Religious studies

Including the notion of ‘religious studies’ as one discipline among many for description and analysis in a volume like this suggests that there is broad agreement among those who study religion in the modern Western university as to the meaning of the term. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is a vast literature committed to providing an understanding of the nature and value of the enterprise, but, as I shall show, there is little agreement to be found among those who have put their hand to the task. Not only is the term ‘religious studies’ ambiguous with respect to the enterprise it designates, but the very idea of ‘a discipline’ is itself vigorously contested; and it is quite obvious that whether or not religious studies can justifiably be called a discipline depends wholly upon the understanding of ‘discipline’, which is operative. As one scholar has put it, the term is used with more passion than precision (Benson 1987: 91). There is, moreover, considerable debate about the nature of the modern university within which ‘religious studies’ as ‘a discipline’ exists, so that to equate ‘religious studies’ with ‘the academic study of religion’ provides little – if any – clarification as to the nature or structure of the enterprise beyond information about its institutional location. Indeed, depending upon the assumptions one makes about the raison d’être of the modern university, there is no guarantee that ‘religious studies’ as ‘the academic study of religion’ can even be clearly differentiated from the scholarly study of religion carried on in other institutions, including religious institutions. It is no surprise, therefore, that some who have attempted to set out the meaning of the term ‘religious studies’ have remarked that perhaps the clearest thing that can be said about it is that it ‘appears to be the designation of choice for the academic study of religion in the college and university setting’ (Olson 1990a: 549). There is, perhaps, equal agreement that this designation for the study of religion, ‘legitimated’ by virtue of inclusion in the curriculum of the university, came into use only after the Second World War; primarily since the 1960s. Providing a singular, overarching definition of ‘religious studies’ as it is carried out in the modern university, therefore, is hardly possible; at the very least, such an exercise is unlikely to be either persuasive or helpful. To understand ‘religious studies’ is to understand the diverse and nuanced way in which the term is used. And in a sense, one must follow the principle that to understand a concept it is important to be familiar with its history. This is not to say that no generalization is possible, but it does require that a thorough knowledge of the debate over the use of the term is essential before proposing one use of the concept over another. Much of this essay, therefore, will3 4 5 6 7 8 910 1 211 4 5 6 7 8 920 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 911 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 911 1 2 3 4 5Accordingly, I restrict my analyses to Anglo-American (including Canadian) treatments of the subject, beginning with the attempts to provide a definitive statement on the notion in representative encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries. Despite the diversity of views that will emerge in this analysis of the literature about the study of religion as it is currently carried out in colleges and universities, I shall attempt in the conclusion to draw out some warrantable generalizations about ‘religious studies’ that may assist those coming new to the field.

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