By Pat McCullough
My Religion 101 course presents me with a bit of a dilemma.
At UCLA, the “101” actually signals an upper division course. The course is not
really a general introduction to the study of religion, highlighting
foundational methods and broad themes—we don’t have one of those. Rather, the
course (“History of the Study of Religion”) surveys the theorists who have influenced the academic study of religion. Since
we are on the quarter system, I have only ten weeks to play around with.
So, it’s a 10-week introductory course at an upper-division
level focusing on theorists without any more general introductory course
leading them in. I don’t want to bring the students into our list of dead white
guys cold, so I need to provide a framework . . . and one that fits in 10
weeks. J. Z. Smith’s “less is more” pedagogical challenge haunts me.
Setting the
Framework. One of the key questions we address in the course is: what is
religion? We start the first week with the intro and first chapter to Brent
Nongbri’s Before Religion (a decent,
accessible overview to the historical invention of the category) and Craig
Martin’s first chapter in his Critical
Introduction to the Study of Religion. On the whole, the students are
really drawn in by the issues of definition and categorization that these
readings raise. Then we apply what we’ve learned to a comparison between
Geertz’s and Lincoln’s definitions. This issue of the category of “religion,”
then, permeates our analysis as we go.
I also present them with a dichotomy that gives them a
narrative of controversy (to add a bit of excitement to the course): the
“essentialists” vs. the “reductionists.” I present these as two “camps” that
battle over “religion” language. We talk about how these two camps utilize
certain terms to claim their territory or attack the other camp.
After this first-week framework, I give them the rest of
Craig Martin so that they know what a contemporary, critical approach to the
study of religion looks like. (This is what I wish they had before walking into
my class.) Also, I know that we’ll spend the majority of the quarter reading
Pals, whose approach to the study of religion differs considerably from mine. I
want them to have a resource that helps them make sense of Pals’ perspective
(more on this later). This takes up weeks two and three. As fun and
revolutionary as Craig’s book is, I feel like it’s too much reading not
directly on the topic at hand. I may work on choosing just two chapters.
Also, throughout the entire class, we have “case studies.”
This year, we talked about Hobby Lobby, the Quebec charter, the intro to
Carolyn Chen’s Getting Saved in America,
12 Years a Slave, the intro to
Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an
Icon (that was so much fun),
Christian Zionism, and Richard Madsen on Buddha’s Light Mountain. We do this
because I think we’d all get bored out of our minds talking theory for theory’s
sake all quarter.
Choosing the “Canon.”
Not everyone has to set a canon in their introductory religion courses, but it
seems to me that a course on the “history of the study of religion” is
necessarily canonical. I need to decide who is in and who is out. My choices
thus far have been fairly traditional, with just a little bit of extra flavor
towards the end. I use Pals’ Eight
Theories of Religion as the main text, supplemented by Deal and Beal’s Theory for Religious Studies and the
glossary of scholars in Russell McCutcheon’s Studying Religion. I use Pals because the reading is the most
accessible presentation. I use McCutcheon and Deal and Beal because I find
Pals’ bias too much to bear at points. For Pals, Freud, Durkheim, and Marx are
the enemies and Eliade is the clear hero:
Reductionist explanations, even in
the less militantly antireligious
form developed by Durkheim, tend to be so fundamentally opposed to the normal stance of faith that it is hard
to see how believers could abide them without discomfort. . . . Behind the
scenes, then, it is apparent that personal commitments have played at the very
least a strong motivating role in the development of modern theories of
religion. To those who, like Freud and Marx, have written from a personal
stance of antipathy toward religion, aggressive
reductionism seems only natural and right. To those who, like Eliade, have
been moved by sympathy with the religious perspective, it can only be misguided and mistaken. (316–7,
emphasis mine)
Thus, I pit Pals against McCutcheon as representatives of
our “essentialist” and “reductionist” camps—highlighting how these often
function as pejorative labels. So, these disagreements become pedagogically
useful.
I use 6 out of 8 theorists from Pals: Freud, Durkheim, Marx,
Weber, Eliade, and Geertz. I add Althusser and Foucault. We also get Bourdieu
via Craig’s book. Nine theorists: all white, all dead, one gay, one wife
murderer.
This brings me to the canon question: who represents the history
of the study of religion? Fundamentally, it seems to me that there are two
approaches to this: theories of
religion (see Pals’ title) and theory for
religious studies (see Deal and Beal). One is a review of theorists who
have said something about “religion” and the other affects the way that we do
religious studies. At times, we deal with this distinction in a single
theorist: Marx, for example, said some stuff about “religion” that’s worth
unpacking, but that’s certainly not where his influence ends in the academic
study of religion. Foucault said some stuff about “religion” that I don’t
really think matters all that much (sorry, Jeremy Carrette!), but he’s offered
some analytical tools that have revolutionized the field.
My primary textbook largely sets the agenda for me: I do mostly theories of religion, which I think is reasonable. There’s a problem,
though. It kills me that all the theorists are dead white guys. I have several
important female scholars in the case studies (Lofton, Mahmood, Sullivan,
others), but they don’t function as part of the “canon.” These women are not
available to the students when they choose a theorist to write about in their
final paper. (I never used the term “canon” in class, even though it is effectively a canon.)
I finish the class with a reading that would have been
impossible to start with, but is a wonderful way to tie all the loose ends
together and bring us back to the overall framework: chapters 1 and 6 of Arnal
and McCutcheon’s The Sacred Is the
Profane. Closing out the course, it reviews just about all the theorists we
discussed and pushes the students to take categorical considerations even more
seriously.
Changes for Next Year:
Less Is More; Difference Is Better. I’m going to be soliciting feedback
from students on how best to do this, but I will be making changes to cut down
on the reading and to reduce the white-male-ness of the course-canonized
theorists. My gut tells me I will chop our Craig Martin reading, as I
mentioned, to free up a week, and to switch out some theorists. Right now, I’m
thinking I could reasonably nix Freud and Weber (and maybe Althusser), changing
them up with Mary Douglas, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad (we already talk about
Asad quite a bit). I’m certainly open to suggestions on theorists. The best
canons are flexible canons.
Also, I’m wondering if there’s some way to reduce Pals. Ultimately,
even though it is fun to teach against the text, I do long for a single
“History of the Study of Religion” textbook that does what I want it to do—and
with shorter chapters. I imagine a mix between Pals and Deal and Beal, with a
sprinkling of Martin’s “Intro” and Nongbri. I can juggle the current
combination in teachable ways, but it feels like too much.
That said, I have watched my students progress through the
class in astounding ways. It was challenging for them, I know, but I’m
confident they can handle pretty much anything another humanities or social
science course might throw at them after this.
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