Stephen C. Finley, Louisiana State University

Stephen C. Finley is an assistant professor of religious studies and African and African- American studies at Louisiana State University. He is a voting faculty affiliate of the women’s and gender studies program. His book, The Black Body in the Nation of Islam, is currently under review. Finley is researching for his second monograph, entitled Sojourners in a Strange Land: The Religious Lives of African American Latter-day Saints, and is coauthoring Malcolm X and Gender (with Eldon Birthwright). He is coeditor (with Margarita Guillory and Hugh Page) of “There Is a Mystery”: Esotericism, Gnosticism, and Mysticism in African American Religious Experience. Finley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and is on the steering committee for the Theology and Religious Reflection Section of AAR. His essay “The Meaning of ‘Mother’ in Louis Farrakhan’s Mother Wheel: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Cosmology of the Nation of Islam’s UFO,” is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Educating for Humanity, Egalitarianism, and Justice

It is common for me to make big claims about the importance of the study of religion in the courses that I teach at Louisiana State University, a large, public, research institution that is the flagship campus for the Louisiana state university system. In fact, I have been known to say, “I think that religion may be the most important academic field in colleges and universities in America,” which I often follow with “and yet it is one of the smallest units in the college (of humanities and social sciences) here at Louisiana State University.” The claim is a serious one, and one that I make with conviction. I think that the study of religion should be compulsory in every college and university in America and that state colleges and universities should commit more resources to attracting and retaining qualified faculty and to making resources available for research into the meaning and function of religion in American and global life.

I ground such a declaration not as an economic and political remonstrance that is meant to justify the field as corresponding to definite job choices (which is a major conversation here in Louisiana), but rather in the belief that religion is important for educating citizens for humanity rather than simply for the marketplace. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. Religion is ubiquitous, and while it may not be comparable to the sciences and the professional fields in terms of corporate and industry objectives, the study of religion is central to the cause of equality and justice, and to disrupting the reproduction of marginalization in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and class, not to mention the ways in which these factors intersect in public policies, practices, and international relations (I am thinking here of the ways in which America views itself as a “chosen” nation and how it polices the globe ostensibly in the interest of democracy, which most often conceals its own exceptionalist and nationalistic self-interests. It is this exceptionalism that I want to understand as religious). As a result, I want my students to understand the ways in which religion participates in how relations between human beings are arranged in America, often along lines of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and how religion is implicated in these relations. As such, my courses attempt to give them the tools to think critically about the world and to envision the world constituted differently, as more democratic and egalitarian. So, while preparing students for gainful employment is important, educating them for humanity is more critical. My teaching is informed by a number of theories and thinkers, including critical social theory, psychoanalysis, black feminist thought, and philosophy of race, and in particular the works of Anthony Pinn, Charles Long, Sigmund Freud, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Anne DuCille, bell hooks, and many thinkers who help illuminate the interaction between religion and the body, especially as it relates to race and gender.

Full disclosure here: I am an African-American heterosexual male, whose parents struggled their way into the working classes. I grew up in Southern California, but my grandparents were sharecroppers and laborers in Texas, and my paternal ancestors were slaves in Madison County, Tennessee. Therefore, I am cognizant of my own social location and reflexive about the ways in which I still benefit from patriarchal values in this country that privilege men. Hence, my motivations are just as personal as they are professional. Though I think religious studies is underappreciated and marginalized in the academy — due in part to the misnomer that it is strictly confessional — I am concerned with interrogating and teaching how religion functions socially, culturally, politically, and with inculcating critical ideas in and through pedagogical processes.

Having an interest in the study of gender and of both women in religion and masculinity, I am also a faculty affiliate of women’s and gender studies at Louisiana State University. Therefore, I often have students in my religious studies courses who are, likewise, interested in the study of gender. My contention is this: students who are interested in gender, sexuality, and so on, should take courses in religious studies because it is in and through religion that divisions in gender are not only constructed but are also maintained and reproduced. Their reproduction is so constant and normalized that gender becomes sedimented so that it happens to appear as natural rather than social. The role that religion plays in constituting the realm of human taxonomy cannot be underestimated when it comes to gender, sexuality, and many other social categories. And religion often authorizes the structuring of — and policing of the boundaries of — acceptable behavior, which is quite often hierarchical and privileges the embodiment of those who are perceived as being the right or most socially acceptable color, gender, and sexual orientation. Yet, religious studies is often taken for granted even in those disciplines and fields that share my concerns for egalitarianism and justice.

When I teach religious studies courses (and for that matter, African-American studies courses), my goal is to equip students, not simply with descriptive data on religion, but with the intellectual resources necessary to disrupt the reproduction of multiple intersecting marginalities that occur in and through religion, while at the same time giving them the theoretical tools to investigate the meaning and function of religion. Therefore, the pedagogy that I employ in “Introduction to the Study of Religion” in particular is necessarily interactive via the organic lecturing style but also independent with respect to reflection papers and group projects.

My Louisiana State University courses have ranged from the “Religious Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X,” “Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Black Religious Thought,” “Introduction to the Study of Religion” (theories of religion), “African American Film and Religion,” “African American Intellectual Thought” (that always includes texts on Black Feminist thought), “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion,” and religion and literature courses that focus on religion, race, and colonialism.

My teaching philosophy, generally, is that education is an exchange between students and professors and that this exchange can and should be mutually edifying and make a social impact in terms of understanding human diversity and coexistence. This is to say that I learn from my teaching experiences in the classroom, and I teach in a manner that affirms the ability and potential of my students to read, write, and think critically about ideas and the world. In line with this philosophy, then, my teaching style emphasizes discussion and organic lecturing in order to facilitate students’ engagement of religion and their ability to interpret the meaning and function of religion and to critique religious ideas and practices. I encourage students, who are sometimes intimidated by religion and its claims of sanctity, that ideas and practices cannot escape critique because they are “religious” and that they have the capacity and agency to interpret religious phenomena. In other words, my courses help students to identify their voices and give them the confidence to read, think, and write critically, and to talk about religion in scholarly and meaningful ways.

All of my courses, for these reasons, have some discussion, group projects, and written critical reflections in which students offer their own interpretations of the important ideas of the course. Of all my courses, these approaches are most significant in “Introduction to the Study of Religion” (REL 2000), a freshman and sophomore lecture course that I have taught six times in my four years at Louisiana State University. The students in this course have typically never thought of religion in critical ways. Largely from Louisiana, these students tend to be Catholic and Protestant Christian, and they often see their religious experience as self-evident and factual. Most of them, according to our discussions, have never considered the human dynamics and anthropological origins of their religious traditions, and many of them are initially uncomfortable with the notion that religion can be engaged intellectually. Therefore, attention to pedagogy is important, especially since they are often nervous about the content of a course on religion in a public university setting. In this sense, even an introductory class on the study of religion can be heavy when one considers what it might mean to encounter the theories of Freud, Durkheim, Tylor and Frazer, William James, Otto, Loyal Rue, Richard Dawkins, and Mary Douglas for the first time.

Consequently, organic lecturing is crucial in that it gives often-anxious students an opportunity to participate, to ask questions, and to engage the subject in ways that impact the direction of the lectures. The organic lecturing style means that the class sessions begin with a set of questions such as: 1) What is the theorist’s definition of religion?; 2) What type of theory is this?; 3) What is the evidence for this theory and the method of gathering data?; 4) What types of religion does this theory help to explain?; 5) Who is the theorist and what is the relationship of his/her background to the theory of religion? The lecture then progresses in response to the issues that students raise about the theory in question. This means that class sessions are always interactive, and students learn (hopefully) that I value their perspectives on complicated matters. Likewise, reflection papers offer students an opportunity for their own critical analyses of theories that develop their ability to apprehend and synthesize the complexity and diversity of religious ideas in written form. Finally, the group projects allow them to come together, to negotiate differences in perspectives and experiences, and to extend what may have been a cursory treatment of a theory of religion in class or to develop their own. By the end of the course, most of them will gain a deeper appreciation for how significant religion is in human societies and interpersonal relations.

Two years ago, for instance, students did their group project on Louisiana State University football as a religious phenomenon. That was interesting enough by itself, but it was more impressive that these first- and second-year students incorporated the ways in which masculinity was constructed within the homosocial arena of sport and in this setting, how the presence of cheerleaders function to reinforce and stabilize a certain view of aggressive heterosexual masculinity as normative. My conclusion — similar to that which my students drew in their group project — is that “religion” is the “arena” that coalesces all of these factors and gives ultimate authorization to racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed divisions among human beings.

From my perspective, then, religion is monumental. It is ubiquitous, yet often unacknowledged. It is complex and diverse. It is problematic, and at the same time, it has great potential to ameliorate challenges of modern life through conviviality and enlightenment. For these reasons and so many more, I teach religious studies in the manner that I do, with an eye toward educating students for humanity. I want them to think critically about religion and about the world. Through these pedagogical processes I have learned much, too. Students want to be challenged. They want to be respected, which these interactive teaching methods communicate to them. And they relish opportunities to say and do something meaningful, through critical reflections and group projects, about the ways that they envision the world. Many if not most of them value the tools that they gain in the study of religion. For instance, conceptualizing and articulating complicated ideas through oral, technological, and written forms of communication, problem-solving, navigating creative group dynamics, and learning to have one’s perspective expanded in ways that have the potential to reshape the world — in small but meaningful ways — are all valuable assets that can be used in multiple courses of academic study and in numerous professional career paths.

Such a perspective on teaching religious studies at a large state university also requires self-awareness and self-conscious attention to the ways in which my own embodiment participates in the teaching process. For instance, I am well aware that I may be the only African-American professor many of these students will have in their entire academic career, and that many of my students, who come from the deep South, may not have ever been in a situation in which a black person was in an authoritative position as the purveyor of information and the leader of the class. And I certainly am not naïve about the implications for teaching. Again, the matters that I raise are both professional and personal. To this end, my attire is always professional. Many of my colleagues around the university are much more casual in their dress, and for me, wearing a shirt and tie is a matter of preference — I believe that the job is professional and requires that my attire be commensurate. Yet I am also conscious of what attire may say about my [black] body to my students and how this is a consideration that others — differently embodied — may take for granted. Would I be taken seriously in such a cultural and geographical setting, teaching subjects that are so personally and theoretically contested for many? Would a woman be able to take attire for granted?

Finally, I teach while being fully intentional about the ways in which my social location and embodiment may be impactful as they interact with the subjects that I teach — how being a heterosexual African-American man may function as a meaningful signifier in relation to teaching about the ways in which religion sometimes (re)produces unhealthful gender (regarding men and women), heterosexist, and racial norms. Therefore, I see teaching religion at a state university as both a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge in the sense that religious studies is probably the most misunderstood intellectual field in the university, and such a misreading of religious studies as confessional — and, worse yet, as not a viable arena for research and intellectual inquiry — continues to be a barrier that has to be navigated and overcome, given prevailing ideas of the separation of “church” (which is synonymous with what some think of religious studies) and state. On the other hand, teaching religion has enormous potential to orient young students to an increasingly diverse and complex world and to impart to them the impact that religion has on most every aspect of public and private life. I can only hope that state universities such as mine continue to invest in research and teaching in the field and see it as one of the most, if not the most, important scholarly areas in the university, given the reach that religion has in perhaps every realm of human life.