Previous volumes in the NAASR Working Papers series have critical reflections on key domains of field, such as theory, method, data, and categories. This latest addition to the series takes a step back to consider syncretically how religion is imagined or invented through several lenses. It takes as inspiration the work of the late Jonathan Z. Smith, who challenged scholars to be mindful of the ways they imagine religion and religious data. Building off this crucial insight, On the Subject of Religion brings together a range of early-career and established scholars of religion to explore how various domains of society—namely the classroom, academic literature, public debates, and private fundraising—shape and are shaped by the contours of the academic study of religion. For example, how is religion depicted in the academic study of religion? How do private donors selectively privilege certain descriptions of religion and to what ends? Do the practical needs of students align or conflict with the theoretical concerns of scholars? To what extent do answers to these questions reveal shared challenges or fault lines across the field of study?

This essay explores what is at stake if we start talking about the category of religion more frequently in active, verb form within the classroom setting. The underlying presumption is that students (not to mention the scholars who teach them) are so steeped in perennialist assumptions that a grammar disruption may be a useful tool in helping to generate critical thought. Talking about religion as if it is a “thing” may inadvertently reinforce essentialist ideas of a cohesive, sui generis entity, but shifting our language to describe religion as an active process places attention on the very real social and cultural acts that religious speech is used to achieve. The essay considers the implications of using this type of speech in light of the ideal critical goals of the religious studies classroom while also offering classroom-tested case studies of how this language shift might be realized.

World Religions at Nebraska Wesleyan University is a well-connected course serving philosophy and religion, international studies, and global diversity graduation requirements. In spring 2019 we piloted a redesigned World Religions in order to critique the World Religions Paradigm . Using Peter Felton’s (Elon University) model for students as co-designers and strategizing selective responses to AAC&U funding (Interfaith Youth Core curriculum initiative ), this course rejects the standard textbook, show-and-tell exoticism, and multiple-choice exams replacing them with examinations of clichés about religion and intentionally provocatively juxtaposed case studies based on JZ Smith’s advice for teaching, assessed through written arguments about interpretations and power. The pedagogical goal: critical and self-interrogation of cultural bias, the influence of colonialism, and a Christian (Protestant) liberal model. Curricular goals: introduce theorizing in the religious studies gateway, critically engage what students expect a World Religions course to do, and ensure that the IDEA prompts indicated as essential are maintained or improved.

In this response I outline how the structure of religious studies programs in Canada and elsewhere communicate a particular conception of what theory is and what it is for and explain why this view of theory gets in the way of the critical approaches Dorrough Smith describes. More specifically, I argue that religious studies programs are often designed such that they frame theory either as an optional accessory or else as a tool for working with pre-existing, unique, and bounded data (‘religion’). I also draw on the Universal Design for Learning framework to suggest specific pedagogical strategies that address the disconnect Dorrough Smith describes between the learning goals instructors embed in their courses and their students’ expectations for religious studies courses. I argue the apparent gaps between what instructors hope to teach and what students expect to learn can be mitigated by optimizing student choice and autonomy; increasing self-relevance; and minimizing construct irrelevance in the design of our courses and assessments.

This paper will focus on the urgent need to talk about the meaning of writing reflexively in our field. Starting from the use of “tactic” as religion in teaching the study of religion proposed by dr. Smith, this paper will critically evaluate this grammar disruption to build up critical thinking. It will firstly stress “the tactics of using ‘tactic’ as ‘religion’ ”, secondly link dr. Smith’s method to the meaning of “writing reflexively” in our field and thirdly give concrete suggestions about teaching self-reflexive writing in classroom. By calling it “the tactics of using ‘tactic’ as ‘religion’ ”, this paper argues that research is a process with effects, not static and sometimes inconsistent. Therefore, self-reflective critique is necessary, since the study of religion is an academic field that has contributed decisively to the construction of Eurocentric and racist imaginations. Indeed, students in classrooms are often confronted with the doctrine of being aware of the own intersections at which they operate and to reflect these. This doctrine, however, misses taking the crucial last step to take into account: what are the practical implications of this reflexive act for academic writing? Therefore, this paper will ask: What can the teaching of applied reflective writing about religion look like? How can we avoid teaching that situating oneself is just a process of ticking boxes combined with dropping the necessary buzzwords and therewith paradoxically reproducing the issues to be solved by this act? And why is it so important to take the ‘methodological agnosticism’ of the discipline into account?

Responding to Leslie Dorrough Smith’s paper, “On the Grammar of Teaching Religious Studies,” my work asks questions about our ability to participate in the “noun and verb” forms of religion simultaneously. Thinking critically with the terms “religious literacy” and “tolerance” as anchors, my paper asks if it is possible to think about concepts, like “religious literacy” as ways of framing the kind of knowledge we find so valuable while also reflecting the knowledge that our universities and institutions recognize as having value. Or, as a colleague of mine put it recently, “can we do what is expected and maintain our own integrity while we’re at it?” Can we meet the university’s expectations and institutional requirements and use their language, but still do the kind of work we want to do? This is what I see Smith doing in her chapter, teaching religion and religious literacy in ways that show value to a variety of invested parties (including institutions and students). My paper then uses examples of activities and assignments from my courses that play with the boundaries of these two investments.

Using initiatives to enhance both students’ and the publics’ religious literacy as the example—from professional associations establishing guidelines to Departments seeing in it their raison d’etre–this paper argues that recent critical gains in the study of religion have been effectively domesticated and thereby limited (such as strong critiques of the world religions paradigm). The paper concludes by challenging a new generation of scholars, some of whom are undoubtedly working in conditions that, in key regards, are rather different from their predecessors, to defend the academic study of religion as an exercise separate from advocating for various religious stances.

In addition to describing several uncritical presuppositions that yet dominate contemporary religious studies, McCutcheon’s paper helpfully presses to also interrogate how the discourse of religious studies is “in the service of a practical political program” (8). One goal of such a program is “to create increased tolerance in diverse liberal democracies” (13). In response to this claim, I explore the discourse of religious studies, especially in the case of black religious studies (other so-called minority identity sub-fields might be considered), as serving progressive racial politics. That is to say, religious studies functions often not simply to ensure cooperative tolerance among a global, diverse citizenry but, more specifically, to redress racial inequality. To this end, talk about black religion has been an apologetic for black religious genius (Romantically understood), moral excellence, and, among other things, the prophetic role of blacks in America’s historic struggle with the problem of race.Making special use of such critical works as Vincent Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness (2016) and Curtis J. Evans’ The Burden of Black Religion (2008), my response shows how progressive racial politics tend to short-circuit critical depth and, in an ironic resurgence of colonialist essentialism, re-essentializes the scholar’s subject of study—albeit replacing negative appraisals with positive ones. Scholarly resistance to such a political program is further complicated by the fact that black scholars are subject to heightened social, cultural, and institutional pressures to be both “proper” racial apologists and scholars—a tension in which the former is expected to take priority over the latter. Exploring this tension involves a consideration of 1960s milestones, the emergence of black liberation theology and black studies, that typically go unattended by traditional histories of the field whose focus on the 1960s is limited to the discipline’s constitutionally upheld status in public education.

This chapter attempts to critically nuance Russell McCutcheon’s argument that little has changed in the study of religion in recent decades. McCutcheon argues that despite the “critical gains” made by scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln, Tomoko Masuzawa, and even his own work, contemporary scholars of religion continue to deploy sui generis notions of religion and tired phenomenological pathologies from earlier generations. These are now simply repackaged under the auspices of various new and putatively innovative methods. Yet, if McCutcheon persuasively demonstrates the persistence of these ideas in the study of religion, this chapter raises the questions of how to explain historically this perceived persistence. In other words, noticing repetition over time is one thing, accounting for it historically is something else. What are the specific historical circumstances—social, cultural, and institutional—that might explain the continued appeal of sui generis ideas of religion and phenomenological approaches to scholars of religion? By way of an answer, this chapter suggests that critical scholars’ overemphasis on the late 19th and early 20th century historical origins and formative ideologies of the field has produced a rather procrustean view of these matters in discussing later historical developments. Such a view posits a long and unbroken arc of rather vague sentiments of Protestant prejudices and colonial chauvisms that sidesteps careful dissection of how the category religion, its field of study, and their specific relationship to wider institutional and social arrangements has changed in the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Set 37 years in the future, this paper is a work of speculative, epistolary fiction. It imagines a world in which the impulse to transform the study of religion into a professional and bureaucratic discipline vis-à-vis religious literacy and its impact on civic health and workplace proficiency has become the animating purpose of religious studies. As a result, the need for professional experts in religious studies has sky-rocketed with a multitude of positions in the private sector, government, and census work. The unnamed author of the letter writes to a young protégé to explain that the study of religion used to be an academic venture and describes key events in the early decades of the twenty-first century that led to its shift to a pragmatic field tasked with promoting governmental surveillance. The piece implies that scholars aligned with the NAASR approach to religion studies have been forced underground and a network of rogue scholars continue the “work of historical, critical, and social scientific approaches to the study of religion, as well as a relentlessly reflexive critique of the theories, methods, and categories used in such study.

Current trends in academia are motivating scholars to look to private funders and funding institutions to fund their research. In this essay, Alles contends that this is not as novel as it might seem. Indeed, the history of the study of religion in the United States is a history that includes private funding at every step of the study of religion’s development and evolution. If private funding is not new, however, there is increased importance on the topic as funding from educational institutions dwindlers. Alles contends that scholars should accept private funding knowing the potential limits and agendas that accompany it. Educated scholars will be able to more successfully navigate the world of private funding and use it to their advantage.

This response uses three examples of private funding in the field of religious studies to examine the role such funding has played and continues to play in the field. First, the Lilly Endowment, funded through the wealth of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly Company, has played a central funding role in the subfield of American religious history. Second, the Danforth Foundation, whose funds are rooted in the Ralston Purina animal food company, funded the founding of dozens of religious studies departments in the 1960s and 70s. Lastly, the Dharma Civilization Foundation attempted to fund two endowed chairs in Hindu Studies at the University of California at Irvine. In 2016 Their $3 million gift was returned by the university after faculty and graduate students protested and accused the DCF of being a right-wing Hindu nationalist group. These three examples show how private funding has always been central to the field of religious studies, how funders and scholars have a variety of interests behind their funding and funding requests, and how their have always been limits to what sorts of funding is possible within religious studies.

In a time of constricting higher education appropriations and increased anxieties around student loan debt, the academic study of religion faces an acute funding problem for which private foundation dollars might seem an attractive answer. However, as Gregory Alles notes in his paper, this threatens to skew quite drastically the questions that scholars are willing and able to pursue. Those working at non-elite, teaching-focused, and tuition-dependent institutions are particularly vulnerable to such pressures — especially those working without the traditional protections of tenure. When budget-conscious administrators, market-conscious students, and mission-conscious philanthropists are driving the financial realities of academic work, the freedom of scholars of religions to pursue their work is constrained by the definitions and expectations of these stakeholders. What these stakeholders “know” about religion is shaped by a range of political and confessional commitments extraneous to the redescriptive and explanatory work pursued by the academic study of religion. Our efforts to teach and pursue research that pushes back against an essentialized notion of “religion” can run aground on a public discourse shaped by the contest of political liberalism and Christian conservatism and disseminated to our students via social media platforms. Students enter our classroom knowing what religion is or is not, and administrators trained in other fields evaluate our work, because we all labor in a linguistic field in which, as Wittgenstein suggested, the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Scholars of religion have always fought to unmask the social and political practices driving attempts to codify such binaries as “religious/secular” and “sacred/profane,” but this work only advances insofar as it is legible as religious studies. Thus our arguments against the “specialness” of “religion” particularly imperil the academic study of religion at this moment in academic history.

Although Alles’ paper focuses on private money for the study of religion, public funding is shaped by political ideologies that are primarily influenced by private interests. Public funding for higher education has steeply declined in recent years. In California, it’s been dwindling for decades, making a sharp about face from its 1960 Master Plan that created a framework for a tuition-free higher education system for all eligible high school students. We have to ask, what happened? What kinds of social struggles were taking place that might turn us away from such fortuitous initiatives? The positive structural shifts that began in the 1960s and 70s coincided with what have been described as the culture wars, such as the rise of the moral majority and fiscal conservatism in response to the civil rights movement and the radical possibilities of social equity. Alles notes that private interests invested in research on science, technology, defense, even agriculture. However, both state and private interests funded the social sciences, which served their often overlapping and contingent form of what anthropologist David Nugent calls “commercial empire” (Nugent 2010). The U.S. and other European powers used knowledge production as a complement to imperialist projects in order to understand how to manage its colonies and the peoples within them (Smith 2002). Religious Studies contributed to these ends through its own deeply racialized assumptions about the nature of religious traditions, producing stratifications that we still live with today (Masuzawa 2005) While the reflexive turn in the social sciences and the postmodern turn in the humanities challenged the universalist discourses that served imperial goals, these strides have been stigmatized by political factions in the last several decades as radical leftist thought. I contend that the field has gotten caught in the crosshairs of these culture wars and it doesn’t know it because it has failed to explore the structural mechanisms of our present social conditions, such as white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racialization in more critical ways that other disciplines, such as Anthropology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, and English have. In fact, it may unwittingly act as a pawn in these culture wars.

In my essay on international perspectives on/in the field of the study of religion, I opt for a multi-perspectival approach that reveals the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in our academic enterprise in this globalizing, technology-driven world. I begin with the significant role played by the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), as the “preeminent international forum for the critical, analytical and cross-cultural study of religion, past and present” in the internationalizing of the field, and my own involvement in these developments since the 1990s. However, I choose to focus on the regional and affiliated associations–the meso level, so to speak–for the window they afford onto changing international dimensions. I then explore a range of (some, but not all, IAHR-related) communities of scholars, learned societies, book series, journals, working groups, academic programs, and collaborative research initiatives. I consider that these various “hubs” and “agents” for a more globally inflected and interconnected study of religion reveal a complex range of responses, strategies, and struggles in relation to internationalization processes in our field. These processes may be internally or externally generated (or both). I contend that by using this “nodal” and “interstitial” approach, one can better discern how the “international” trope is variously defined and deployed, whether as best practice, value addition, recalibration, legitimacy, elitism, or redemption.

This chapter provides an “international perspective” on the field from a scholar who was trained in the US with an expertise is in religion but now teaches in a department of global development and social planning in Norway. Although it will respond to Professor Hackett’s essay, it will do so in the context of a presentation of new empirical findings from the Values in Scholarship on Religion (VISOR) project and a discussion of a recent book on Religion and Development in the Global South by Rumy Hasan (2017). The first section introduces the “methodological naturalism and methodological secularism” scale (created and validated as part of the VISOR project). Methodological Naturalism (MN): Preference for academic arguments that optimize the use of theories, hypotheses, methods, evidence, and interpretations that do not appeal to supernatural agents or forces or authorities. Methodological Secularism (MS): Preference for academic practices that optimize the use of scholarly strategies that are not tied to the idiosyncratic interests of a religious coalition. I provide figures demonstrating the high levels of MN and MS among NAASR respondents, and compare this to other demographics including international respondents.The second section introduces the “academic values” scale (also created and validated as part of the VISOR project. Here I report on the similarities and differences among scholars in the field in relation to values such as breadth or depth of knowledge, preference for a humanities or empirical approach in methodology, etc. NAASR respondents stand out for their high valuation of academic fairness and intellectual capacity. The final section explores the implications of the VISOR findings, and broader findings in the scientific study of religion, for the responsibility of scholars in the Global North to identify and critique the deleterious psychological and political effects of high levels of religiosity in the Global South. In light of Rumy’s research on the role of supernatural thinking in mitigating against the dynamic of growth, development and the uplifting of people in the Global South, I argue that scholars of religion in the Global North ought to be more willing to offer public critiques of those aspects of religion that contribute to socio-economic dysfunction.

Whether there is such a thing as an “international religious studies field” or not, in response to Rosalind Hackett my paper discusses aspects of the study of religion in Greece and North America, and the benefits of comparing international settings in gaining insight about one’s own background. Furthermore, I argue, that such a comparative endeavor that stems from being acquainted with other cultures can guard against taken for granted assumptions about that thing we commonly call “religion.”

In her paper “International Perspectives on/in the Field” Dr. Rosalind Hackett identifies the end of tokenism as an important commonality of the internationalization of the field. “Tokenism” signifies the only symbolic participation of minority group, and it is clear from Dr. Hackett’s paper, that we have come a long way in working on moving past this, with a blossoming of regional and national organizations worldwide. But does this really mean we have established an equal footing for all actors to cooperate on eye-level, for example the various scholarly organizations that Hackett describes the histories and present of? I will try to argue that Dr. Hackett, in her paper, shows us how far we have come, but still belies a difference deeply established in the field. In an analogy to my research on religion in the field of international development I’ll show several faces of tokenism and the crucial role of method to establish identity and differentiate between white and non-white scholars. How critical method might be reduced to a marker of (Western and “progressive”) identity instead of the vital analytical tool to dismantle structures of power and study religion without being religious.