| Religious Studies in the Context of Liberal Education |
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Brian C. Wilson, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
The Goals of Liberal EducationIs religious studies as it is taught at a public university a branch of the humanities or a social science? Is its goal largely cross-cultural interpretation or explanation? This theoretical divide has played out in other fields (e.g., anthropology, history, art history), but it has been especially acute in religious studies where departments continue to be, as Charlotte Allen put it in her notorious Lingua Franca article, "shapeless beast[s]…lumbering through the academy with no clear methodology or raison d’être" (Charlotte Allen, "Is Nothing Sacred?: Casting Out the Gods from Religious Studies," Lingua Franca 6:7. November 1996: 30–40). Such amorphousness is the fate of all fields that have not attained theoretical consensus and remain interdisciplinary perforce. Personally, having grown more and more agnostic about the claims of theory over the years, I’m perfectly happy with the field’s fluid nature. However, thinking as a former department chair, I am mindful of the necessity of positing some overarching structure for religious studies, both to promote the smooth running of a department with disparate faculty as well as to promote its programs to potential majors and justify them to administrators. Inspired in part by Michael Root’s "perfectionist" social science, Gerald Graff’s injunction to "teach the conflicts," and Warren Nord’s discussion of teaching religion in public schools, I have decided the best way to deal with religious studies' ongoing identity crisis is to return to an admittedly old-fashioned idea — contextualize the field firmly within the ideology of liberal education and build its coherence on the demands of liberal education. Unfortunately, the health of liberal education — especially at state universities and public colleges — is none too robust these days. A few years ago, I served as chair of the General Education Review Task Force at my institution, the goal of which is to bring coherence to the University's liberal ("general") education program. It became glaringly obvious to me that there is widespread confusion and outright apathy about the goals and methods of liberal education among both faculty and administrators. This is due to the assumptioni that education for personal development and citizenship needs to be sacrificed for a greater emphasis on vocational training. Like many others, I believe this “vocational turn” is a tremendous mistake. I for one still cling to the notion that personal development should be a priority in higher education, although I do realize that this is a hard sell to cash-strapped students and their parents — not to mention to the army of administrators who are interested only in quantitative metrics and the financial bottom line. Nonetheless, at state institutions like mine — which still operate (at least in part) with taxpayer dollars — it seems to me that education for responsible citizenship is not only desirable but imperative, especially considering the increasing polarization of civil society in this country today. Moreover, given the fact that American public universities are becoming increasingly attractive to foreign students, liberal education at state institutions represents both an opportunity and a duty to promote liberal values globally. Both of these are compelling reasons for those of us at state institutions to hold the line when it comes to erosions of liberal education. But what precisely does liberal education consist of in this sense? If indeed it is still important for public higher education to train students for successful citizenship in a liberal society — a society that allows a large degree of free choice among competing conceptions of the good — then liberal education must aspire to three learning outcomes or goals:
And to achieve these goals, liberal education must proceed by three methods:
In short, liberal education aspires to train students to be autonomous individuals with the skills necessary to choose reflectively between rival conceptions of the good and to live comfortably in a pluralistic society.
Since religious traditions have been expressions of some of humankind’s highest aspirations for the good — and for significant portions of the world's population they continue to playthat role — it stands to reason that the study of religion should be a "non-negotiable part" of any liberal education program (Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, Harvard University Press, 1997: 145). Moreover, the way in which religious studies is taught must explicitly embody the values of liberal education. To be true to the liberal ideal, religious studies must not promote one conception of the good over another, but rather foster a sense of epistemological humility and tolerance, leaving choice to the individual. It can do so by incorporating into its curriculum three distinct steps in line with the three goals and methods outlined above. I call these three steps Description, Critique, and Metacritique. Description: Expose students to the variety of religious traditions of the world, and do so as accurately as possible and with intellectual charity. Such is the task that has gone under a variety of names: hermeneutics, phenomenological description, verstehen, ethnology, etc. Critique: Train students to use those intellectual tools that allow them to critique the claims of rival religious conceptions of the good. Broadly speaking, there are three critical approaches to the study of religions, all of which are comparative: exclusivistic or conservative theological critiques; perennialistic or liberal theological critiques, which see religions as species within the genera ‘religion’; and naturalistic critiques as represented by the social and natural sciences. Generally, exclusivistic or conservative theological critiques have been avoided in state-sponsored religious studies programs in favor of perennialistic and naturalistic approaches; however, to be true to the liberal education ideal, they, too, should be addressed. Metacritique: Introduce students to the disciplinary debates critical of the preceding three critical approaches (thus, "meta" or philosophical critique) and of the task of description. Metacritques include inter alia, Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern critiques. The problem with the typical religious studies course is that the three steps of the liberal education process are not adequately differentiated, and the distinctions between them are not made clear to students. The undergraduate religious studies theory course is one of the obvious places to introduce these steps, and to make the liberal education process explicit. In my version of theory course, I begin by laying out the rationale for liberal education in general, which for many students is the first time they have heard any such rationale (or even been made aware of the fact that they are engaged in liberal education!). I then divide the rest of the course between sections on the history and methods of description (e.g., various classical attempts at definition and typology; Joachim Wach’s discussion of verstehen; Ninian Smart’s “seven dimensions,” etc.); classical theoretical positions (e.g., Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Freud, Eliade, Douglas, Geertz, etc.); and contemporary metatheoretical critiques of both descriptive categories and classical theories (e.g., Asad, McCutcheon, Reuther, etc.). Finally, in order for students to better understand the force of both the critiques of religion and the metacritiques, I have found it indispensable to introduce some basic concepts of the philosophy of social science, especially as presented by Hollis (Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2003), who delineates clearly four basic theoretical moves in the social sciences (i.e., holistic interpretive, individualistic interpretive, holistic explanatory, individualistic explanatory). While this may sound like a lot of ground to cover in a single semester, I have found that once students have been given a clear roadmap by applying the goals and methods of liberal education, they respond to both the approach and the material quite well. What’s more, students leave the course with a set of intellectual tools that allows them to better understand just about any other course they may subsequently take at the university. Of course, the use of this explicit liberal education approach does not have to stop at the religious studies theory course; it can be used to frame the entire major. A major structured in this way would begin with lower division courses that focus primarily on description and interpretation — such as the introductory world religions course or survey courses on specific traditions or regions. These would then be followed by the introductory theory course described above, followed by a series of midlevel courses that highlight targeted theoretical approaches to specific traditions or cross-cultural topics (the "religion and …" course). Upper division courses would then be the place to develop the metatheoretical critiques in-depth, since it is at this level majors have the requisite descriptive and critical theoretical background to understand why these critiques are relevant. Indeed, such a clear step-by-step sequence insures that students are prepared at each level to understand the theoretical moves being made by religious studies scholars — too often we throw theoretical or metatheoretical arguments at our students before they even grasp the questions such theories are designed to answer, thus creating the kind of academic cluelessness that demoralizes so many students (Graff, 2003). Finally, the capstone course would assume a special role in the liberal education-structured major. In the capstone, students would be encouraged to think through the real-world implications of the three-step liberal education approach to religion, whether it be for their personal lives or for their lives as citizens in a liberal society (for an example of how this might be done in the context of a public institution, see Noddings, 1993). In the nineteenth century, American colleges typically offered a senior capstone course as the place in which students were asked to reflect holistically on their educational experience and relate it to their future lives — it is for precisely this kind of practical purpose that I would like to bring back to the capstone course in the religious studies major. Beyond actual student learning, the advantages of structuring the religious studies major along these lines are manifold. First, it charts a clear progression with learning outcomes that can be assessed at each stage, thus providing us the kind of concrete evidence necessary to back up our claims that we are teaching crucial critical thinking skills. Second, it provides the major with a clearly defensible rationale that can be neatly dovetailed with all but the most narrowly drawn administrative strategic plans — at least at public institutions where the duty to teach citizenship skills can and should still be insisted upon. And third, it provides a unified focus for those departments whose faculty are riven by factional squabbling over theoretical positions. (As a past department chair, I know how divisive theoretical debates can be, especially if one or more faculty members are heavily invested in a particular approach as the one valid path that will turn the field into a discipline). By employing a pedagogy based on the demands of liberal education and making that the foundation of departmental unity, theoretical diversity in a department truly can become the asset we often say it is and not the liability that it all too frequently becomes in reality. In other words, an explicit liberal education approach provides a source of coherence that religious studies as a field has always seemed to lack. Of course, why stop at the religious studies major? The most logical extension of this approach would be to the university’s liberal (or "general") education program overall. If adopted as the structure for such a program, this approach would address many of the misgivings about the supposed incoherence of most liberal (or "general") education programs by placing the emphasis on students’ acquisitions of the tools necessary for living productive lives as citizens in a liberal society instead of strictly on the content of such programs. |
Brian C. Wilson is professor and Chair of comparative religion at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. His areas of interest include American religious history and theory and method in the academic study of religion. Among Wilson’s publications are Christianity (Prentice Hall, 1999), as coeditor Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (Brill, 2001), and Religion as a Human Capacity (Brill, 2004). He is also the author of several articles on the religious history of the Midwest, including the chapter on religion in The Midwest: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures, edited by Joseph W. Slade and Judith Lee (Greenwood, 2004). His most recent publication is Yankees in Michigan (2008), part of the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan Series published by Michigan State University Press. Currently, Wilson is working on The Battle for Battle Creek: Religious Conflict in a Nineteenth Century Midwestern Town, a book exploring the conflict between Seventh-Day Adventists and Spiritualists in the early history of Battle Creek, Michigan.