CONSTRUCTING INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES
Thinking Critically About Interfaith Studies and the Interfaith Movement
Amy L. Allocco, Geoffrey D. Claussen, and Brian K. Pennington
Driven by a vision of cooperation between individuals of diverse religious identities, the civically oriented American interfaith movement has successfully established cocurricular interfaith engagement programs on many college campuses. We value these programs and the vision of “making interfaith cooperation a social norm,” as the leading interfaith organization, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), articulates it. But as scholars who teach about interreligious encounter, we are also concerned that efforts valorizing cooperation may provide fertile ground for essentialism and generalization, fail to fully engage with histories of interreligious conflict, and unwittingly provide cover for the secular nation-state, hegemonic forms of Christianity, the globalizing capitalist order, and other systems and approaches that are in fact responsible for many of the tensions that the interfaith movement aims to address. In this chapter we extrapolate from our experience of developing the curriculum for an “interreligious studies” minor at Elon University to argue that the academic field of interreligious studies must maintain independence from the interfaith movement in order to critically assess discourses and practices that promote tolerance, pluralism, and respect for diversity.
OUR CONTEXT
A commitment to promoting interfaith dialogue and interreligious education was written into Elon University’s 2010 strategic plan. Along with other faculty who aspire to teach about religion in ways that advance understanding and reduce conflict, we responded enthusiastically to this signal that the university supported our interests and was willing to invest resources in pursuing them. Three years later, when we joined IFYC’s national effort to develop academic programs in interfaith studies, we found ourselves asking a series of questions prompted by this endeavor as well as by our experience as architects of, participants in, and observers of a campus initiative to foreground interfaith projects.
At Elon, we faced challenges posed by our relatively homogenous student body, which is dominated by Anglo-American, Protestant Christians and has significant Roman Catholic and Jewish populations but only the tiniest minorities of other “faith” traditions. The university’s strategic plan had nevertheless begun to successfully build vibrant and well-staffed chaplaincy and cocurricular interfaith programs via its Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life. These programs included multifaith internships and engagement programs for a small but dedicated cohort of students. The initiative energized our classrooms and helped our campus to begin to seriously engage with questions of religious diversity. Although popular and transformative, some of these programs—for example, a springtime Holi celebration consisting almost entirely of raucous, powder-throwing, non-Hindu students—are appropriately critiqued by students of diverse backgrounds as superficial and homogenizing.
As participant-observers in national conversations about an emerging field of interfaith studies, we find ourselves unexpectedly at the leading edge of related disciplinary and curricular innovations. In what follows, we describe and assess Elon’s efforts to build a program of multireligious education as one site of the production of interfaith (or, to use the language we prefer for reasons similar to Kate McCarthy’s in this volume, interreligious) studies. We are scholars trained in religious studies disciplines, intellectually habituated to historical and critical theorizing. When we and our colleagues began, with encouragement from Elon’s leadership and an IFYC grant for this purpose, to design an “interreligious studies” minor, we reflected not only on the specific conditions of a campus early in its experimentation with interfaith programming but also on the terms in which the national conversation was taking shape. As we studied the handful of similar programs at other institutions, which may include coursework in leadership or conflict management, for example, we recognized that by contrast our commitments lay squarely in the realm of the humanities disciplines. When we listened to IFYC founder and coeditor of this volume Eboo Patel describe the interfaith movement he was helping to lead as a “civic project,” we asked ourselves how interreligious studies, as a curricular project and a mode of intellectual inquiry might make a distinct contribution. And as we observed our students spray powder on each other at Holi and saw Elon’s campus embrace programs like Christian yoga and mindfulness meditation, we deliberated about how to promote alternative modes of encounter and critical reflection on encounter.
OBJECTIVES FOR INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES
With this context in mind, we embarked on a yearlong investigation into curricular programs that would reflect our institutional and intellectual circumstances. We hoped thereby to complicate the questions that the emerging field of interfaith studies might ask and to spearhead innovation and new models for structuring and assessing interreligious encounter. The distinction between the interfaith movement as an action- and engagement-oriented civic project and interreligious studies as a curricular project and academic field assumed a certain prominence in our thinking, and we posited the analogue of the relationship between social programs of poverty alleviation and the discipline of sociology. At an important and fundamental level, those pursuits are often allies in their commitments to social justice and equality, but the first is a project of direct action, intervention, and policy development, while the second is an effort to understand social forces through research and assessment and to teach students to critically evaluate, improve, and enhance direct action programs. Thinking along these lines, we determined that fidelity to the principles and methods of the humanities would demand that we think and teach historically and theoretically. It would require firsthand engagement with communities and their interactions with one another as well as critical reflection upon those experiences, and it would ask us and our students to seriously consider critiques of the methods and emphases of the American interfaith movement.
In the end, we determined that a guiding principle for our curriculum development should be something like this: securing the relevance of interreligious studies to the wider academy and contributing to the advancement of the field requires ongoing critical engagement with models of interfaith cooperation and a rigorous interrogation of their ramifications.1 With these ideas in mind, we concluded that as a counterpoint, complement, and correction to the interfaith movement and cocurricular models of interfaith engagement, interreligious curricular development should equip students to accomplish three overarching objectives: (1) to analyze the character of interreligious encounter; (2) to think critically about interfaith dialogue; and (3) to historicize diversity, pluralism, and tolerance. In contrast to modes of encounter predominant in the interfaith movement, which privilege direct encounter and individual experience, and in cocurricular campus programming by students and student life professionals, which promotes appreciation and celebration but may drift toward appropriation and caricature, we concluded that three other paradigms were necessary for us to consider: historical contextualization of encounter, ethnographic engagement through the carefully framed site visit, and critical reflection on discourses of pluralism and projects of the neoliberal nation-state.
In consultation with our own department, the Truitt Center, and colleagues in other disciplines, we sought and received approval for an interdisciplinary minor in interreligious studies that requires students to meet six learning outcomes:
1. Students will produce nuanced reflections on ways that religious traditions and religious communities have interacted with other religious traditions and communities throughout history.
2. Students will recognize and explain the ways in which religious traditions and interreligious encounters are embedded within cultural, political, and economic systems.
3. Students will recognize and appreciate the contours of religious difference both within and between particular traditions.
4. Students will interact with communities and hear from practitioners, gaining firsthand experience of worship, ritual practice, gender dynamics, the use of sacred texts, political dynamics, and/or interreligious encounters.
5. Students will analyze the category of religion and the field of interreligious studies, including the histories and theoretical models that inform them.
6. Students will critique existing models for understanding and facilitating interreligious encounter and offer constructive suggestions for improving these models.
While the required courses for the minor are all located within the Religious Studies Department, elective courses may come from a variety of departments. Minors must complete:
1. The Religious Studies Department course Religion in a Global Context that introduces students to the field of religious studies and gives particular attention to learning outcome 2 (and, in some sections, outcome 4).
2. Two courses that provide breadth and historical perspective with regard to particular traditions (e.g., Buddhist Traditions, Hindu Traditions, Islamic Traditions, Christian Traditions, and Jewish Traditions) and give particular attention to learning outcomes 2 and 3 (and, in some sections, outcome 4).
3. Two elective courses that focus on encounters between different religious communities or traditions, giving particular attention to learning outcome 1 (and, in some sections, outcome 4).
4. A capstone course titled Interreligious Encounters, in which students will meet all six learning outcomes.
The following sections of this chapter offer examples of how some of our elective courses and our capstone course help students to meet learning outcomes 1, 4, 5, and 6.
THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT HISTORIES OF INTERRELIGIOUS HATRED
In choosing elective courses that meet learning outcome 1, students may elect to explore encounters between a variety of religious traditions and communities across time periods and locations. Offerings include, for example, an art history course on visual cultures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, looking at points of contact, continuity, and conflict among those traditions; a German course that devotes substantial attention to relations between Christians and Muslims in contemporary Germany; a religious studies course focusing on conflicts and confluences along the Silk Road in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages; a Spanish course that examines the history of Spanish Christian imperialism and the conquest of indigenous peoples; or an Elon study abroad course located in Ethiopia and Tanzania, taught by a historian and an anthropologist, that scrutinizes encounters between and among multiple religious communities.
All of these courses are historically oriented in one way or another and thus require students to study histories of interreligious conflict and hatred. Co-curricular interfaith programs readily acknowledge these histories, but in their effort to cast approved religious traditions in a positive light they are more likely to conclude that, nevertheless, none of our faiths in their essence truly promotes hatred and conflict. By contrast, our interreligious studies faculty are more likely to point out that what Americans like to call “faiths” have historically been political traditions as much as anything, and that members of so-called “faith communities” have often been interested in asserting political power over others and fostering hatred of those who challenge what they see as their rightful power.
One example of an elective course that explores these historical dynamics is a course taught by Geoffrey D. Claussen and Jeffrey Pugh, Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Real and Imagined). This course examines the ways that Jews and Christians have constructed Jewish and Christian identities in relation to the other in diverse historical, geographic, cultural, and political contexts. We underscore that the history of Jewish-Christian dialogue has often been less about actual conversations between human beings and more about imaginary dialogues in the minds of Jews and Christians, reflecting the way that both Jews and Christians have imagined the other as idolatrous, impure, demonic, or the source of any number of evils that must be eliminated from an ideal world.
The work of history that stands at the center of this course is David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, which gives particular attention to how diverse Christians have thought about Jews as the other in opposition to whom they have constructed their identities. As Nirenberg demonstrates, many of the Christians who engaged in influential patterns of thinking about Jews had no contact with actual Jews themselves but often used rhetoric about Jews in their fights with other Christians. Their concepts of Judaism, however, frequently had dire political consequences for actual Jews, given the historical realities of Christian political power (and Jewish political powerlessness) throughout most of the past seventeen hundred years. Even as they see the striking parallels between how Jews have demonized Christians and Christians have demonized Jews, students come to appreciate the ways in which these hatreds have had very different levels of influence on the course of history, and also the ways in which Jewish-Christian relations have dramatically shifted with the tides of political power in the twentieth century. Students are able to recognize how studying the dynamics of political power is essential for understanding the encounters between different communities.
Significantly, Nirenberg also argues that the history of Christian thinking about Jews has had serious consequences for all of us who are heir to Western intellectual traditions. Nirenberg argues that “anti-Judaism” has not been marginal to the development of dominant patterns of thinking in the West but rather “one of the basic tools with which that edifice [of Western thought] was constructed.”2 With regard to this history, Nirenberg writes, “The peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great.”3 Quite the contrary, even the very language that we use to speak about “interfaith” or “interreligious” encounters—including words like “faith,” “religion,” or “politics” (not to mention words like “spirit,” “freedom,” “reason,” “law,” “love,” and “justice”)—is burdened by the way it has functioned in the past as part of an arsenal of Christian ammunition used against Judaism (though, to be sure, such language is also burdened by its roles in other forms of intergroup conflict). And students discover that even many of the critics who may provide them with resources for “critical thinking” about religion (such as, for example, Marx or Kant) developed their critical tools for thinking about religion precisely through their anti-Judaism (though, again, other antipathies have played a similar role for other critics). Studying such histories helps students to realize how their contemporary ideas are affected by this history of ideas, how even their visions for interreligious harmony may be fashioned by histories of interreligious hatred, and how, even as they seek to be critical thinkers, they may be insufficiently critical of their own habits of thought.
CRITICAL THINKING THROUGH EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING: THE SITE VISIT
Elon has earned a national reputation for its emphasis on experiential and engaged learning in its core curriculum and across university departments and programs, and we have capitalized on these strengths in our interdisciplinary minor. Its fourth learning outcome—that students will interact with communities and hear from practitioners, gaining firsthand experience of worship, ritual practice, gender dynamics, the use of sacred texts, political dynamics, and/or interreligious encounters—is accomplished through ethnographic site visit assignments that bring students into different religious communities and spaces. These site visits, which owe a great deal to Amy Allocco’s design, feature in the capstone Interreligious Encounters course and are threaded through several other courses in the minor. While we acknowledge that there are a number of limitations and pitfalls involved in including ethnographic site visits in university courses focused on religion and religious traditions, particularly when a single encounter with a community is all that is feasible in a given semester, we persist in using such experiential assignments in our courses because we recognize the potential that even one such fieldwork encounter holds for moving students toward a more informed appreciation of others’ religious beliefs, practices, and commitments.
Although including site visits in our interreligious studies curriculum may appear to blur the lines of distinction we drew earlier between cocurricular models and our own vision, we would point to some key differences in the framing and execution of these experiences. In contrast to these cocurricular paradigms, where encounter is sometimes uncritically offered as an end unto itself, we privilege a trajectory that includes careful academic preparation followed by independent ethnographic participant-observation, classroom reflection and discussion, and written analysis to catalyze an informed and nuanced awareness of religious diversity in our students that we believe classroom learning alone cannot.
Students require adequate preparation in advance of the site visit, both personally in terms of the rigors of the ethnographic process, as well as academically, so that they are familiar with relevant histories and basic content and are therefore minimally prepared to navigate and interpret what they observe. While preparation levels will vary in relation to the course topics and foci, we know that spending significant time—ideally beginning on the very first day of class—discussing the logistics, goals, and expectations for this assignment is crucial. Still, even the best-prepared students sometimes find the site visit daunting or uncomfortable.
Substantive handouts prime students for the site visit by outlining the participant-observer methodologies they will employ as well as guidelines related to dress, etiquette, and bodily comportment. Other documents list key terms and sample questions students might ask of those with whom they interact during the visit and offer models for how to bring this experiential learning into explicit and sustained conversation with course categories and readings. We generally favor a model whereby students undertake site visits solo or in small clusters rather than arranging for the class to visit together (the approach most cocurricular interfaith engagement programs take). Two reasons underlie this preference. First, sending students out to navigate new religious spaces and communities independently offers them the opportunity to test drive course material in real-world settings and conversations, thus revealing the applicability and limits of the knowledge they have gleaned in the course thus far. This process shifts the locus of authority temporarily away from the course instructor to those they encounter on their visit and forces students to assume the responsibility for interpreting what they see and hear there (and for framing questions about what they do not feel competent or comfortable analyzing without assistance). Second, when students recount their experiences to their colleagues in subsequent classes, we all benefit by learning about an array of places, practices, and exchanges. Their rich narrations sometimes confirm or corroborate others’ experiences but also frequently act as foils or highlight significant differences. In these sessions students extemporaneously and critically engage course categories and readings as they collaboratively hypothesize about what may account for such divergences. Identifying these variances and analyzing them in conversation with material presented in the course is a key aim of the culminating site visit report.
David Pinault observes that it is the physicality of site visits involving ritual that his students sometimes find “challenging or even threatening.”4 Pinault’s students report being discomfited by the necessity of removing their shoes and getting their fingers sticky from contact with food offerings, bodily inconveniences that signal that getting out of the relative safety of the classroom to learn about living religions entails putting their bodies on the line in ways no amount of groundwork can fully prepare them for. Elon students’ concerns about somatic involvement most often coalesce around gender dynamics, particularly among those who experience gender-segregated prayer on their site visits or encounter menstrual taboos in the communities they visit. Because the site visit offers students the chance to temporarily embody gender-specific religious and ritual practices, it frequently prompts these participant-observers to raise more nuanced questions about gender roles and expectations in various religious communities than more detached classroom knowledge typically elicits.
These moments of literal cold feet are as crucial to the process of our interreligious studies model for interreligious encounter as the flashes of mutual recognition and appreciation are, and we render our fullest service to our students if we can help them to grapple with both. Successful site visits will make students palpably aware of difference as well as similarity, as attuned to incommensurable categories as they are able to recognize shared vocabularies and devotional idioms. These direct, real-time exchanges will alert students to the many ways that histories of conflict, exclusion, and distrust may still be present in contemporary communities and to think critically about the received categories of diversity, pluralism, and tolerance. And they will push us as pedagogues to embrace the role of colearner with our students as we hear and read about what they saw and did and heard, to be nimble in assisting them in contextualizing and deciphering without giving in to the temptation to overdetermine their interpretations and evaluations, or to make messy pasts and relationships overly tidy even as we push toward a more civil and respectful future.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DISCIPLINARY THEORY
Our capstone course for the minor, Interreligious Encounters, developed by Brian Pennington, helps students to meet all six of our learning outcomes, but it has two goals particular to this course: that students can analyze the category of religion and the field of interreligious studies, including the histories and theoretical models that inform them (learning outcome 5), and that students can critique existing models for understanding and facilitating interreligious encounter and offer constructive suggestions for improving these models (learning outcome 6). Capstone courses in major and minor programs very often familiarize students with the history of a disciplinary discourse and help them develop some self-awareness about that discipline’s commitments and limitations, especially as it relates to other disciplinary approaches. This one devotes particular attention to the ways in which theoretical models used in the field of religious studies can help students to critically analyze the Christian pedigrees of categories such as “religion,” “faith,” and “interfaith” and appreciate their potentially hegemonic, normativizing tendencies. Alongside pluralism’s scholarly advocates such as Diana L. Eck, for example, they read Talal Asad to grapple with the Protestant suppositions inherent in some versions of pluralism and Russell T. McCutcheon to consider the potentially ideological character of pluralism projects such as the interfaith movement.5
Students taking this course also study the particular historical contexts that gave rise to the goals of such movements. They are led to consider the roles of Western colonialism and Christian missions in establishing the very racial, ethnic, national, and religious identities that structure the contemporary social order and the interfaith movement itself. The course encourages students to ask: Who benefits from interreligious harmony and interfaith cooperation? Which values, communities, or interests are empowered by them and which are marginalized? They analyze critiques of interfaith studies as an academic field: for example, that it suppresses and stigmatizes conflict;6 that it naturalizes and normativizes a bland and interiorized spirituality;7 that it provides domestic cover for racist and imperialist projects abroad;8 that it makes the world safe for global capital; that the logic of the incorporation of difference on which it is based is part and parcel of the imperialist US project;9 that it co-opts difference for its own purposes and manufactures hegemonic depictions of minority difference;10 that it compels an accommodation to Protestant secularism;11 that it foregrounds projects of identity recognition over analysis of material sources of conflict; and that it normalizes US-style pluralism and thereby advances American exceptionalism.12 If the field of interreligious studies is to have a healthy future, we maintain that, as with all disciplines, it must work to identify and deconstruct its assumptions, even if some of those assumptions are foundational to the interfaith movement itself. Just as anthropology came to an awareness of its facilitation of the violent colonization of the non-European world, and just as religious studies has successfully (at least as of this moment) survived the disembowelment of its foundational category, “religion,” interfaith studies will have to contend with concerns about the interfaith movement’s relationship to neoliberal projects of the postcolonial nation-state. Engaging with and assessing critiques such as these, we think, can help students think constructively about the future of interreligious dialogue and contribute toward building the field of interreligious studies.
Our goal is not that our students emerge from our courses as cynical detractors of good-faith intentions and actors, and our hope for the future of interreligious studies, we must be clear, is not that it collapses under the weight of its own self-assessment. Our challenge to our students and to interreligious studies is the same we pose for ourselves. A long, cruel, and racist history of European Christian colonialism and its intellectual products has generated the very lexicon and conceptual apparatus by which we apprehend one another and structure our social actions, a critical underpinning of what Jeannine Hill Fletcher in this volume calls the West’s religio-racial project. A world globalizing at an ever-accelerating pace in service of the concepts and values born of the Enlightenment and the West’s unremitting efforts at domination have put us all in an epistemological bind that we have not yet thought our way out of. Its social and political consequences are ever more obvious. With historically unprecedented resources at its disposal, the neoliberal nation-state is relentlessly committed to the defense and preservation of the modern episteme and the global capitalism that it undergirds. Rather than building on the very values that got us here in the first place, the field of interreligious studies could set its sights on addressing the problems that give rise to the very perception that we need an interfaith movement. A more radical critique could contribute to a fundamental reimagining of our social order. In our view, that would be an approach to interreligious studies worth pursuing.13