Neusner, Why Religious Studies in America

7/27/2019 Neusner, Why Religious Studies in America

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LII/4

WHY RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN AMERICA? WHY NOW?

JACOB NEUSNER

To answer the question, Why Religious Studies? we have to askanother: What do people not know, if they do not know about andunderstand religions? What can they not explain and of what can theynot make sense? Phrased in this way, the question answers itself. Fo rreligion is so powerful a force in the contemporary world that withoutknowledge of religion we scarcely can understand the daily newspapers.A fair example of what happens when people do not know how to makesense of the power of religions in contemporary life is our country'sdifficulty in understanding the Islamic revolution in Iran, not to mention

the Judaic revolution in the State of Israel, the Protestant army of North-ern Ireland, the Roman Catholic revolution in Poland and in LatinAmerica, the Christian army of Lebanon, the tragedy at Jonestown, andmany continuing evidences of the vitality of religious belief—sometimeshealthy, sometimes perverse.

There is, of course, a bias against religion as a force in culture andpsychology. This is surely one possible way of thinking about the charac-ter and meaning of society and of life. It holds religion to be dying, aholdover from another age. It therefore claims that religion does notrequire study. Those of us who find religion an exceptionally interestingphenomenon of society and culture, imagination and the heart, can dolittle to overcome this bias. But it is a bias, for it rests upon the will towish religion away, not upon the perception that religion has gone away.

In fact, much of the world as we know it is shaped by the formation ofsociety and culture around religious beliefs, by the way in which peoplerefer to religions to make their choices about how they will live. Thesebeliefs and choices invoke particular modes of supernaturalism, distinc-tive expressions of revelation. A country governed by a president whospeaks of a personal experience of conversion had better understand themeaning of religious conversion. A nation in which institutions of reli-gion exercise vast influence over citizens' political and cultural decisionsis wise not to deny that religion is a formative force in contemporarylife. Whether or not people want religions to exercise that power, theydo. In fact, religions not only speak about supernatural powers, they, too,constitute powerful forces in this world.

So it is a matter of fact that if people do not understand the character



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of religions, they cannot make sense of much which happens in the worldtoday. Nor need w e dwell upon a more obvious fact. To understand wherehumankind has been, to make sense of the heritage of world civilization,the transcenden t side of the hum an imag ination and of society and cultureconstitutes a definitive dimension. There is no understand ing of hum anitywithout the confrontation with the religious heritage and hope, whatever

may be our judgment of the value of the heritage and the hope. So far asuniversities propose to teach how to interpre t th e world in which we live,organizing courses and depa rtmen ts of Religious Studies is a perfectly nat-ural way of teaching wh at must be taught.

When we study religion, we study the subject which unifies all theother subjects of the humanities. Until our own time and in many placesin our own time, religion is the center of human life. If we do not studyreligion, we are not studying what is important about ourselves in theworld. These are truisms. And yet, these are truisms which may be self-

evident to us Americans and Canadians, but are not to many in otherplaces.

So we must ask, How do we explain where religious studies are donewell, and where not? Let me point to the two periods in recent history

when the field of the religious study of religion, as distinct from theolog-ical studies, came to rich expression. The first was through Religionswis-senschaft between 1880 and 1920, during which period almost all of theclassics were written. Then scholars asked all the basic questions. Wemay not accept the answers. But the founders were thinking about verymuch the same questions that interest us. So one place and period ofgreat achievement we locate in Western Europe inclusive of Britaintoward the end of the nineteenth century. The second period in whichreligious studies has flourished is in our own day, since World War II.We therefore have to ask what we in America have in common withWestern Europe in the last three decades before World War I. And theanswer, it seems to me, is that when people have had to confront aliencultures and could not avoid them, but had to explain them, to confrontthe "other" and make sense of the alien in a serious way, then the studyof religions flourished.

At the end of the nineteenth century religious studies formed part ofimperialism and the reaction against imperialism. It was a Europe tryingto make sense of the world with which it was in intimate contact. For us,as a nation, it was when we entered the responsibilities of world leader-ship, that is, since World W ar n . From that time w e simply have had tofigure out how to talk to people born in a world not our own and whatroute there is into an experience which is not our own. At that verypoint, in the liberal arts colleges which were prep aring foreign serviceofficers, the civil service, the army, and all the rest for the age of Ameri-can leadership in world affairs, the study of religion as indicative of



740 Journa l of the Am erican Academy of Religion

culture became important. The power of religious studies is to bring ourstudents to encounter the alien, but to do so in terms that the studentscan grasp. It is not so alien that no one can grasp anything about it. Butit b also not ourselves, in a mirror. As a society, we have had to developa thesis of the other and to build a society out of "others," out of aliens.We have done it for three hundred years. This is why I think religious

studies flourishes in this country, and why I think the field must continueto flourish. So I argue that our own country has entered upon a period inits history much like that of the late adolescent, approaching the deci-sions of maturity. For a long time, like children, we pretended there wasno world but our own. Then, in World War II and afterward, we pre-tended that the whole world was our own. Now is the time to come toterms with a world which is not our own, but in which we have a share.To recognize both what is ours and what is not ours is to understandwhat is foreign but what we can make our own.

It is this encounter with the alien which requires our communityand society to take up the intellectual and cultural tasks of interpretationof what we do not understand out of the resources of what we deeplycomprehend. This social and political task of making ourselves at oneand whole with an alien world is something we cannot do, if we havenot experienced the work in some small place. In the study of religionswhich are not ours we learn how to enter worlds which belong to others.

That is why the importance of learning a foreign language and oflearning about a religion other than our own is the same: it is to prepareus for the confrontation with the difference, to educate our sym pathiesto welcome diversity, to discover what we can be in what we are not.We must learn to glory in the encounter with difference, not onlybecause we have not got any choice. The reason is also that we shouldnot want it otherwise. In finding out things we did not know, we learn.In encountering and entering into worlds we did not make, we discover.In the learning and discovery, we uncover in ourselves things we did notknow were there. W e find out we can be more than what we are.

The critical task facing this country in the world and in our life as anation is to learn to confront difference. Our society now recognizes thatthere is no single normative culture for all of us to accept. Twenty per-cent of the population speaks Spanish. Nearly twelve percent is black.Three percent is Jewish. There is a growing minority of Moslems andBuddhists, both native and immigrant. I have had the privilege of sittingon the National Council on the Humanities, governing body of theNational Endowment for the Humanities, and so I always am studyingproposals of many sorts, from many kinds of groups and organizations,in every part of the country. I marvel at the diversity. I am amazed thatbefore us come the ideas of men and women who know how to find thehumanist in all of us.



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The world in which we live no longer concedes that one way of lifeor one system is valid for all. The world for which our students nowprepare demands, therefore, the capacity to take two steps, first, to dis-cover oneself in the other, so that the alien seems less strange, and sec-ond, to discover the other in oneself, so that the self seems more strange.When our students study a religion other than the one in which theywere brought up, they discover themselves in what is different. Theyundertake the exercise of empathetically interpreting the alien in termswhich allow for their act of understanding. When they study the religionin which they were brought up and for the first time undertake the taskof sympathetic, academic analysis and interpretation, they discover thealien in what they thought belonged to them. Questions which seemsettled long ago turn out to be unsettling. The alien is within. Where weare most at home, there we are mostly strangers.

If our notion is that we study with profit only someone else's reli-gion, we deprive ourselves of what we most require. To take one exam-ple, if contemporary Jews take for granted that they also know all aboutand define Judaism, they transform themselves from isolated and notnecessarily representative or consequential facts about a given religion,

Judaism, into the measure of all things Judaic. So they reduce a complextradition, going back for nearly three millennia, into its most current,and not demonstrably its most representative, form. The same is so forChristians. It is when our students realize that even what they think theyknow best, themselves and their own culture, contains mysteries yet tobe uncovered that our work begins. It is when we understand that, in thework of learning, we remain perpetually outsiders in our own richlycomplex traditions, strangers when we feel most at home, that our workbegins.

Neusner, Why Religious Studies in America

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