The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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understood in the reflective methodological literature in the field. Given the proliferation of relevant publications, however, this review cannot hope to be comprehensive. Accordingly, 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.

Encyclopedic treatment of the notion of religious studies

Encyclopedic treatments of ‘religious studies’ consider the term to refer to a new kind of study of religious phenomena – that is an exercise free from narrow ecclesiastical interference and more general religious influence. Religious studies, that is, is often taken to be other than a religious quest or undertaking and, unlike earlier scholarly studies within the framework of the academy (colleges and universities), seems to work on the assumption of religion’s status as a purely social phenomenon. There is agreement not only that there existed a scholarly study of religion in the university prior to the emergence of religious studies departments in the modern university, but also that it was religious or theological in character. (‘Theology’ is often used in the literature to refer not only to a particular discipline but also, more generally, to denote any kind of confessional or religious orientation.) Indeed, not only was it religious, it was parochial, exclusivist, and therefore sectarian and ideological. As I show here, however, the encyclopedia portraits are not internally coherent in their accounts of this enterprise and therefore leave much to be desired with respect to defining the term.

Those who consult the new Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987) for enlightenment on the notion of ‘religious studies’ (Vol. XII: 334) will find the cross-reference ‘Study of Religion, article on Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline’ (Vol. XIV) – an entry that consists of essays by Seymour Cain (‘History of Study’), Eric J. Sharpe (‘Methodological Issues’), and Thomas Benson (‘Religious Studies as an Academic Discipline’), the last of which purports to trace ‘the development of religious studies as part of the liberal arts curriculum of secular and sectarian institutions of higher learning during the latter half of the twentieth century’ (64). According to Benson, religious studies is a scholarly or academic undertaking aimed at ‘fostering critical understanding of religious traditions and values’ (89) as opposed to a religious exercise designed to nurture faith. It is therefore a new enterprise, distinct from an earlier style of ‘faith-based’ study of religion in the university that is usually referred to as ‘theology.’

Harold Remus, in the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience (1988, Vol. III), claims that the development of new academic disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, applied to the study of religion at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘led eventually to the development of an academic field designated religion or religious studies that was dedicated in principle to the academic study of religion …’ (1658). There is a clear line of demarcation, he insists, between this new discipline and its forerunner (the religiously committed study of religion). Religious studies, he warns, must not be confused with religious education which, like theology, is confessional in nature. ‘Religious studies,’ he writes, ‘does not seek to inculcate religious doctrines or specific religious values, to strengthen or win commitment to a religious tradition or institution, or to provide instruction preparatory to

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professional training for the ministry or rabbinate’ (1653). For Remus, therefore, religious studies cannot involve instruction in religion but can Ânevertheless teach about religion (1657).

Alan Olson presents a similar picture of ‘religious studies’ in the Encyclopedia of Religious Education (1990a), insisting that such studies are ‘to be distinguished from theological studies programs at the some two hundred and fifty seminaries and divinity schools in the United States and Canada’ (549). For more than a century, he claims, religious studies has been trying to differentiate itself from religious and theological enterprises as a study that excludes personal belief. In his view, ‘religious studies is meant to identify an objective, scientific, non-biased study of religion as distinct from ‘theological’ and/or ‘confessional’ study for the purpose of increasing the faith, understanding, and institutional commitment of individual degree candidates in a particular religion’ (549–50). Thus, according to Olson, whereas the academic study of religion in the US had been primarily in the care of religiously founded institutions until well into the twentieth century – and, therefore, had been essentially religious in character – by the 1950s it became more scientific and ‘emerged as an important Âinterdisciplinary, polymethodological, and cross-cultural area of academic inquiry’ (551).

The entry by Ninian Smart on ‘Religious Studies in Higher Education’ in John Hinnells’ The New Penguin Dictionary of Religions (1997) echoes Olson’s description. After acknowledging the existence of long-standing traditional approaches to the study of religion in institutions of higher learning, Smart maintains that ‘Religious Studies as a new multidisciplinary subject incorporating history of religions, cross-cultural topics, social-scientific approaches and ethical and philosophical reflections … came to prominence chiefly in the 1960s and early 1970s’ (420). The significance of the new ‘discipline,’ it is suggested, is that the academic study of religions in the modern university made possible a variety of scholarly approaches different from those sanctioned up to then by the traditional theological framework. Smart argues that this shift of approach clearly broadened the scope of studies in religion.

Despite the advent of a new and clearly defined scholarly approach to religious studies, that new study does not consistently reflect the neutral status of an objective science. Benson points to this, for example, arguing that even though admitting religious studies results from secularizing forces in society, what lies behind the emergence of this new field is not primarily a scientific impulse. Religious studies programs, he notes, have usually been created in response to student and community interests, so that, even though such studies of religion are not as overtly religious as they once were, they are nevertheless concerned with more than scientific knowledge, for they are often touted as an important element in the ‘liberal education’ dedicated to the cultivation of the self. As he puts it, religious studies is ‘generally influenced by pluralistic assumptions and [has] tended toward global perspectives on the nature and history of religion’ (1987: 89). As a consequence, religious studies, even while bringing a broader curriculum to the religion department and considerably undermining the traditional seminary model, has unfortunately held the door open to ‘a crazy quilt of courses encompassing many disciplines, eras, regions, languages, and methods of inquiry’ (91) – including traditional seminary-type offerings of Christian history, theology, biblical studies, religious ethics, religious thought, and religious education. The survival of religious studies in the US, he suggests, is therefore tied not to the social sciences but rather to the fate of the humanities which are, like theology in the past, directed not only toward providing knowledge about the human estate, but to the search for meaning, the inculcation of values, and the formation of the character of students. Recognizing this, Benson points to the vestigial religious overtones to ‘religious studies’ in the university context, noting that in the publicly

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funded university, the study of religion occasionally raises apprehension ‘concerning church– state relations and the constitutional status of state-funded religious studies’ (89). Objections to such studies in the public university context, he suggests, have eased in the light of court decisions that have distinguished teaching about religion (even with the overtones described) from religious indoctrination, implying that only self-ascribed sectarian religious education need be excluded from the field. In Benson’s estimation, therefore, religious studies seems to connote a broadly liberal religious education directed toward the formation of character and the betterment of society rather than scientific study aimed at knowledge and explanation of religious phenomena. He admits that in the 1960s there was deep interest in gaining disciplinary status for religious studies, but not on the grounds of its being a science. Rather, such status was sought on the basis of scholarly interest in a common subject matter: ‘the nature and diverse manifestations of religious experience’ (91). But this, he declares, is not sufficient to warrant its recognition as a discipline, because it clearly does not have a method peculiar to itself. ‘Religious studies are, perhaps, best understood,’ he therefore concludes, ‘as a community of disciplines gathered around the complex phenomenon of religious belief and practice’ (92).

Although Remus argued for a line of demarcation between instruction in religion and teaching about religion, he also noted that such teaching about religion is of particular importance to liberal education (1988: 1658). And in so doing, he seems to suggest that religious studies is more than merely a scientific undertaking, despite his insistence that it is not the task of liberal education to make the university a religious place (1658). He claims, for example, that it is not only the emergence of the social sciences that provided an impetus to the development of this new field, but that a ‘decline in institutional religions has also been a factor in enrolment in religious studies courses …’ (1658), suggesting thereby that the new enterprise has become in some sense a surrogate religion. Courses available in the new departments, that is, provide students with ‘opportunities to pursue some of the basic human issues – such as freedom, justice, love, evil, death – that universities were often bypassing in favor of technical and analytical study’ (1659). Thus, although not intending to indoctrinate, the new religious studies department nevertheless constitutes an element in the student’s search for meaning in life; it is not simply concerned with obtaining empirical and theoretical knowledge about religion.

Olson’s demarcation of religious studies from a religio-theological study of religion is at least as ambiguous. For Olson, however, the reasons no such clear demarcation is possible are connected to the nature of science rather than to the nature of either religion or religious studies. A proper understanding of ‘science,’ Olson insists, will be seen to exclude all possibility of providing a fully naturalistic explanation for religion. ‘Religious studies,’ he writes, ‘has greatly contributed to the growing awareness that true science does not have to do with the development of a monolithic discipline, but with the collective efforts of a community of scholars illuminating one or more facets of the truth’ (1990a: 551, emphasis added). In an article on the university in the same encyclopedia (1990b), Olson’s notion of religious studies is further clarified in his claim that the discipline is an important element in the humanities because it provides sustained attention to religious values, making knowledge alone an insufficient goal of the enterprise. Consequently for Olson – although he does not spell it out in great detail – a scientific study of religion that seeks to study religion wholly objectively is little more than an ideology of secular humanism.

The essay by Smart in Hinnells’ The New Penguin Dictionary of Religions also acknowledges that the so-called new religious studies is not altogether new; in fact, it offers programs that

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often parallel those offered in divinity schools and departments of theology. It is acknowledged, moreover, that, at least in part, religious studies is fuelled by ‘a growth in questing and questioning’ rather than by the ideal of obtaining objective knowledge about religion (1995: 420–1). Thus, even though involving the sciences in the study of religion, the new religious studies is not unambiguously scientific in intent or in practice. Not only is it determined by a religious or theological agenda, it is also shaped, Smart argues, by other ideological agendas. Since its emergence in the 1960s it has been profoundly affected by newer, non-objectivist approaches to the understanding of human phenomena such as feminism and postmodernist theorizing (421). Smart then concludes by pointing out how important religious studies is to the humanities – and by implication – to the humanist (and ‘liberal education’) agenda: ‘Religious Studies is in one sense a branch of social science but has also begun to play a vital role in the humanities, both because of its cross-cultural commitments and because of its serious consideration of diversity of human world-views’ (421).

In light of this analysis of the encyclopedists’ efforts to provide an account of ‘religious studies’ – of the academic study of religion in the university context – scholars will have to acknowledge, as does Adrian Cunningham (1990), that ‘perhaps “religious” [in the phrase “religious studies”] may still carry hints of its earlier usage to describe adherents, and of the ambiguities of “religious education” …’ (30). Michael Pye (1991) makes the same point more forcefully, arguing that ‘the adjective “religious” can easily suggest, and sometimes may be intended to suggest, that these “studies” are supposed to be religious in orientation and not simply studies of religion …’ (41). The term is often used, he maintains,to designate those subjects and activities which in the past have constituted theological enterprises, and must therefore be taken for ‘camouflage for theology’ (42).

The lack of clarity and precision in the encyclopedia definitions of ‘religious studies’ is not surprising for it reflects current practices in the enterprise as it is observed in college and university departments around the world. A critical review of the self-reflective literature on “religious studies” as it is carried on in Canada, Great Britain, the United States of America, and elsewhere in the world will, I suggest, lend credence to Cunningham’s and Pye’s assessment that the field fails to live up to the implicit ideal of it as a scientific rather than a religious undertaking found in the encyclopaedic accounts.

‘Religious studies’ in Canada

The character of the academic study of religion is thoroughly analysed in the ambitious state- of-the-art reviews of religious studies in Canadian universities directed by Harold Coward. Six volumes of the study have appeared between 1983 and 2001, covering the provinces of Alberta (Neufeldt 1983), Quebec (Rousseau and Despland 1988), Ontario (Remus et al. 1992), Manitoba and Saskatchewan (Badertscher et al. 1993), British Columbia (Fraser 1995), and New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland (Bowlby 2001).

Although entitled ‘The Study of Religion in Canada/Sciences Religieuses au Canada,’ the projected study is described in the editor’s introduction to each volume as ‘A State-of-the- Art Review of religious studies in Canada’ (emphasis added), which seems to identify ‘religious studies’ in university departments very broadly with any and every type of study of religion carried on in institutions of higher learning. The ambiguity of the project description, in fact, provides other authors in the series all the encouragement needed for dealing not only with the academic study of religion in the university setting but also with the religious and

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theological study of religion in other post-secondary educational institutions from bible schools to seminaries. Brian Fraser, for example, entitles his state-of-the-art review not ‘Religious Studies in British Columbia’ but The Study of Religion in British Columbia (1995), and makes it very clear early on in the volume that he believes the ambiguity of the project title leaves room for argument to the effect that the kinds of study carried on in these very different institutions are not only complementary but in some fundamental sense the same. ‘In the other volumes in the Canadian Corporation for the Study of Religion (CCSR) series on the study of religion in Canada,’ he writes, ‘the focus has been on religious studies in the secular university, with minimal attention being paid to various approaches of theological studies’ (viii). As there is only one department of religious studies in universities in British Columbia (UBC), and because Fraser works, as he puts it, from a ‘vocational base in theological studies,’ he chose ‘to focus on the broader subject indicated by the original designation of the series as a whole, i.e. the study of religion’ (viii–ix). A comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in that province, he insists therefore, ‘requires that appropriate attention be paid to both religious studies and theological studies’ (ix). This, in his view, moreover, is not mandated simply by the fact that two radically different kinds of study of religion exist in institutions of higher education. It exists also because they have complementary interests, so that a proper study of ‘religious studies’ requires that this fact be recognized. According to Fraser, for example, both types of study of religion exact an element of commitment aside from that found in religious institutions; for while religious institutions of higher learning are committed to enhancing ‘participation in and contribution to religious traditions and communities that govern the institutions in which the study takes place’ (viii), the so-called neutral and non-advocative study of religion in the university is also directed toward results ‘that intend to elucidate the questions of human existence that religions have always tried to confront’ (viii). Religious studies, therefore, even though having ‘nothing whatsoever to do with the professional training of ministers’ (20), seems to be a kind of non-sectarian civil religion or general theology fit for ‘a public and pluralistic institution’ (viii) because it engages fundamental questions of meaning in human existence. His views in this regard are clearly exhibited in his praise for the work of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, which, he claims, emerged in part as ‘the result of the need for an expanded view of studies in religion’ (109) wherein the ‘interdisciplinary nature of its commitment brings together the various voices of the scholarly worlds, while not ignoring the community at large, [to address] major challenges of global concern …’ (109). And it is in light of this kind of project that Fraser expresses the hope for an integration of the various approaches ‘to the study of religion and the religions themselves[,] and for the development of a [university-based] doctoral program in religious/theological studies’ (109, emphasis added).

Had Fraser consulted the first volume in this series, he would not have needed to provide justificatory argument for his study of religious and theological programs of study in British Columbia’s religious institutions. For in Ronald W. Neufeldt’s (1983) account of ‘religious studies’ in Alberta he acknowledges that some scholars ‘expressed some opposition to the inclusion of theological colleges and bible colleges and institutions’ (xi) but nevertheless in his study proceeded to support such an expanded notion of the field – as has every subsequent study.

In all of the programs described in the Canadian studies, only that of the University of Regina is (in theory at least) purely epistemic in orientation. And its view about the nature of the discipline clearly places it in a minority. There were some early indications that religious studies would be identified primarily with a non-religious, scientific approach

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to understanding religion (Anderson 1972), but, as the state-of-the-art studies make clear, such views did not have a significant impact on the development of the field in Canada. Charles Davis’s essay on ‘The Reconvergence of Theology and Religious Studies’ (1974–5) better captures the aims and desires of those involved in Canadian university departments of religion, as is clearly evident in the majority of the contributions to the more recent volume of essays, Religious Studies: Issues, Prospects and Proposals (1991), edited by Klaus Klostermaier and Larry Hurtado. While recognizing something new in contemporary religious studies, the editors nevertheless pointedly invited participants to the conference ‘to consider the study of religion at public universities as a continuation of the intellectual examination of religion which goes back over the ages’ (ix, emphasis added). This is also clearly evident in the character of the research activities of the majority of those who contribute to the Canadian journal Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, whose pages are for the most part filled with religious and theological research rather than with scientific studies of religion (Riley 1984). Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere, religious studies in Canada, for the most part, has been more concerned with a ‘learned practice of religion’ rather than with seeking a scientific explanation of it (Wiebe 2006).

‘Religious Studies’ in Great Britain

Although there are no other state-of-the-art reviews of the field of religious studies as extensive as that undertaken by the Canadians, the festschrift for Geoffrey Parrinder, edited by Ursula King and entitled Turning Points in Religious Studies (1990), provides a comparable one-volume review of the emergence, development, and current state of religious studies in Great Britain. This volume is of particular interest because it unequivocally presents itself as providing an account of religious studies as a new discipline, clearly distinguishable from the theological approaches to the study of religion that had until recently characterized university scholarship. As the fly-leaf notice about the volume puts it: ‘Religious Studies was first introduced as a new discipline in various universities and colleges around the world in the 1960s. This discipline brought about a reorientation of the study of religion, created new perspectives, and influenced all sectors of education’ (emphasis added). The clarity of this brief statement about a new discipline that has re-orientated scholarship in religion, however, is quickly effaced by the editor’s general introduction to the essays intended to document both the emergence of the new discipline and the major turning points in its evolution. For King speaks here not of a discipline, but rather of a field of study which ‘found wider recognition from the 1960s and 1970s onwards when the term “Religious Studies” came first into general use’ (15). But as a field, religious studies cannot be characterized methodologically, for fields of study involve a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches to a particular subject matter of interest. Her introduction to the essays on the institutional growth of religious studies in the universities of England, Scotland, and Wales, moreover, compromises the claim that the so-called new discipline brought about a re-orientation of the study of religion already in existence prior to the 1960s. These essays, she writes, ‘show how much the course of Religious Studies and the history of its programmes have been intertwined with and often curtailed by earlier institutional developments in the study of theology, so that it has often been difficult to maintain the distinctiveness of Religious Studies’ (16). Having acknowledged this, King then goes on to claim that religious studies cannot really ‘be fully understood without looking at the closely associated developments in religious education and practical issues in interfaith dialogue …’ (16), suggesting that

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religious studies is – and ought to be – more than an academic (scientific) discipline. Thus she includes in the volume not only essays on the development of the ‘new discipline’ but also on the role of religious studies in relation to developments in religious education, interreligious dialogue and philosophy of religion. For King, these ‘concerns’ characterize distinct approaches to the subject matter of religious studies and are therefore some of the disciplines that characterize the field as multidisciplinary; but all of them clearly reflect the traditional religious and theological concerns of the scholarly study of religion which ‘Religious Studies’ ought to have superseded. As Robert Jackson points out in his essay on ‘Religious Studies and Developments in Religious Education’ (1990), for example, religious education embodies not only an epistemic or scientific concern about religion, but also sees religion itself as a form of knowledge and a distinct realm of experience (107); and religious education, therefore, as directed to awakening ‘a unique spiritual dimension of experience’ in children (110). The raison d’être of religious education, therefore, is not only epistemic but formative; aimed at helping children exercise their spiritual curiosity, and encouraging ‘in them an imaginative openness to the infinite possibilities of life’ (110). W. Owen Cole’s discussion of ‘The New Educational Reform Act and Worship in County Schools of England and Wales’ (1990) similarly confirms the judgement that religious education is concerned not only with gaining knowledge about religion but also with nurturing religious growth and development. As Cole puts it: ‘Some kind of collective gathering is considered desirable by most teachers for a number of purposes including the collective exploration of and reflection upon values and beliefs …’ (129–30, emphasis added). The fact that philosophy holds the same kind of religious and theological import as one of the disciplines that make up the multidisciplinary enterprise of religious studies is clearly evident in Keith Ward’s ‘The Study of Truth and Dialogue in Religion’ (1990). For Ward, philosophy’s value to religious studies is to be found in its concerns with the meaning and truth of religion (230).

Interestingly (if not ironically), only Marcus Braybrooke – Chairman of the interfaith movement ‘World Congress of Faiths’ – appears to assume that religious studies is a genuinely new approach to the study of religion. Braybrooke writes: ‘The underlying hope of the interfaith movement, although not of the academic study of religions, is that in some way religions are complementary or convergent’ (1990: 138, emphasis added). He nevertheless seems to believe that a positive complementarity exists between religious studies and interfaith development. And Eleanor Nesbitt’s article on Sikhism (1990) presents a similar proposal for encouraging a positive Ârelationship between the modern student of religion and the religious devotee.

The descriptions of the emergence of religious studies in the universities in England (Adrian Cunningham), Scotland (Andrew F. Walls), and Wales (Cyril Williams), it must be noted, claim (or suggest) that it achieved status in the university as an autonomous discipline by virtue of its differentiation from religion and theology. Their claims, however, seem to be undermined by the editor of the volume in which they appear, for they are found in the context of numerous other contributions of the kind just described, as well as an essay by Ninian Smart

– ‘Concluding Reflections on Religious Studies in Global Perspective’ (1990) – that argue a contrary case. It is true that neither Smart nor the other essayists argue specifically against undertaking scientific analyses of religion and religions. Smart does argue, however, against what he calls a scientifically purist stance in religious studies. As with the other essayists, Smart insists that religious studies can only properly be understood as a polymethodic and multidisciplinary enterprise which embraces ‘as much as possible of the scholarship of all sorts going on in the world … [w]hether it is neutral and objective or religiously committed’

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(305, 300). As a non-purist study, religious studies, he claims, will triumph because it can ‘be a force for permitting deeper conversations between religions, without reverting into a simple exchange of pieties’ (305). In this light, it is ironic that Cunningham should remark, as I have already noted, that even though the designation ‘religious studies’ for the study of religion carried on in university departments has an honourable history, ‘perhaps “religious” may still carry hints of its earlier usage to describe adherents, and of ambiguities of “religious education,” and it would be better for the university area to be simply called religion”’ (30).

Given Ninian Smart’s widespread influence on the development of university studies of religion over the formative period under review here, not only in the UK but also in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the US, it may be helpful to elaborate more fully his views on the nature and structure of ‘religious studies.’ In ‘Some Thoughts on the Science of Religion’ (1996), Smart clearly differentiates between the scientific study of religion and religious studies, with the former being associated with a multiplicity of disciplines, including history, comparative religions, and other social scientific approaches to the study of religious phenomena (16). It is possible, Smart admits, to take ‘religious studies’ to be fully described as the scientific study of religion, but he thinks such an understanding falls short of the view of that enterprise held by the majority of those engaged in it. Thus he argues for a broader view of ‘religious studies’ that will include not only scientific studies but also ‘reflective studies’ (19). By ‘reflective studies’ Smart means the examination of philosophical questions about the meaning and value of religion, in the same sense presented by Keith Ward (1990). Smart admits that such a reflective religious studies involves itself in ‘presentational concerns,’ by which he means engagement with the questions of truth and meaning, yet he denies that this amounts to merging religious studies with theology (19). This on two grounds: first, that which he calls ‘extended pluralistic theologizing’ is clearly distinguishable from traditional theology; and second, that ‘certain reductionistic views of science are themselves ideological positions that are not clearly distinguishable from traditional theology’ (20). He argues, therefore, that talk of the science of religion as the core of religious studies is wholly reasonable, but only if it remains non-reductionist. As such, the science of religion would then allow for critical reflection on the meaning, truth, and value of religion insofar as it is not simply identified with traditional theology, which, he claims, ‘is tainted by arrogance, colonialism and a usual lack of pluralism’ (19). As he puts it, ‘[I]f Religious Studies is to take on board reflective studies, and with that get involved with any presentational concerns with theology or ideology, it is only with Extended Pluralistic Theologizing … that it should blend’ (19). For him, therefore, ‘[t]o be genuinely scientific and objective we need to be able to steer a middle channel between the Scylla of secret theology and the Charybdis of reductionism’ (20), which requires a blend of non-reductionistic scientific studies of religion with reflective, extended theology. Both traditional theology and scientific purism are excluded.

In his contribution to Jon R. Stone’s The Craft of Religious Studies (1998), Smart reiterates his concern about ‘scientific purism,’ even though he acknowledges that what is called modern religious studies arose only after the 1960s with the merger of the history of religions with the social sciences (18). The new discipline, he insists, must be both speculative and philosophically reflective, although he warns against its being used as as mere ‘clothing for a religious worldview’ (24). It is little wonder, therefore, that Smart characterizes religious studies here as a quest (ix). But neither should it come as a surprise, therefore, that many in the academic world, as Smart himself puts it, have categorized religious studies ‘as some form of tertiary Sunday School, … [and so] resist and despise it’ (24). There is sufficient confusion about the notion of ‘religious studies,’ he judiciously notes, that ‘the outside world

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in academia may be forgiven for misunderstanding what the field of Religious Studies is all about …’ (24). But it does not appear to me that his own characterizations of the field have helped dispel the confusion; indeed, his own work seems to contribute to a view of religious studies as a religious exercise.

Subsequent studies on the character of ‘religious studies’ in the UK confirm that the dominant conception of the study of religion in British universities is essentially as a religious exercise. The volume A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (Nicholson 2003), for example, treats essentially Christian topics from a Christian point of view, and

Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-first Century (Ford et al. 2005) attempts to show the interplay of the two fields in relation to a range of topics in Christian theology and thereby establish ground for a future in which theology and religious studies are pursued together.

‘Religious Studies’ in the United States of America

That this kind of confusion about the nature of religious studies also exists in the American context is clearly acknowledged in the report of the Committee on ‘Defining Scholarly Work’ of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). In a report entitled ‘Religious Studies and the Redefining Scholarship Project,’ the committee notes: ‘Religious Studies, however defined or wherever located, remains suspect in the eyes of many within the rest of the academy and continually finds itself marginalized or otherwise obscured due to the fact and/or perception of blurred boundaries between studying religion and being religious, or between education about and education in religion’(Myscofski and Pilgrim et al. 1993: 7).

The suspicion in which religious studies is held in the US academic context, therefore, is due primarily to the confusion of what is proposed as an academic (and therefore scientific) enterprise with a religious or theological undertaking. As in Canada and Great Britain, scholars in the US claim that a significant transformation in the nature of the study of religion in the university context occurred after the Second World War. In God’s People in the Ivory Tower: Religion in the Early American University (1991), Robert S. Shepard claims that the study of religion in US colleges and universities briefly flirted with the idea of creating a science of religion but remained essentially a kind of ‘Christian Religionswissenschaft’ that was essentially moralistic and apologetic in intent and practice. As such it was unable

to separate [itself] from the theological and professional concerns of the nascent university, particularly the rising seminary within the university. A theological agenda accompanied the entrance of comparative religion in American higher education despite the arguments, some rhetorical and some sincere, that the new discipline was objective, scientific, and appropriate as a liberal arts subject. (129)

Nevertheless, claims Shepard, the academic study of religion in US colleges and universities experienced a renaissance after the Second World War and within a very short period of time gained disciplinary status within the academic context. D. G. Hart (1992) comes to a similar conclusion in his analysis of the field of religious studies. While not unaware of the fact that the rapid growth of the field was stimulated by the cultural crisis generated by the Second World War, and that such studies were aimed at ensuring college and university students received an education that included ‘values-training’ and moral formation (209), he nonetheless insists that the development of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) transformed

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the field into a scientific discipline. These changes, he insists, constitute a watershed in the history of the study of religion in the US, because they involved the substitution of scientific explanations of religious phenomena for the earlier quest for religious, theological, and humanistic accounts of religion. ‘The new methods of studying religion advocated by the AAR,’ he writes, ‘signalled the demise of [the] Protestant dominance [of the field] as professors of religion became increasingly uncomfortable with their religious identification … By striving to make their discipline more scientific, religion scholars not only embraced the ideals of the academy but also freed themselves from the Protestant establishment’ (198). (Hart recapitulates the argument in his more recent book, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (2000).)

Were this picture true, scholars would be hard-pressed to explain why the so-called new discipline is still held in suspicion by the rest of the academic and scientific community. What does account for the suspicion, however, is the fact that the notion of religious studies is not in fact carried out within a naturalistic and scientific framework, but more nearly resembles the academic field as it first emerged in the US – namely, as an inchoate enterprise not easily distinguishable from theology and characterized primarily by apologetic and moral concerns. This is clearly evident in the review of the field produced for the AAR by Ray Hart, entitled ‘Religious and Theological Studies in American Higher Education’ (1991), even though he admits that the term ‘religious studies’ is now generally used to refer to ‘the scholarly, neutral and non-advocative study of multiple religious traditions’ (716). Hart notes that many in the AAR are extremely uncomfortable with ‘the nomenclature that discriminates “religious” from “theological studies”’ (716), and points out that the members of the Academy are divided between the terms ‘study of religion’ (gaining knowledge about religion) and ‘practice of religion’ (understanding the truth of religion) (734, 778); he then claims, however, that by far the majority of the members favor a style of scholarship that combines the two activities, or one that at the very least eschews a clear demarcation between them. Joseph Kitagawa’s essays, ‘The History of Religions in America’ (1959) and ‘Humanistic and Theological History of Religion with Special Reference to the North American Scene’ (1983), strengthen Hart’s contention considerably. In the first essay, he maintains that the religious liberalism of the World’s Parliament of Religions served as the fundamental impetus for the establishment of the study of comparative religions – which later became religious studies – in American universities, even though he acknowledges that the participants at the Parliament meeting in 1893 for the most part gathered together representatives of the world’s faiths rather than scholars of religion. In drawing attention to this, Kitagawa underlines the fact that the academic study of religion in the US has more than one dimension; it has involved historical and social scientific analysis, but it has also moved beyond what such analyses can provide. Consequently he distinguishes the ‘History of Religions’ (as a scientific enterprise) from the ‘theological History of Religions’ – but with the implication that neither can do without the other. And he insists that the Religionswissenschaft later destined to become ‘religious studies’ is not simply scientific but rather ‘religio-scientific,’ being obliged to ‘view that data “religio-scientifically”’ (1959: 21). In the second essay, Kitagawa suggests that the scientific Enlightenment principles behind the scholarship of the members of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) have greatly affected the development of the field in the US, and yet – in keeping with his earlier analysis of Religionswissenschaft

– he refers to the discipline as ‘autonomous[,] situated between normative studies … and descriptive studies’ (1983: 559). Unlike other social sciences, then, for Kitagawa this discipline does not simply seek descriptions or explanations of events and processes; rather,