like Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt have brought attention to the deep dynamics of social polarization and its interreligious implications. And of course historians and area studies scholars have always had to reckon with interreligious conflict and cooperation as important dimensions of their research. To conceptualize this diverse work as a coherent field of study—interreligious relations—is to make an important move toward cross-disciplinary engagement and the kind of critical mass that can give academic work significance beyond the academy. To locate it in the already multidisciplinary field of religious studies is both apt and problematic.
In 2013, Eboo Patel offered an outline of what “interfaith studies” might look like: “As an academic field, interfaith studies would examine the multiple dimensions of how individuals and groups who orient around religion differently interact with one another, along with the implications of these interactions for communities, civil society, and global politics.”1 In what follows I examine the current contours and possible future of such a field in the secular discipline of religious studies.
CONTEXTS: ACADEMIC, CIVIC, RELIGIOUS
Three overlapping contexts frame the relationship between interreligious studies and what would seem to be its logical disciplinary home: religious studies. The first of these is the institutional context in which religious studies, and the humanities more broadly, face decreasing enrollments and increased pressure to justify themselves on market grounds. Media analyses over the past several years, triggered in part by Harvard’s Mapping the Future report, have raised alarms about the “decline,” “crisis,” or “threat” facing traditional humanities disciplines.2 In this regard, anxiety is clearly felt in the halls of university religious studies departments.
Our students, influenced by the triple threat of educational debt, stagnant job markets, and a wider culture that increasingly defines the value of education in terms of its immediate economic payoff, are likely to leave their religious studies education at a single general education course—or nothing at all. And because a low number of majors is often given as justification for reducing or eliminating academic programs, many religious studies departments are indeed in crisis mode. While it is the stuff of eloquent essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the case for the long-term and intrinsic value of humanities degrees has not yet been made effectively to the relevant populations. An infusion of new disciplinary energy from interfaith and interreligious studies programs, with their promise of practical, employment-relevant outcomes, would be a welcome development but only if the purpose, values, and methods of the emerging field can be aligned with those of the existing discipline, which is rightly wary of selling out to market-based measures of educational significance.
The second important setting in which this new field is emerging is the civic context of increased public concern to reduce interreligious intolerance and promote intergroup understanding. Increasing public anxiety about interreligious conflict and extensive media coverage of the changing US religious landscape have fueled countless initiatives to improve religious literacy and reduce prejudice and bigotry. These efforts are seen at the local level in the proliferation of community-based interfaith organizations, at the national policy level in the State Department’s establishment in 2013 of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs, and in the educational arena in such programs as the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, which launched in 2015 and whose massive open online course (MOOC) in religious literacy enrolled over thirty-two thousand students in the spring of 2016.3
The project of strengthening the social fabric by reducing ignorance and promoting engagement across lines of difference is vital given nativist responses to shifting demographics and fears of violent extremism, both of which played a role in the US presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016. Once accustomed to life in a somewhat obscure and widely misunderstood academic discipline, then, religious studies scholars now find ourselves in the less familiar terrain of public interest and relevance. These developments invite the discipline to turn a fresh eye outward.
Finally, the American religious context of decreasing religious affiliation and increasingly dynamic, plural, and hybrid religious identities complicates established models of both interreligious relations and the academic study of religion. In many American cities it has become common to see church buildings that now house antique stores or yoga studios rather than religious congregations. A Pew Research Center report in 2012 provides some numbers behind this repurposing: The “nones,” those who report no religious affiliation in particular, now account for nearly one-fifth of the US population and an even greater percentage among those eighteen to twenty-five years old.4 What are the academic study of religion and the study of interreligious relations to do with this development? Programs for the study of nonreligion and secularity are quickly emerging, but they have yet to be woven into the fabric of the discipline, especially at the level of undergraduate education.5
Scholarly work on the nones has explored causes for the decline of religious affiliation.6 It has also analyzed the identity subcategories of the unaffiliated, including atheists, agnostics, seekers, and the “spiritual but not religious.”7 But in this research, religious identities are usually understood as relatively stable things. One is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, or a “none,” and movement among categories is referred to as “switching,” suggesting an either/or binary that may not accurately reflect Americans’ increasingly eclectic religious lives. Interreligious studies and the established discipline of religious studies (whose departments and introductory courses are still largely built on “Big Five” world religion models) will both have to confront not only the new prominence of nonreligious identities but also the degree to which all religious identities are plural, partial, and hybrid, the ways many religiously affiliated people might not belong to their religions, and the ways many nones may in fact not be not religious.
CURRENT CONFIGURATIONS
One way to explore the relationship between religious studies and the emerging interreligious field is to compare descriptions and mission or goal statements. I was able to identify seventeen interfaith or interreligious studies programs currently offered by US colleges and universities and compared them to those of thirty-two religious studies programs.8 The former are diverse in their curricula—some emphasize interfaith leadership, while others are more traditionally academic—but all but two of the seventeen surveyed are located in private colleges and universities, twelve of which are religiously affiliated. This in itself contributes to the suspicion with which secular religious studies might initially view such programs.
In reviewing their published self-descriptions, I identified thirteen salient traits across the two sets of programs:
1. Scholarly method
2. Multidisciplinary method
3. Comparative method
4. Explicitly neutral, objective, or critical method
5. International or global scope
6. Religious literacy as purpose
7. Promoting dialogue as purpose
8. Understanding diversity as purpose
9. Contributing to citizenship or the public good
10. Fostering empathy, sympathy, or appreciation of other religions
11. Personal development or critical self-awareness
12. Professional preparation
13. Attention to nonreligious perspectives
The graph “Percentages of Interfaith/Interreligious and Religious Studies Program Descriptions Featuring 13 Traits” shows the percentage of the two program types that featured each trait. While it is certainly likely that the programs surveyed do more (or perhaps less) than their public statements indicate, these characterizations give a broad sense of self-understanding in the field(s).
For both religious studies and interfaith/interreligious studies programs, a multidisciplinary method and a global perspective are high priorities. Many programs also are understood to be serving practical goals by improving skills for citizenship and equipping students with professional competencies. What is striking, though, are the traits that are common in one set of programs and rare in the other. Among the traits that showed up least frequently in religious studies program descriptions, for instance, are the development of empathy or sympathy for other religions, promoting dialogue, and personal development and critical self-awareness. Each of these is relatively prominent in interfaith/interreligious studies program descriptions, with dialogue being the second most common trait for those programs overall. On the other hand, while 35 percent of interfaith/interreligious studies programs cite the development of empathetic, sympathetic, or appreciative views of religious others as a goal, only 6 percent of religious studies programs include any such language (none of which were affiliated with public institutions). Similarly, religious studies programs tend to draw explicit attention to their scholarly, comparative, and critical methods, while this language is nearly absent from the interfaith/interreligious studies program descriptions, each trait appearing only once each. An obvious conclusion to draw from this comparison is that religious studies’ emphasis on critical scholarship is, at least on the surface, at odds with the more affective and religion-friendly goals of interfaith and interreligious studies.
Some of the tension evidenced in this analysis can be explained by the history of religious studies as an academic discipline. The post–World War II establishment of departments of religion in American universities was largely the work of Protestant scholars who argued for the study of religion not only as preparation for ministry but also as a vital element of the science-driven modern university. But academic interest in religion remained largely limited to those religion departments themselves.9 Especially as higher education shifted from mostly private to mostly public institutions and from a liberal arts to a professional focus, the study of religion was increasingly marginalized.10
When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1963’s Abington School District v. Schempp that school-sponsored Bible-reading was unconstitutional, it also legitimized the nonconfessional academic study of religion in public education systems, declaring in fact that “it might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. . . . Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”11 But that ruling also intensified concern among academics to keep hard and fast the boundary between the study and endorsement or practice of religion. Thus in the many now well-established religious studies departments in public universities across the country, there is wariness about practicing meditation in the Buddhism class, and even more wariness about hiring a Protestant pastor to teach the introductory Christianity course.
This concern for legitimacy and boundary maintenance extends beyond public universities to the wider self-understanding of the field, as seen in the last of historian of religion Bruce Lincoln’s famous “Theses on Method,” in which the religious insider is barred entry to the discipline.12 Especially as the public practice of religion becomes increasingly associated, rightly or wrongly, with intolerance and violence, religious studies practitioners will rightly highlight these distinctions. If religious studies is to make room for interreligious studies, with its orientation to empathy and engagement, this boundary will have to be carefully renegotiated.
NAMING THE FIELD
Perhaps the most important step in defining the relationship between these two areas of study is terminological. One need not aim for orthodoxy here. The larger field of religious studies is also variously called religion, comparative religion, and history of religions, each with a different inflection but all mutually intelligible. The most widely used terms for the newer field, though, are more freighted. “Interfaith” appears to be the most widely used in the academic programs launched to date. But I believe “interreligious” is the better term, for two reasons.
First, “interreligious” more accurately denotes the inclusive scope of the field. “Faith” is a heavily freighted term, one that emerged from Western religious systems and is prominent especially in Protestant Christianity. Leonard Swidler has noted that “interfaith” came to be used more than “interreligious” as more Protestants got involved in interfaith dialogue programs in the mid-twentieth century.13 “Faith” connotes personal disposition (“being faithful”) and propositional assent (“having faith in this or that”), religious features that may not be central to non-Christian traditions in which ritual or ethical practice may be more prominent, or in which communal identity rather than individual piety is paramount. To ask the word “interfaith” to do the work of including Theravada Buddhists and Reform Jews—let alone secular humanists—is akin to asking “mankind” to stand for all humans. We can make the mental translation, but why not define the field more openly at its inception? If we begin from Patel’s wonderfully inclusive naming of the object of study as “individuals and groups who orient around religion differently,” “interreligious” would seem the better choice, especially as it pertains to those whose different orientation does not include religious affiliation of any kind. Any academic program in interreligious relations must ask whether students and scholars of all religious affiliations (including none) would find themselves at home in the discipline; “interreligious” is the more capacious term.
A second reason to opt for “interreligious” over “interfaith” is methodological. If this is to be an academic discipline suitable to secular higher education, it must not be construed as an auxiliary of the interfaith movement. Countless national and international initiatives, from community interfaith councils to high-level institutional consultations, use the word “interfaith” to refer to their work of mutual understanding, bridge-building, and peace-making. These are vital projects, now more than ever. But, as Lincoln would insist, they cannot be confused with scholarship. The interfaith movement, to which the word “interfaith” is I believe ineluctably tied, is decidedly an insider affair, the work of practitioners with normative visions emerging from both their own faith commitments and the dialogue project itself. Religious studies scholars resolve the insider/outsider problem in a range of ways, from Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s insistence that any scholarly statement about a religion should be recognized as true by the practitioner of that religion to Russell McCutcheon’s insistence that the religious insider’s viewpoints, behaviors, and institutions are only data for the scholar to theorize.14 Precisely because its subject matter includes the interfaith movement, though, the academic field of interreligious studies will need to work through the insider/outsider problem in a way that emphasizes critical distance, and “interfaith” will not help in that effort.
The prefix “inter-” is less contested in naming the field, but Anne Hege Grung has made an interesting case for “trans-religious” over “interreligious” because the former “requires the acknowledgement of intrareligious differences and a larger fluidity in the encounter between people of different religious affiliation.”15 This is an important move that emerges from feminist and postcolonial analysis of the complex nature of religious identity, especially for those—women, racial and sexual minorities, etc.—who are simultaneously insiders and outsiders in their social worlds. These theorists call attention to the power relations inherent in interreligious encounters, which remain dominated by white Christians and in which doctrinal and institutional conceptions of religion edge out those of practice, culture, and internal flexibility.16 While “trans,” with its suggestions of crossing over, through, and beyond, may speak well to plural, hybrid, and power-imbalanced religious realities, I believe “inter,” with its own evocation of betweenness, can do the same job. The spaces that the “inter” in “interreligious studies” bridge must include those between different religious institutions, texts, belief systems, and practices; between practitioners of those diverse traditions; between those affiliated with the same tradition who differ in culture, race, gender, sexuality, literacy, and so forth; between religious and other social systems; and, finally, between religion and secularity.
TOWARD A FIELD OF INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES
Interreligious studies belongs within the secular study of religion because (1) there is a great deal of research on the subject already being done in that setting that justifies a unified (though multidisciplinary) field, (2) religious studies scholars are equipped to address the subject with unique depth and focus, and (3) perhaps most importantly, the secular academy affords the critical intellectual space where the very terms and frameworks of interreligious interaction—such as religion, faith, pluralism, dialogue—can be interrogated and theorized. The practical aspect of interreligious studies that is captured in program traits like promoting dialogue and contributing to the public good, as well as affective traits such as fostering empathy, would be recast in a secular religious studies context as civic and professional outcomes.
We might then define the field this way: Interreligious studies is a subdiscipline of religious studies that engages in the scholarly and religiously neutral description, multidisciplinary analysis, and theoretical framing of the interactions of religiously different people and groups, including the intersections of religion and secularity. It examines these interactions in historical and contemporary contexts, and in relation to other social systems and forces. Like other disciplines with applied dimensions, it serves the public good by bringing its analysis to bear on practical approaches to issues in religiously diverse societies.
The scholarly and religiously neutral quality of interreligious studies is what establishes its place in the academy. Interreligious studies therefore must underline its commitment to critical inquiry by including, among other things, systematic analysis of conflict, domination, and contestation in historical and current interreligious encounters. That is, medieval Cordoba must be set against ISIS and the antigay Westboro Baptist Church. In this sense, McCutcheon is right that it should not be the task of interreligious relations scholars to be caretakers of the traditions. Such programs must also attend to the full range of dispositions toward religion itself, including those of the evangelical atheist. It is problematic, especially given the data on American nones, that so few of the surveyed religious studies programs (one of thirty-two) and interfaith/interreligious programs (two of seventeen) listed explicit attention to nonreligious worldviews.
The idea of pluralism that underlies much of the discussion of interfaith and interreligious work in the United States is due for particular scholarly scrutiny, and theoretical framing is a critical part of the endeavor. Critics of initiatives like the Harvard Pluralism Project and Interfaith Youth Core have argued that in these settings pluralism can function in the service of American exceptionalism, in the universalizing of elite cultures, and even in “the expansionist logic of empire” by incorporating more and more identities—such as religious conservatives, atheists, and racial minorities—into configurations of difference that make real difference invisible.17 These are important and sophisticated critiques. If interreligious studies is to achieve the status of an academic discipline, central theoretical constructs such as this must be subject to critique and reformulation.
To say that it is religiously neutral, though, is not to burden interreligious studies with the standard of objectivity. Ironically, while religious studies has continued to pursue strict detachment in the quest for academic legitimacy, most other academic disciplines have long acknowledged that there is no view from nowhere and that scholars inevitably bring predispositions to their research questions. But religious studies scholars are up against a unique problem when this is acknowledged. As Bruce Grelle argues, “The language of neutrality is one of the main things that helps us distinguish between an academic and a devotional approach to the study of religion, a distinction that has never occurred to a surprising number of people.”18 Ongoing critical reflection on the scholar’s role and self-understanding in relation to the subject matter must accompany the growth of interreligious studies.
The establishment of interreligious studies as a subdiscipline of religious studies creates a space in the field for clear articulation of the intellectual and civic values that drive it. These can align with those of the diverse secular institutions in which the programs will be housed. Grelle includes among these values “free and open inquiry, respect for multiple perspectives, and evidence-based argumentation,” as well as freedom of religion and the promotion of tolerance, which, he acknowledges, “undoubtedly aligns [the field] with liberal pluralist democratic polities.”19 Ongoing conversations with critiques of these alignments will be an important aspect of interreligious studies as a secular discipline. But it will be vitally important to ally the field with values that are constitutionally sound, civically relevant, and clearly distinct from confessional approaches.
The last feature of this conception of interreligious studies that needs further explication is its applied element. Given the civic context of increased attention to the problems of religious intolerance and the real-world consequences of religious illiteracy, religious studies can, through the interreligious subfield, develop programs that substantively engage students in real-world concerns. While other academic disciplines have been building relations with community institutions for decades, secular religious studies programs have generally resisted such partnerships, both because of concerns for maintaining critical distance from the practice of religion and because there is not yet a robust infrastructure for getting students to do practical work around religious diversity in the community. Those of us invested in the long-term flourishing of religious studies would do well do to embrace an applied dimension to our mission, framed in terms of civic and professional (rather than religious) values and skills. Many religious studies programs, as noted above, already include civic and professional outcomes in their program statements. Interreligious studies programs can provide opportunities to achieve those outcomes by involving students in the theory and practice of effective interaction in professional and civic contexts with those who are religiously different. The challenge for such programs will be to find sites for community engagement that are themselves religiously neutral. It would be appropriate, for instance, for a student pursuing a degree in education with an interreligious studies minor to work with a public elementary school teacher on developing religiously inclusive and constitutionally sound curriculum, while it would not be appropriate for that student to intern with her church’s youth group. Carefully identifying and developing suitable community partnerships is one of the first tasks that secular interreligious studies programs must take on.
Religious studies scholars, especially those of us who work in American public university settings, know that our students come to our classes with misconceptions about the study of religion and about religion itself, often including essentialist views that religions are stable things and that all religions are basically the same (good or bad), or the hope that our courses might help them answer life’s hard questions. Most of us aim to disabuse them of these assumptions and expectations with opening lectures on the academic study of religion and lists of learning objectives that assiduously avoid promises of personal meaning-making. But most of us also, I believe, hope that our courses are transformative, that our students become less dogmatic, more open-minded, curious, and tolerant. Incorporating the study of interreligious relations into our field offers us a legitimate site for the development of these dispositions by locating them in the civic sphere, where questions of religious identity and difference shape policy and inform the daily practices of life and work in democratic societies. Our public universities’ mission statements typically include reference to preparing students for responsible participation in these communities, and interreligious studies programs could make a substantive contribution to that effort. This expanded model of the discipline can offer a substantive—but civic rather than capitalist—rationale for the vitality of academic religious studies, while responding to a real and urgent social challenge. By bringing a focus to the instability and betweenness of religious categories, interreligious studies also provides a space to explore some of the most interesting recent developments in both the lived practice and the theoretical interpretation of religion.