WHY RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN AMERICA? WHY NOW?

Abstract

To answer the question, Why Religious Studies? we have to ask another: What do people not know, if they do not know about and understand religions? What can they not explain and of what can they not make sense? Phrased in this way, the question answers itself. For religion is so powerful a force in the contemporary world that without knowledge of religion we scarcely can understand the daily newspapers. A fair example of what happens when people do not know how to make sense of the power of religions in contemporary life is our country's difficulty in understanding the Islamic revolution in Iran, not to mention the Judaic revolution in the State of Israel, the Protestant army of Northern Ireland, the Roman Catholic revolution in Poland and in Latin America, the Christian army of Lebanon, the tragedy at Jonestown, and many continuing evidences of the vitality of religious belief-sometimes healthy, sometimes perverse. There is, of course, a bias against religion as a force in culture and psychology. This is surely one possible way of thinking about the character and meaning of society and of life. It holds religion to be dying, a holdover from another age. It therefore claims that religion does not require study. Those of us who find religion an exceptionally interesting phenomenon of society and culture, imagination and the heart, can do little to overcome this bias. But it is a bias, for it rests upon the will to wish religion away, not upon the perception that religion has gone away. In fact, much of the world as we know it is shaped by the formation of society and culture around religious beliefs, by the way in which people refer to religions to make their choices about how they will live. These beliefs and choices invoke particular modes of supernaturalism, distinctive expressions of revelation. A country governed by a president who speaks of a personal experience of conversion had better understand the meaning of religious conversion. A nation in which institutions of religion exercise vast influence over citizens' political and cultural decisions is wise not to deny that religion is a formative force in contemporary life. Whether or not people want religions to exercise that power, they do. In fact, religions not only speak about supernatural powers, they, too, constitute powerful forces in this world. So it is a matter of fact that if people do not understand the character