the study of religion

This post is not about stuff regular people really need to know, just getting into some distinctions that are important in my reading and my frame of reference. A lot of what I'm going to say is obvious but it just makes sense to break it all down in one place.

My field, broadly speaking, is religious studies. Religious studies is, in the simplest terms, the secular study of religion, and so is both broader and less charged than theology -- although theology can be studied without believing, can be offered as a discipline by secular institutions, and in some cases is the field of scholars who have no religious affiliation, more commonly it's associated with believers and ministerial training.

This doesn't mean that no one in religious studies has any religious beliefs, only that the academic discipline itself, and ideally any program offered in it, is belief-neutral, just like a political science or economics program.

Because "religious studies," unlike "history" or "psychology," is not part of the core curriculum throughout the land, not every religious studies scholar has a degree in that field. The field is by nature multi-disciplinary and includes history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and psychology most obviously, as well as overlapping with pretty much every other multidisciplinary field. Further from the core of the topics that are sort of the heart of "religious studies" you find areas where there are certainly scholars pursuing work that deals with religion -- neurologists, legal scholars, literature scholars -- but who might or might not consider themselves part of "the religious studies field." (Of course, this can also be true of historians whose work happens to focus on the antipopes, or ethnobotanists studying the ritual use of plants.)

In my case, for instance, I came >thisclose< to a double major in English and philosophy but, because the philosophy department was incredibly small (just a couple classes per semester), had to settle for an English degree because the alternative was delaying graduation by a semester or two waiting for another few credits in philosophy classes I hadn't already taken to be offered. In grad school, I did two consecutive Master's programs (at different schools) - history because no religious studies program was offered, and Western European Studies because I was moving on short notice and had missed the application deadline for religious studies.

In both cases I focused primarily on religion and philosophy (and the history and philosophy of science along the way), but my tools and training are as a historian, not as a sociologist or an anthropologist. This isn't unusual, and it fits my areas of interest -- the development of Judaism and the early Christian Church (and the blurry inbetween), the later development of Christian theology, the history of American religion.

Some areas within religious studies -- the history of religion, the anthropology of religion, for instance -- are very deep, with numerous subspecialties, traditions, or competing schools of thought. There are books just on the history of the "quest" for the historical Jesus, for instance, and they're not lightweight books. Some are newer or narrower, like the neuroscience of religion, where there's neither enough data nor enough scholars for a robust field. There are areas that are not explicitly part of religious studies but which certainly inform religious studies, from moral psychology to constitutional law.

Methodologies vary considerably in religious studies, according to the scholar's training and focus. Comparative religion is a term that many people are familiar with, and when I was in college -- this may still be true -- many schools still had comparative religion majors, programs, or degrees instead of religious studies ones. But comparative religion is more limited in scope and methodology than religious studies -- a necessary step along the way, perhaps, but historically very focused on classification. At its worst, the comparative religion as a methodology is tunnel-visioned and focused on the wrong details -- while it is (perhaps) one thing to sort folk tales according to type, doing so with belief systems ignores the fact that people live these belief systems, and change them and are changed by them. You can go on and on about how many different flood myths there are, but what do you do with that if you don't know anything else about the different cultures the flood myths came from? But like I say, it's still an important part of the field's DNA -- knowing that there are all those different flood myths is important. It just isn't enough.

As you can likely tell by this blog and my decision to include both religion and my ongoing reading in the same place, religion and science are not only not at odds for me, they are intertwined. Religion, science, art, love, these are all means we use to grapple with our experience of the world in order to come to better terms with it. Some people abuse religion (whether they're the lawmakers or the lawbound or somewhere in between), some people abuse love. Not everyone grapples well. I am aware of, but not especially intrigued by, the fascination in the 19th century and again in the 21st with finding the "explanation" for religion, the reason for it, the lens in the mind that makes it happen. For me it's all fundamentally part of the human condition, and the human condition is always what interests me most.

Defining religion is much harder than defining religious studies. I'm not even really going to attempt it. There are a few important things, though:

1: It's a mistake to think of religion as "a set of beliefs." Most members of most religions at most points in history would find this definition nonsensical. Religion has almost always, almost everywhere, been defined, talked about, and argued about not in terms of what you believe but what you do.

2: Trying to figure out "what religion is," how to define it, whether X or Y "counts" as religion, and so on, is a whole area of scholarship within religious studies, which is not to say it is an area that has generated solid answers. I'm not new to the internet. I get that you read the above two paragraphs and there's a pretty good chance you thought to yourself that you're pretty sure you know what religion is. Do not trust that confidence.

3: This is even apart from the fact that it is often necessary to talk about doctrinal religion and lay religion separately -- what a religious institution actually teaches or embraces, versus what its members believe. Now, although I rail about the decline of modern religious literacy, I am not just talking about the fact that modern Methodists and modern Presbyterians rarely know anything about their own denominational differences. I'm talking about, for instance, the way that Marian devotion within the western European Christian laity and especially in Italy and the Iberian peninsula trickled upward over many centuries, until eventually the doctrine of immaculate conception -- which says that Jesus's mother Mary was born without sin -- was adopted in the 19th century, an incredibly late date for such a strongly supernatural piece of doctrine.

I am not saying that lay Catholics held a folk belief in immaculate conception that was eventually made into doctrine; that didn't happen. But there were strong Marian strains in folk Catholicism for a number of reasons, and Mary was consistently more important in the day to day worship of everyday Catholics than in the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Eventually this pressure from below resulted in a change in doctrine, though that single change certainly didn't result in equilibrium.

4: It is considerably easier to define and talk about any given religious institution. It is not super hard to explain what we mean by "Catholicism," or "Judaism," though it is probably a longer conversation than you're imagining. Once we can talk about Catholicism or Judaism, we can start talking about Catholic culture or Jewish culture, and then we can talk about Santeria and Voodoo in the context of Catholic culture without trying to have a much harder and more hesitant conversation about whether Santeria or Voodoo "are religions."

5: The idea that certain beliefs are -- considered on their own, without respect to context -- inherently religious beliefs is a very new one, and while it makes sense to a modern post-Enlightenment laity, it is not an especially useful one. The idea that certain beliefs are inherently supernatural, although it's one I reference myself on a regular basis, is pretty dodgy too, and at best has to be understood as a sort of shorthand, a sort of footnote referencing a long conversation.

6: One reason it's very tricky defining what a religion is, what religious beliefs are, etc., is because there are so many supernatural practices, religious-seeming practices, etc., that are often found among the practices of members of particular religions but which are not found among the teachings of those religions. I'm talking about magic, but I'm not just talking about magic, in part because magic is a complicated area of scholarship and in part because people often misunderstand what you mean by it. On the one hand, you can make the claim, as some believers might do, that various magical practices are condemned by such and such a religion -- that Christians have no business believing in astrology, let's say. On the other hand, what do you make of the reality when such a forbidden, "non-religious" practice is primarily practiced by members of the religion that supposedly forbids it?

(Kabbalah, pre-Madonna -- no, pre-19th century, obviously -- is the obvious example here, because while roundly and regularly condemned by every major Jewish denomination it is also a group of mystical practices that, whatever its outside influences, is also quite clearly Jewish in nature, Jewish in practice. This is different from the divide between doctrinal religion and folk religion because we're talking about religious, mystical, or magical practices rejected not just by institutional authorities but by regular folks. And yet also practiced by regular folks.)

(As you might suspect, defining "magic" is at least as difficult as defining "religion." To me it seems harder -- with a lot of hemming and hawing I could spend a few thousand words explaining what religion means. I would hesitate to even attempt the same with "magic.")