The Politics of Religious Studies

Christian Century, Sept 8, 1999 by Daniel L. Pals

THE GRADUAL DILUTION of sustained, rigorous catechism in churches and synagogues means that young people often make their first serious contact with the claims of religion not in the presence of a committed pastor, rabbi or parish priest, but in the classroom of a university or college professor of religion. Who that person is and what he or she may think about religion are thus weighty questions, not just for science and the academy, but also for communities of belief, and indeed, the entire moral and spiritual fabric of our culture. Is religion derided in the classroom? Is it being debunked in the faculty office?

It will surprise many to learn that Donald Wiebe's concerns run in the opposite direction from these familiar fears. In his view, it is the universities, not the churches, that need to worry. The loss of intellect, not of souls, is his concern. He thinks scientific ideals for the study of religion have collapsed under the pressure exerted by religious belief. The modern academic study of religion, while aspiring to be objective and scientific, has in fact been compromised by the intrusion of faith upon its mission. Though professors of religious studies have won academic legitimacy by pledging allegiance to the rigorous methods of empirical science, behind this facade they still promote religion--in some instances through an implicitly Christian theology, in others through a broad endorsement of the religious posture. In the ancient words of Tertullian, these professors claim the voice of Athens, but their accent is that of Jerusalem; and like Peter in Pilate's court, their speech betrays them.

Over the years Wiebe has carried his battle to multiple fronts and warmed to the fight in many a disputatious page. Most of what he has said can be tracked along two main paths of argument: one historical, the other theoretical. Historically, he contends that a truly scientific study of religion first emerged, with great intellectual promise, in the closing years of the 19th century. It was shaped by pioneering figures like F. Max Muller in England, C. P. Tiele and P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye in the Netherlands, and Morris Jastrow in the United States. All had a deep commitment to the methods of empirical science. They knew that they needed to collect data, to craft theories to explain that data, and to test these theories in accord with the naturalist paradigm of all science. Their promising venture went awry, however, in the first decades of the 20th century, when a different generation of scholars betrayed these high scientific ideals. (Wiebe's term for this misfortune, borrowed from classicist Gilbert Murray, is "the failure of nerve" in the academic study of religion.) Rudolf Otto in Germany, Gerardus van der Leeuw in the Netherlands and other assertively theological scholars discarded their predecessor's legacy and recaptured for confessional interests a discipline on the verge of becoming an objective science.

During the interwar years and after World War II, when the discipline migrated to the U.S. and blossomed in numerous colleges and universities, matters only got worse. Eventually, Mircea Eliade and his colleagues at the University of Chicago Divinity School finished the process of subversion. In opposition to the reductionist social science of secular thinkers like Freud, Durkheim and Marx, Eliade took a stand for the autonomy of religion and the humanistic paradigm of explanation. Religious studies, says Wiebe, are now only a kind of intellectual charade, devoid of respect in the academy.

Though not wholly implausible, Wiebe's account is flawed. The founders of religious studies whose commitment to science Wiebe lauds were also men of deeply religious purpose. They were in fact more explicit and assertive about the religious and moral aims of their work than were any of its theological traducers--including Eliade and his disciples. Wiebe is aware of the founders' religious commitment. He addresses the problem in two of his opening essays--one mainly on Muller, the other on Tiele--though too briefly, given its importance. He insists that for Muller "belief in the existence of God is not presupposed . as a necessary element in the framework of analysis of religions," while the theology in Tide's science can be dismissed "as a matter of inadvertence."

Perhaps. But if theological aims can be disengaged from the science of religion as practiced by the discipline's founders, why can they not be disengaged from the work of Eliade and those whom Wiebe calls the discipline's betrayers? And wouldn't doing so make for a quite different history? Could the real story be found not in any "failure of nerve," but in the rise of a largely consistent intellectual tradition? Though the scholars who belong to that tradition will always have diverse motives--religious, nonreligious, even antireligious--these motives are harmful only if they substantively affect the scholarship. Though Wiebe offers what he calls "ease studies" in the failure of nerve, he mainly examines developments in the American Academy of Religion and at his own University of Toronto. His discussions offer neither sufficient detail nor comparison to be convincing.