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Loading...How dispensible is Religious Studies to the mission of a modern university?
To the mutual chagrin of the faculty colleagues in my department, we recently learned that the chancellor of one our affiliate schools, UNC Greensboro, was considering closing down their own very fine Department of Religious Studies ( the UNC “system” has 16 public universities, over which there is a President; each university has its own Chancellor as its chief executive officer).
We have signed petitions in support of the department, and several of us have written letters to explain our support.
I thought it might be interesting for blog readers to see mine, since it explains why I consier Religious Studies (as a discipline) significant for university education. There’s a lot more that I could say, of course, but that would take a book, not a letter.
In any event, we are hopeful that the message gets through, since all of us understand how imporant the academic study of religion is, especially in our times.
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January 23, 2024
Dear Chancellor Gilliam,
I’m a professor of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I am writing to express my concern over the possibility of shutting down the Department of Religious Studies at UNCG.
I fully understand the need for fiscal responsibility and for you as chancellor to do what is in the best interests of your university in both the short and long term. With that in mind, and as a long-time contributor to the UNC system, I would like to explain from my religious-studies-insider’s perspective why your department and the academic study of religion itself are so vital to the mission of our great university system, the academy at large, and even more to the issues and problems we are facing as a state, nation, and international community.
On the surface it may seem that “religion” is a somewhat fringe field of academic study of rather marginal value to higher education and the need to train our students in areas important not just for their own lives and careers but also for the future of our society and culture. Isn’t “religion” better studied in divinity schools and seminaries? What does it have to do with life in the “real world” or the progress we need to make as we look to the challenges that lie ahead of us? This surface view quickly dissipates once you dig deeper into historical, cultural, social, and political realities.
On just about any level, the academic study of religion is vital not just for understanding our world but for navigating through it in our increasingly difficult times. There are some eight billion people in our world. The vast majority of them are connected with, committed to, or even fiercely committed to their particular religious traditions, and that demographic reality has played, does play, and will play an enormous role in just about everything connected to society and culture, from regional conflict, to national and international political policy, to social agenda.
Here are some examples chosen at random, none of them strictly “religious,” but all of them intimately tied to religious traditions, issues, and agendas.
- 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalism.
- The Current Israeli-Palestinian conflict: with religious roots going back three millennia, with ultra-religious on both sides urging on the clash.
- The connected, perennial, and now heightening problems of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
- Other major regional conflicts, historically: not just crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms, but, in more recent history, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Soviet communism and orthodox Christianity, Muslims and Hindus in India, Sunni and Shia in the Middle East;
- And on a smaller but devastating scale, such disasters as the David Koresh disaster at Waco ( driven, oddly enough, by a bizarre interpretation of the book of Revelation).
Making sense of these conflicts, and knowing how to deal with them, is not simply a matter of history, political science, and cultural studies. It requires a deep understanding of the religious underpinnings of the different groups, and that requires actual expertise in major religious traditions: Christianity — from American Evangelicalism, to Roman Catholicism, to Seventh-Day Adventism, and on and on – Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many other religious traditions, all of them, as in Christianity, with their own complicated internal groups and conflicts. It is impossible to deal with an “enemy” or resolve conflicts between two bitterly opposed sides without deeply understanding their commitments and antagonism toward the views of others.
It is also impossible to understand many of our current national debates without recognizing their religious roots:
- Abortion rights: Argued vehemently on biblical grounds, by both sides, neither of which, in most cases, has any idea what the Bible actually teaches about it.
- LBGTQ issues: The same can be said.
- Immigration: Yet again.
- American support for the state of Israel (The decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was intimately tied to fervent Evangelical eschatological beliefs, going back to the 1830s)
- American attitudes, support of, and policies connected with climate change (why are people of some religious persuasions so indifferent, as clearly shown in polling)
These are issues connected not only with the Bible, but obviously with American religious history, a completely different area of academic expertise, in which historians and political scientists are generally not well trained.
For Future generations of voters and leaders facing these and yet other social and political issues, even worse than literally “knowing nothing” about, say, Sunni Islam, orthodox Judaism, American evangelicalism, or Native American religions is assuming that common knowledge picked up from social media, TV, or films is “good enough” to form an opinion or make a decision.
Only training in religious studies can provide the expertise needed. That training has to come from institutions of higher learning, colleges and universities where experts instruct students in what they need to know about religion to understand their world. (Divinity schools and seminaries for the most part provide partisan ministerial training in their students’ own religions). But religious studies is an unusually vast field (or rather, set of fields), and no one person can possibly master even a significant chunk of it. It requires a department.
From the standpoint of university structure and coherence, it is also worth noting that departments of religious studies departments are virtually unparalleled in their inter-disciplinary character. Studying religion is a multifaceted venture, involving history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literary analysis, philology, cultural studies, American studies, women’s studies, and … It’s quite a range. Scholars of religious studies are trained in various ones of these fields (sometimes two or three, but never the range) and so contribute to the wider mission of the university in extraordinary ways.
Your Department of Religious Studies at Greensboro is a valuable asset to your university, to the university system, and the state. I and all my colleagues here at Chapel Hill very much hope that you will be able to retain and even strengthen it.
Sincerely,
Bart Ehrman
James A. Gray Distinguished Professor
Hello Dr. Ehrman, Question: I have been a believer for around 18 years. Early on, I studied the Ante-Nicene Fathers quite a bit, because it seemed sensible that those closest to the Apostles would surely have the most pure doctrine. I learned much, but now that I know manuscript evidence is relatively late for some of these works, I wonder what weight should be given to these writings. I am currently “rebooting” my theological belief systems, and I wonder if you might tell me what weight you would give to the Ante-Nicene Fathers in such a rebooting process? It seems to me that one would be better served studying the New Testament, not because it is the Bible, but because it is in all reality the earliest Christian writings we have by far. Thanks for your thoughts.
I don’t think the fact that the manuscripts for the Apostolic Fathers are late is in itself a big problem. The same is true for virtually every author of the ancient world (think Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, on and on and on), but we have a *pretty* good idea what htey actually wrote, and usually are pretty confident we’re class. The Apostolic Fathers can indeed show us what some Christian leaders were thinking and saying and assuming about the Christian faith after the NT period. If you want to know what was happening in the first century, though, the NT is our primary source of information. It wold be a mistake, though, to think that someone closer to the event is going to have the pure teaching (that is, the oldest form of it). Paul is our earliest author and he has Christian enemies that he says confounded the truth in lots of ways, and THESE Christians were stating theological views BEFORE any of the surviving NT writings. So EARLY doesn’t mean PURE.
Do you get the idea that the move to dispense with religious studies is any way tied to religion itself? That is, some people are suspicious of such departments as being too liberal and leading people to question the “true” religion?
Oh yes. Think Florida.
Thanks for doing your part and sharing it here.
Thank you for letting us read your letter to Chancellor Gilliam. I’m wondering if it might be persuasive for some of us bloggers to let him know how we have benefitted by the academic study of religion? If you think
that would be alright, then we can write him: Dr. Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr; Chancellor of UNC Greensboro, P. O. Box 26170; Greensboro, N.C. 27402-6170 or email: [email protected]
Wouldn’t hurt!!
Excellent letter, Bart.
When I was in college (Duke), we were all required to study religion for two semesters. I have always been glad even though I am not a Christian. Religion is the cornerstone of so much of the world that one cannot fail to learn about it and still be considered educated.
Church/synagogue/mosque/etc. only teach theology … a very different subject … which primarily identifies the two groups or people that make up the world: your group and everyone else. Religion cannot really be understood solely from the inside.
Raemon Polk
How things have changed. Including at Duke!
Well said.
The reality of the economics of higher education cannot be ignored. Yes, religious studies is a valuable discipline, along with others that encourage students to THINK. (A practice that seems to be waning in popularity.) However, not all disciplines need to be offered at every campus in the same format. Greensboro and Chapel Hill are only a hour apart – why do both campuses need to support independent, in-person degree programs? Learning delivery systems across all education levels need to adapt….
It’s not feasible for an undergraduate to take courses at universities an hour apart. It’s *very* difficult for students at Duke and UNC to go back and forth, even though there’s a bus. The only way to pull it off would be remotely, and Covid put paid to that idea…
You are a good man, my friend, and have a gift with words and with thinking clearly.
The attempts to decimate and curtail the study of Humanities at Universities appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, and it started years ago. One has to wonder if there is a conspitorial element to this, or whether students are simply “voting with their feet”, and studying something that enhances future employment prospects, or some combination thereof. Chris Hedges has stated that the value of Humanities is to teach critical thinking, i.e to teach you how to think, not what to think. I fully concur, and the worldwide reduction in Humanities courses and departments is a great concern.
Good luck with your efforts Bart.
Your letter sets out a very compelling case for maintaining a Religious Studies department at Greensboro, Dr Ehrman. Given the examples you cite, of current issues with a religious dimension, there appear to be good reasons for beefing up the Islamic studies element. But, as we have seen here on the Blog, research into early Islam can generate some extremely heated debate, to put it mildly. Perhaps, such considerations are driving the Greensboro decision, ie. they are taking the path of least resistance and avoiding contentious subjects, which, if true, would be very sad as it flies in the face of the spirit of intellectual enquiry.
My undergraduate degree was from a Catholic college, and two of my favorite courses were connected to this topic. Freshman year I learned what theology really meant and how it was done. What a complete eye opener for someone who had never heard anything like the academic side of it before!
Later, I took a course called “Oriental Religions” that covered just about all the Eastern and Middle Eastern religions, and was just absolutely fascinating. I treasure the memories of all I learned in those courses.
Although today I call myself an agnostic, I feel that I have a better understanding of those who feel themselves to be religious, and that makes it much easier to relate to them in many ways.
After reading your letter to Chancellar Gilliam I am even more convinced that religious beliefs are intrinsically intertwined with the fabric of human existence. And… the only way I can see to educate people in these areas is to have a secular Religious Studies program. Religious bias, like the kind you receive from attending Universities promoting a particular style of Christianity, seems to almost always lead to isolation rather than inclusion.
I grew up Mormon. Learning about the historical aspect of Christianity changed my life in more ways than any other single university course. No it didn’t affect my career as a physician directly, per se, but it affected almost everything else about my life. I hope they don’t take away the first chance any of these kids have to learn about religion outside the influence of what was likely a single religious perspective in their home.