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by D. G. Hart Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999 304 pp.; $18.95, paper |
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by Jon H. Roberts and James Turner Princeton Univ. Press, 2000 184 pp.; $18.95, paper |
Religion does not do well in the hands of academics, whether they are sympathetic to it or not." So argues Darryl Hart of Westminster Theological Seminary in his provocative book on religious studies in the university. As a matter of fact, he claims, the field has "failed to produce first-rate scholarship." It has "limped along behind other academic disciplines."
More important, according to Hart, it has been conflicted from the start. Its practitioners have pursued the study of supernaturalist faith communities in a largely secular, indeed naturalistic, way. And they have labored in the service of both the academy and the churches, creating confusion in the general public regarding the nature of their craft, and schizophrenia among one another in the guild.
In The University Gets Religion, Hart jumps right into the recent fray over the secularization of the academy, paying special attention to developments in religious studies.1 His focus is on the arguments used to justify this discipline, its scholarly methods, and its place in the modern American university. Ignoring the intellectual giants whose work gave rise to the secular study of religion (e.g., Hume, Durkheim, Freud, and Weber, Europeans all), Hart suggests that a host of home-grown, largely forgotten, liberal churchmen proved most important in building up the American profession of religious studies, and in defending its legitimacy as a university discipline.
Hart traces the history of this defense through three major phases. In phase one (c. 1870-1925), he avers, leading white Protestant churchmen responded to the rise of new American universities by baptizing their scholarly methods and moral values. They accommodated older orthodoxies to recent scientific findings, and promoted university-based religious scholarship under the aegis of mainline Protestant campus ministries.
In phase two (c. 1925-1965), modernist Protestants emerged victorious from their row with fundamentalists, their leadership in the field now uncontested. But chastened by world war and its technological devastation, they proved more pessimistic about the promises of science. They began in earnest to found departments of religious studies in universities. But they often did so in an effort to shore up the nobler traditions of Western civilization, promoting a "neo-orthodox" theological resistance to historical presentism and cultural arrogance.
In phase three (c. 1964 to the present), religion departments sustained the social upheavals of the 1960s, a decade when earlier Protestant rationales for religious studies began to implode. Consequently, the discipline "reinvented itself as an academic field of critical inquiry," symbolizing this transition with the founding of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, formerly the National Association of Biblical Instructors). This "new academic appearance," however, "never hid completely the older ministerial one." And, more than ever, scholars of religion "suffered from the strain of being pulled in two directions simultaneously, one churchly, the other academic."2
We are left today, according to Hart, with an academic discipline still in search of a solid identity. Having been "stripped of the pious and social grounds for studying religion," recent scholars have failed to "produce a set of compelling intellectual reasons for its place in the university." Further, Hart contends that this failure is endemic to the very enterprise of establishing the discipline on a completely secular/scientific footing. "As much as religious studies strives to sever ties to communities of faith," he writes, "it cannot do so without self-immolation. The academic study of religion has not only been dependent historically upon churches, synagogues, and mosques, but it has no object of inquiry without particular religious traditions. As such, religious studies needs communities of faith, and such dependence will always be out of place in the modern university."
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