Sunday Saunter: Why I Still Believe in the Critical & Comparative Study of Religion
On Religious Studies & Its Decline
In 2013, I entered the Fall an undergraduate at Missouri State University and immediately declared as a Religious Studies major. (It took me longer to get my Greek minor sorted with the registrar.) I took basically any and every course I could manage to fit into my schedule: I did the very mean thing to myself of taking 21 credit hours a semester and 10 over the summer, because I was trying to graduate early, but I was trying to have my cake and eat it too by also taking a bunch of stuff that really jazzed me even before my gen eds were out of the way. Thus it was that I slid into my graduate program in the late summer of 2016 having already taken courses on Old and New Testaments, Jesus, Paul, CS Lewis, Hinduism, Yoga & Meditation, Theories of Religion, and so on with what still seems to me to have been, and to continue to be, one of the best Religion faculties in the country.
Religious Studies generally has not avoided the poor fortunes of the academic Humanities at large. It’s kind of a running joke in most corners of the Humanities that the funding is always being cut, the enrollment numbers are falling, and the institution is cutting our program in favor of athletics, but across the country, the kernel of reality in this joke has been that this really is the fate of many a humanities and religion program in particular. The statistics seem to suggest that Religion experienced a spike in enrollments among Humanities majors in the early 2000s, peaking the year that I enrolled in 2013 and then falling precipitously since then; the study just linked goes until 2017, but it notes that “From their peak in 2013 the number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in the academic study of religion fell 31% from 5,012 to 3,479 degrees, in just five years,” which was “the largest decline in 28 years of available data for the discipline.” In the Fall of 2017, only about 2% of all enrolled undergraduates in the country were enrolled in Religious Studies courses or departments. For graduate study, the peak was in 2014, with 1,055 Master’s degrees conferred, falling 19% by 2018 to 855 degrees, which sounds like it’s not huge, but in fact “represents the lowest share in records extending back to 1987.” Conferred doctorates are in even worse shape, constituting just .35% of the overall number of PhDs conferred in 2018 (in the 1990s, it was .5%). Josh Patterson and Rob Townsend, the conductors of this study, conclude:
Despite budgetary restraints and declines in majors, religious studies departments—on average—have remained stable, and the number of institutions offering religious studies degrees continues to rise. The national trends of declining student interest in religion degrees, and the humanities more broadly, cannot be separated from the current discourse on the value and purpose of college education. These indicators point to the need for careful consideration and engaged response by faculty, administrators, and advocates for the academic study of religion. Across higher education, the impact of the pandemic will be unprecedented and follow after already-concerning downward shifts in humanities degree completions. Religion scholars can and should use these data to act with urgency to inform their strategic response to the coming challenges, and they should ally with other humanists to counter the rhetorical devaluing of particular fields of study and waning institutional support.
Now, this study was published prior to COVID, and to my knowledge no comprehensive follow-up has been produced. But given the overall decline of collegiate-level humanities education and college enrollment generally, I cannot imagine, and anecdotal evidence seems to bear out, that things have not gotten much better in most places. In 2022-2023, just 3,329 Religion degrees were awarded, an 8.19% decline, at least according to this study; that’s not a huge fall from 2018 numbers, it’s true, but it seems to me that this number includes Theology degrees, which is a different discipline (more on this below), since the Study lists Liberty University as the number one conferrer of Religion degrees. Scanning the map provided in that dataset for famous universities in the guild is not encouraging: 1.5% of Baylor’s degrees were in Religion; 1.2% for Harvard; .83% for Yale; .8% for Princeton; .6% at Vanderbilt; .5% at Rice; UNC Chapel Hill, .6% (just 18 degrees). The same year, 33 degrees were awarded in Greene County, MO, which is where Missouri State is, but also a variety of other theological colleges and seminaries associated with different confessions; just 6 people in St. Louis City/County graduated with a Religion degree the same year.
The largest bloc of people who get a religion degree of any kind end up going into the clergy: in 2022, there were 359,792 people with a Religion degree of some kind in the workforce, of which 9.78% were clergy; 8.2% were lawyers or paralegals, and 6.82% became postsecondary teachers (professors); just 1.73% are high school teachers (hi!) and 3.12% are elementary and middle school teachers. Beyond these concentrations, some of which (clergy & education) are particularly suited to the continuation of Religious Studies as a formal discipline, Religion (and Theology) majors are widely dispersed in the workforce in all kinds of jobs.
All of this data paints a picture of a discipline that is in formal decline, with fewer enrollments as majors or minors as a share of an overall smaller number of collegiate enrollments.
I would contend that this is a problem—a big problem.
The academic study of religion is, theoretically, different from either the philosophy of religion or from theology. The short way to explain this is that religious studies considers the human side of religion—religion as a human phenomenon that includes beliefs, behaviors, and belonging, to use a popular triad, and that can be studied through texts, traditions, communities, history, contemporary demographics, and so on—while theology studies the divine side of religion, from within a confessional perspective on a particular religion or set of religions. Philosophy of religion is, in theory, a mediator between these two disciplines, allowing for a suspended, dialectical consideration of religion’s possible transcendent meaning with the use of philosophy rather than from a standpoint of either conviction (Theology) or what Ninian Smart called “bracketing the transcendent.”
Now, this is a pretty basic way to think about the three disciplines. In reality, most scholars of religion, philosophers of religion, and theologians engage in one another’s disciplines to different degrees and with different degrees of intensity. Most scholars of religion are scholars of religion because they are people with philosophical or theological interests, or at least started that way; sooner or later, most philosophers of religion and theologians have to engage with the findings of the academic study of religion. Many people stand bestride two or more of these disciplines and function in them in different contexts. My own schtick here on APD is that, trained in religious studies and classics, I try to do philosophy and theology from a standpoint of being critically and comparatively informed about religion and antiquity, so I’m speaking from experience.
I want to focus for a minute on those qualifiers, critical and comparative, because it’s here that I think the ultimate value of Religious Studies qua Religious Studies can be found. Religious Studies teaches us to think about religion critically: to, as I said before, “bracket the transcendent” question of religion’s meaning for a moment to zoom in on religion’s humanity, to distinguish between the emic, “insider” perspective and the etic, “outsider” perspective on religion, to chart a religion’s development over time, space, and material culture, and to identify religion’s intersections with, for example, literature, art, politics, society, sex, gender, health, suffering and meaning, and so on. And because Religious Studies teaches us to think about religion critically, it teaches us also how to have what I have called to students “critical sympathy”: both a keen, sharp understanding of religion for what it is, humanly speaking, as well as a sympathy for the people who practice religions. In part, Religious Studies is able to impart this sense of ethical cosmopolitanism to us because it deconstructs the notion of “religion” as a reified essence that categorically divides people, and instead teaches us to see religion as a concept mainly useful for organizing a broad theme of the human experience that unites as well as diversifies the human community as a whole.
The beauty of Religious Studies’ confessional neutrality is that this is work that can be done on any religion by anyone, of any faith, multiple faith, uncertain faith, or no faith. Religious Studies facilitates Hindus reading Christian literature and Jews taking a Yoga and Meditation course and secular agnostics reading the Qur’an, and the world is a better place for having this meeting grounds than it would be otherwise. When I was in grad school, the office was made up of feminist demographers of religion, a friend interested in taking on Tibetan Buddhist thought and practice from her evangelical upbringing, some Pentecostals, and well, me; our broader cohort included folks interested in Islam and Mystical Judaism and Paul and apocalypticism (hi again!) and the Reformation and martial arts and Theravada and the Bhagavadgita and most of us, I think it fair to say, had at least a little bit of interest in all of these things.
This leads me to the second thing Religious Studies teaches us to do, which is to compare religions. To study a religion—Judaism, Christianity, Sikhism, whatever—critically will yield profound fruit of understanding and humane vintage; but to study multiple religions together, comparatively, gives access to a much wider swathe of the human experience. To be able to trace the development, for example, not just of the Jesus Movement into Early Christianity but to trace it in comparison with Islamic Origins or medieval and early modern Jewish messianic movements or whatever grants insight into broader trends in the religious imagination and what forms it takes in different circumstances. And it extends our critical sympathy outwards as far as possible, to encompass as many people as possible.
When critical and comparative Religious Studies is joined to philosophy and theology, we end up with a combined disciplinary approach that amounts to the pursuit of Wisdom (cue talk of the “scholar-practitioner” and “Wisdom-seeker,” especially in the South Asian corner of Religious Studies). That Wisdom pursuit connects us to what Jeff Kripal calls the “super” part of our natures, to our preternatural and transcendent dimensions, to what I have called sophiology rather than mere theology, or, otherwise, “Indiana Jones theology.”
But short of that lofty goal, it is also the case that Religious Studies genuinely makes us more compassionate people for our neighbors of many different faith backgrounds, and is a key part to building a more just, merciful, and connected world. And this is my main concern, really, about the decline of Religious Studies: the essential service that it provides to the intellectual and moral health particularly of America is one that is only more vital with the passage of time, not less.
In a world where Donald Trump is President, where global conflicts are on the rise in parts of the globe that are religiously, politically, and socially unfamiliar to most Americans (Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific), where literacy and critical intelligence in general is declining and where we are engaging in more and more cognitive offloading onto machines and reading less and less, where a moderate center in American religious life is dropping out in favor of an increasingly polarized Religious Right and Secular Left, and where the global religious future is one that will effectively be a conversation between Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Hindus, and Nones, critical and comparative knowledge of Religion seems not just a luxury but a necessity for our world’s survival and flourishing and for our society’s struggle to realize a multiracial, multicultural, egalitarian democracy.
Does this mean I think every new college student, finally, should go out and major in Religion? Not necessarily. Certainly, I’m not advocating that everyone needs to go get a Master’s degree in Religious Studies (hi!) or a PhD. I am no stranger to the reality of the need to get a job that pays actual money, especially if you have a family in tow or you want to have one, and the relatively harsh truth is that there are vanishingly few jobs in the professional study of religion available and that the translation of Religious Studies into other, non-academic career fields, while possible, is often non-obvious. I remember being really bitter about this when I first entered the full-time job market in the summer of 2020 and went from working a miserable managerial job over the summer to a job teaching middle-school English that Fall. Most professors I know in academic Religion don’t recommend to their students that they plan to do extensive graduate study in the field for these reasons, unless a student demonstrates special proficiency or talent or interest. I think it’s always a good idea to at least minor in something diverse from what you major in (in this respect I obviously don’t regret my education in Greek but I rode the line of what might have been a foible in terms of designing my education), and so for those who are going to become doctors or lawyers or business people or something, minoring in Religious Studies seems a really good way to keep your humanity alive while you do so, and to maintain a connection to something life-giving over the course of your adult life and career, especially if you’re going to spend it doing something…well, to be diplomatic I’ll say “more logistical.”
But ultimately, fewer and fewer people are going to college, so how can they get Religious Studies? Thankfully, we’re living through an embarrassment of riches when it comes to academics functioning outside of the academy or engaging in public-facing work alongside their academic work that popularizes Religious Studies for the average person. So to close out, here’s a list of some of my favorites.
Some Free or Cheaper-Than-College Public-Facing Religious Studies Opportunities
YouTube channels
Podcasts
New Books in Religion (within which there are subdivisions for Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, Christian Studies, Islamic Studies, Indian Religions, etc.)
Minding Scripture (now defunct, but some good episodes along the way)
Online Learning
My main caveat about religious studies is that it needs to be self-aware of its hard limit: namely, that the most important things can only be understood from the emic, insider perspective of subjective bhakti commitment. (Riffing on Kierkegaard, here.) Insofar as the discipline is axiomatically committed to the etic perspective, it by definition can’t access that level. Before I was a Catholic, I considered the Mass as a type of performance art, whereas now I get how that was woefully reductive—and so on.
I also adhere to a perennialism, though, where all who are aligned with Sophia and the Logos ultimately are “Christian” in a higher sense, whether they know Him by name or not. Like Emeth in *The Final Battle*.
Appreciated the New Books in Religion recommendation. Hadn't heard of it before