The Study of Religions—Whether and Where?

A few days after my college graduation, a doctor whose office I had been visiting for periodic shots came running down the street after me. The first thought that crossed my mind was that there was a problem with the shot that I had just received. But no, that was not it. When she caught up with me, she told me that her staff had mentioned to her that I was planning to go to the University of Chicago to study the history of religions. “Do you know how much misery that program caused my family?” I had no idea; I still do not. I do know now, as I did not know then, that her ex-husband, a philosophy professor, had once been a member of Joachim Wach's Sangha, but at the time, I did not want to pry. So I just shook my head politely as if I knew. “You have talent. Do something useful with your life. Why don't you become a doctor?” At the time, I found it easy to dismiss her suggestion. I was happy with my chosen path. And anyway, medicine was never a serious possibility. I do not deal well with blood and guts. In the almost 50 years that have intervened between then and now, much has changed—in the world, the United States, and academia. Today, in 2024, my doctor's attitude, minus whatever familial misery informed it, seems widespread, almost universal. Never mind religions. In an era when students, parents, and even the US government's “College Scorecard” (https://collegescorecard.ed.gov) assess undergraduate programs in terms of their future earning potential, studying the humanities strikes many as a waste of money, let alone time. In such a climate, what future does the study of religions have? I claim no special powers of prognostication. I fancy myself a scholar of religions, not a diviner. My sense is that most predictions, whether about politics, culture, society, religion, academics, even the next roll of the dice, turn out to be wrong. In retrospect, we may be able to identify and weigh the various forces that got us to where we are; in prospect, it is too easy to mistake local swirls for the winds of change. So I will not offer any predictions here. I will simply share some of my hopes and fears, knowing full well that they are shaped by my location not just in time but also in space—and many other dimensions as well. Let us start with my fears. They are implicit in my opening story. I fear that the study of religions will shrink and that future generations will look back upon the last 50 years as an unusually creative period in our field. In part, these fears reflect simple arithmetic. First, there is the so-called demographic cliff: in the very near future there will apparently be many fewer students of traditional college age in the United States. This means that there will be less need for professors, the occupation that has provided most scholars of religions with a living. (Demand for theologians may shrink, too, but that's a different topic.) In the last few years, a second factor has emerged that compounds the effect of the shrinking pool of potential undergraduates: a declining demand for higher education.1 If this trend does not reverse, the need for professors will be that much less. And then there is the effect of a common response to the greater competition for a smaller number of students: the redirection of resources toward programs that administrators think students and their parents will find more attractive. Too often the result is yet fewer opportunities for scholars of religions. As if all this were not enough, I wonder what the impact of the growing secularization of college-age students will be (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/)? Will it lead to even less interest in the study of religions? Perhaps here there is a glimmer of hope. I have it on good authority that in that most secular of European countries, Estonia, interest in the study of religions has grown to the point that students interested in the field must be turned away. There is simply not enough room to accommodate them.2 It is tempting to confine the three forces of potential contraction that I have identified to the United States. Indeed, from a global perspective, it would be reassuring if they were yet another example of US exceptionalism: the historical lack of interest in higher education on the part of various governmental bodies in the United States, leading to a higher education landscape populated by an unusually high number of private institutions that need to compete for students and, more importantly, the dollars that students bring; a more recent shift from conceiving of higher education as a public good to conceiving of it as a private one, leading to the financing of higher education not through the public support of institutions but increasingly through loans that students take out against anticipated future earnings, effectively forcing many students to choose fields of study on the basis of future earning potential; and a culture bred in the crucible of free-market capitalism that assesses human accomplishments in terms of their mass-market appeal and potential for monetary accumulation. Unfortunately, although structures of higher education elsewhere are somewhat different, contraction in the study of religions is not limited to the United States. Programs in the study of religions are shrinking in Western Europe, too, for example, in Denmark and Norway. Given that North America and Western Europe have been the most influential drivers of the study of religions worldwide, this does not bode well for the field. But let us not be overly pessimistic. Predictable demographics aside, the variability inherent in future trends may be a mitigating factor. Just think of the various claims and counterclaims that have been made about secularization since the 1950s. Some current trends may also contain signs of hope. Contraction is not affecting all institutions of higher education in the United States equally. In the public sector, state flagship institutions seem to be growing, even as regional institutions shrink. In the private sector, demand seems to be shifting to more elite, “highly rejective” institutions (https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-haves-and-have-nots-of-higher-education?sra=true). In both sectors, these are the institutions that have historically placed the greatest emphasis on scholarship. Then, too, perhaps it is not wise to judge scholarly production on the basis of quantity alone. There were fewer scholars of religions in the 1950s and 1960s, and we know their flaws all too well. Nevertheless, how many scholars active today can match the contributions of Mircea Eliade, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Huston Smith, and Ninian Smart (in the interests of fairness, I have listed them in the order of their years of birth, oldest to most recent)? As Jonathan Z. Smith liked to say, all of us stand on the shoulders of giants. Another of my fears is about students rather than scholars, and it is more local, that is, more specific to the United States. I have never thought that the United States—or any country, for that matter—needed to produce an inordinate number of specialists in the study of religions. At the same time, unlike in Europe, the study of religions is generally lacking in US secondary education. For that reason, I have always thought that it was important for undergraduates in US colleges and universities to develop knowledge of what we commonly call religions as well as analytical skills that they can use to think about them seriously. To put this in more institutional terminology, I have always thought that the principal contribution of departments of the study of religions to undergraduate education was not the production of majors but the production of graduates who know something about religions. The departments I have been familiar with have certainly conformed to this model. Compared to other departments, they have produced relatively few majors; nevertheless, their courses have tended to be well-enrolled. Private colleges and universities that provide partisan religious education—theology, if you will—complicate this contribution. So does the current political climate in the United States, at least potentially. The biggest threat, however, may come from the structure of US higher education itself. Many schools that depend upon tuition dollars, both public and private, have been evaluating programs on the basis of enrollment in majors rather than demand for courses. Programs whose majors appear unattractive may be reduced or eliminated. Are we entering an era in which the wealthy, people with resources to spare, or people who attend schools with ample resources will have access to an education about religions while the rest of the college-age population remains ignorant? What might the social consequences of such a situation be? What political—or religious—agendas might it play into? Hopes are a bit more idiosyncratic. They arise from scholars' personal agendas and the agendas of the communities that they inhabit. At least, this is true of my hopes. I want to share two of them. They, too, are concerned with questions of where and whether. When I edited Religious Studies: A Global View more than 15 years ago, I did so with an eye to questions of where. Where do scholars of religions work? (Alles 2020) Where are they trained? From where do they derive their inspiration and ideas? Where do they communicate their results? Where are the scholars who are listening to them? The implicit suggestions were that scholars outside of North America and Western Europe may have interesting contributions to make, and that scholars inside North America and Western Europe might want to pay more attention to them. That was in 2008. Now, after public dissatisfaction with the effects of economic globalization and the COVID-19 pandemic, there is talk of a post-global world in fields as varied as economics, political science, and literary studies (e.g., Foroohar 2022; Lahiri 2022). In at least one case, “post-globality” has seeped into the study of religions, too (Borup 2020 was the only result that turned up when I searched the ATLA Religion database). Nevertheless, a case can be made that in practice, the study of religions cannot be deemed post-global. That is because to be post-global, the study of religions must first have been global, and that is something it has never really been. It certainly is not and never has been “flat” (cf. Friedman 2005), in the sense that people from all corners of the world have participated in it equally. In important ways, the study of religions remains pre-global, largely practiced in regional clusters. As in most other fields, prestige and influence are profoundly weighted toward North America and Western Europe. These are the regions where the heavy lifting of theorization has tended to take place, at least the theorization that receives widespread attention. Furthermore, communication between scholars in North America and Western Europe and scholars in other regions tends to be rather unidirectional. Still today, people in other parts of the world know more—and are expected to know more—about scholarship in North America and Western Europe than North Americans and Western Europeans know and are expected to know about scholarship in other parts of the world. How much do North American scholars, for example, know about the study of religions in places such as China, Japan, India, or Iran? To be sure, this uneven topography reflects practical realities. In some parts of the world academic resources are in short supply, training is limited, and scholarly inquiry may be subject to restrictions. But it is also true that some scholars have difficulty recognizing value in work that employs conventions and addresses questions different from their own. To say this is not to grant anyone license to borrow, in effect, a strategy from creation scientists and assert, without critical analysis, that their methods and perspectives are just as good as everyone else's. But if my worry is that the study of religions is shrinking in North America and Western Europe, my hope is that it will flourish in new and perhaps unexpected places. This way of putting it, however, is open to misunderstanding. My hope does not derive from trying to fill gaps left by what I see as potential contraction in the study of religions in North America and Western Europe. I would have the same hope if the future for the study of religions in these regions looked robust. It also does not reflect a politically correct desire for inclusivity, although I do share that desire. It arises instead out of a conviction that there is something that scholars working in these regions are best positioned to tell the rest of us. The relatively recent, vigorous discussion of the limitations of the category “religion” was largely carried out by scholars in North America and Western Europe, but at least it revealed the extent to which work in our field has imposed folk categories from Western Europe and the European diaspora—in recent decades heavily Anglophone—upon the rest of the world. Serious engagement with scholars whose categories derive from elsewhere carries the potential to improve all of our analytical work. Scholars in North America and Western Europe can and should help foster scholarship in other parts of the world. One way they can do so is to disrupt unidirectional communication: to recognize explicitly work in the study of religions that is done elsewhere and to include it in their accounts of the field, oral or written. I tried to do this recently in an article on “The Study of Indigenous Religions” (Alles 2023). I surveyed not just the admittedly voluminous accounts and analyses of Indigenous religions by scholars in Western Europe and North America but also traditions of scholarship among non-Indigenous scholars in South Asia and among Indigenous peoples themselves. Better accounts than mine are both possible and needed. My second hope concerns a question not about where but about whether. Rather than being global in scope, it is specifically about the study of religions by North American scholars. Start with this observation: There are, in India, to say nothing of the rest of South Asia, over 100 million Adivasis; that is, there are over 100 million people who self-identify as Indigenous (upper-case i) in an international sense.3 The size of that number should make any scholar of religions pause. It means that there are more Indigenous people in India than there are people in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, or Spain. It also means that there are more Indigenous people in India than in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States combined. Now add a second observation: although there are several good scholars in North America who study Indigenous people in South Asia, so far as I am aware from working with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit of the American Academy of Religion for over a decade, it is possible to count North American scholars of religions who study Adivasi religions on one hand—minus the thumb. Scholars in the United States and elsewhere do excellent work on Indigenous religions. Given the dynamics of settler colonialism, it makes sense to give Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand considerable attention. Furthermore, the widespread failure to introduce Adivasis into this mix is not a matter of openness; scholars of Indigenous religions would welcome scholars of Adivasis into their conversations. That there are so few scholars of Adivasi religions is a lost opportunity to broaden and deepen our understanding of Indigenous peoples and their religions, if only for the reason that India was not a settler colony (in one sense, it was a succession of settler colonies, just not a British one). As a result, Adivasi ideas and practices may complicate a certain tendency to essentialize Indigeneity, what Siv Ellen Kraft especially has taught us to see as an emerging “Indigenous religion” (in the singular) centered on “notions of an Indigenous we and a flexible, but fairly standardized, vocabulary of assumed similarities: harmony with nature, healing and holism, antiquity and spirituality, shamanism, and animism” (Kraft et al. 2020: 186).4 Similar comments about complicating and broadening our understanding could be made, mutatis mutandis, in regard to religions in South Asia. The religions of South Asia are extensively studied in the United States, even if sometimes under circumstances that are trying and regrettable. A program in the study of religions that did not address Hindu and Buddhist topics would be most unusual. The same is true of textbooks. Nevertheless, one can read discussions of Hinduism or of South Asian religions in textbooks and never encounter the word Adivasi.5 It is also disheartening, if not uncommon, to encounter scholars who conflate Adivasis with Dalits (the preferred self-designation of many former untouchables). Adivasis are a separate set of communities from Dalits. They have their own distinct convictions and practices. Conflating them with Dalits simply shows how rudimentary US scholarship is in this area. There are many fine scholars in South Asia and Europe who study Adivasi religions. To take one example: the contributors to Brill's Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia (Carrin et al. 2021) include 44 scholars located in Europe and 18 scholars located in South Asia. Of the seven North American contributors, five are anthropologists located in the United States (two of them professors emeritus), and one is a social and human ecologist located in Canada. Only one self-identifies as a scholar of religions.6 If I could have only one wish for the study of religions in North America, it would be just this: that more North Americans interested in South Asia or Indigenous religions would study Adivasi religions. Given current realities, I have to wonder: is this a hope, or is it just a fantasy? Fears and hopes, hopes and fears. Stated or not, they are always there, always changing. But in contemplating the future, it is also good not to ignore the past. Whatever hopes and fears I may have, at least I have no regrets about ignoring my doctor's advice. As the back issues of Religious Studies Review demonstrate, the study of religions has had 50 good years. It is a solid foundation on which future generations can build. Whether they choose to do so is up to them.

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