Why Study Religion? By Richard B. Miller

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In this book, Richard Miller proposes what he calls Critical Humanism as a framework for the academic study of religion. The project has three main components: a description of the “identity crisis” that has characterized the field for the past half century, an engagement with six prominent approaches to the study of religion, and a detailed presentation of Critical Humanism through and in conversation with recent works in which its components are on display. On Miller’s telling, “Religious studies has been disabled by an ascetic ideal that prevents it from championing its merits and providing motivating reasons for studying it” (9). This ideal has three significant historical roots. The deepest of these is Protestant theology’s suspicion of the project of justifying human behavior. A more recent source is Max Weber, who in his famous 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” consigned talk of values and ends to the realm of “the prophet and the demagogue” (4), articulating the “ascetic ideal” that has come to be widely accepted by scholars of many stripes. And the most recent source is Claude Welch, who introduced the language of identity crisis in his well-known 1971 overview of religious studies. While celebrating the field’s new independence from Christian theology, Welch noted the risk of its becoming “nothing more than a cluster of area studies that aimed to expose students to a range of self-contained religious traditions,” lacking “commonalities that could hold a program together or enable its faculty to learn from each other’s work” (20). But Welch (who, of course, “possessed impeccable Protestant bona fides”) resisted the project of offering a justifying rationale for religious studies—in fact, he regarded all such justification as ideological expressions (23)—and instead advanced practical, methodological recommendations that would leave space for new directions to emerge. Miller judges that Welch’s principled silence regarding the ends of academic work exacerbated the identity crisis that he described and contributed to a mistaken substitution of questions of method for questions of value.